I followed the news-feed links to the latest post at OMG! Ubuntu! (LOLOMGWTF!!!!111eleventy-one) and as soon as I saw the opening sentence thunder that Ubuntu was "a steaming pile of mediocrity," I said to myself, "Gee, I wonder if this is going to be a fair, balanced evaluation?"

I have now been using Ubuntu for most of a year on all three desktop PCs and the laptop, so I'm now in a better position to comment on Ubuntu news. (And to the Ubunuts: You hear that, Ubunuts? You can't dismiss me as an ivory-tower Slackware-using elitist anymore. I'm riding your bus, now!)

Anyway, I, myself, know better than to demand perfection from Ubuntu. If I want perfect, I know where to find it - I will find it in Debian, Slackware, grml, Gentoo, Linux-From-Scratch. But the perfect is the enemy of the good-enough.

Not for one minute after pitching Ubuntu onto my machine did I think that it would "just work," nor did I suppose that it would fulfill all of my needs out-of-the-box. Really, I pick distros partly because of what they will teach me, so this time around I figured to get some experience making the putt-putt distro usable for a power user. Months later, I'm still slinging packages onto it and fixing issues. I still have a half-dozen open problems with Ubuntu, problems which wipe out major swaths of my fields of activity...

Let me explain something about "power users." I know there's yuppies out there who say they're power users because they watch videos on the computer (Ah-hyuk!) but when I say "power user" I mean, for example, that in a month's span, I might render a human mesh to export to a vector-trace, write a script to generate meme images, browse my BBS ANSI art collection, play and review a 20-year-old game on DOSBox, and write a poker game in Flash.

In my spare time. For fun. That's not counting what I do in paid work.

And still be grumbling at the end of the month because I didn't get enough work done.

And baby, Ubuntu can do some of this, but it can't do it all. What distro could possibly do everything I want to do out-o-the-box? You'd have to be stark raving mad to anticipate what-all I'll need. And having such diverse spreads of interests, touching on everything you can possibly do with a computer, I have learned one important thing - let's carve it in stone: THERE IS NO PERFECT SYSTEM.

That applies to Debian, Slackware, grml, Gentoo, and Linux-From-Scratch. Yes, I've tried them all. All of them have required that I tweak something to get it to do what I need it to do.

Now we have Ubuntu, which, as I've said, should not be even considered on the same grounds as other Linux varieties. It's got its own shelf. It is not there to be the gourmet restaurant at the end of the universe where you can order any specialty your finicky appetite can imagine. It is there so drive-by users can grab a bag of greasy fast-food McFatPatties to go. It installs in minutes and gives you the ultimate Suzie-uzer-friendly grandma's Linux experience.

Get back to OMG!UBUNTU!, this guy's a developer on Ubuntu (I'll give that power-user points), and then complains because he has problems developing Ubuntu on Ubuntu? Really? God, no! Next you'll be telling me that Barbie lacks parenting skills! Launchpad blueprints don't "go the extra mile," the menus are botched up (I fixed that. It's a magic spell called "Fluxbox"), the notifier box nerfs everything when it pops up (not a problem on Fluxbox), it can't copy-and-paste text without even botching that up (so the Clipboard memory appears to be barfed), minor quirk in the music syncing something, and the documentation sucks?

Yep, that's our special-needs distro! Deal with it. Ubuntu is not a power distro for power users. Ubuntu is a toy distro for toy users, and toy users need it to be a toy. Ubuntu benefits by being slapped-together, sloppy, easy, cheap, and prone to break if you lean on it. It gets the low-common-denominator users. Don't listen to the Holy Crusaders who preach fire and brimstone about how they can theoretically get it to be powerful enough to serve on Mount Olympus. I'm ten times the geek they are, and I'll be the first to tell you that it's more work to get Ubuntu to do more work than it is to get another distro to do it. I use Ubuntu the way I drive a car with a four-cylinder engine: take off gently, keep under the speed limit, and brake early.

It's good enough for what it is.

It's good enough for the few Joe Sixpacks who venture into Linux.

Let me explain an example: Getting back to that BBS ANSI art, I'm having problems getting the console to render the ANSI text mode font... in fact, I can't seem to get color working on the laptop's console, too. So on both the desktop and laptop I can't get tetradraw to show the correct character set, and in addition on the laptop the console can only show eight colors instead of the standard sixteen. Now, I remember having a beast of a time solving this problem on Slackware, where I had a community of prickly geeks to fall back on.

Now try searching for "Ubuntu console font color" and see what you get. I find a lot of Ubuntu forum posts with people going "What?" and "Huh?" and taking wild-stab guesses at it. Most Ubuntu users are unaware of this "console" thing. The rest have no clue what a BBS is, and have never heard of ANSI character art. The remainder are struck dumb at the prospect of suggesting doing anything with the console font, for fear that if they get it wrong, a demon will leap out of the screen and gobble them up. And that's the difference with Ubuntu's user base.

You know what? It's not that important. I can view ANSI art in gnome-terminal using tetraview and it works flawlessly. It just runs as slow as a tarbaby there. But seriously, I can run a live CD from my distro library and twiddle with ANSI art that way. It's like 0.001% of my current concerns. I'm not done picking at it myself. The point is that I can accept that I'm running on a plainer distro, and not charge around demanding Escargots de Bourgogne at McDonald's.

It's Ubuntu. It releases every six months. Even if they fix all this, there'll be more things that go askew. That's human.

Jack Wallen over at Tech Republic just posted 10 old-school Linux tools I refuse to let go of, and of course I have a warm place in my heart for anyone who puts the command line first (and he isn't even a programmer! - see #3 on his list). Anyway, this sounds like good meat for a fun meme, so what are the programs that will never be replaced on my menu?

As I see it, the point of this exercise is not to rant about your favorite programs, but to make fun of yourself for being so old-fashioned. And I'm deliberately picking different programs from Wallen, even though there's overlap (command line, nethack, man pages, and cron).

Emacs - Emacs, like Zen, is something you either get or you don't. I rave about Emacs on this blog all the time, so I won't bother to explain more here. I'll just say that ultimately, Emacs has something unique that appeals to me - personality.

dc - Isn't this hilarious? I have desktop calculator programs installed all the time. I never use them, because it's still faster to just dive to the console and bang out the dc line. I've gotten to where I actually think about math better when I'm writing it as a dc command. No, really, if I'm away from a digital device and doing math in my head, I've discovered that I mentally type the reverse polish notation - complete with the leading "dc -e!"

Shell tools (sed, grep, cut, etc.) - Important thing to know about me: I am the epitome of laziness. If I can do something with 15 keystrokes instead of 20, I'll do it that way. And the command line text editing tools are fun! Yes, I get more kick out of figuring out some wicked-clever for-loop solution with filters than I do actually solving the problem.

Angband - Like Nethack, Angband - in the console - is just the dungeon crawler grind that never goes away. I'll go off and play the latest 3D amazing impressive whiz-bang game, and when I'm done with it, I'm back to Angband again. I must be broken.

SoX - If 'dc' didn't cement my place as a dinosaur, this will do it. The 'play' command is still how I listen to MP3s. Hey, it gets the job done, takes up the least resources, and I wrote a jukebox script which auto-plays my music file library on shuffle. I can just turn it on with one command and go back to what I was doing - instant custom radio station.

Image Magick - This isn't so much an anachronism as it is the only solution for batch image processing. Remember, I'm lazy. I can't believe there are people out there who will wait for Gimp to start (and nobody uses anything but Gimp ever, right?) and load up an image just to do some monkey-task like resizing, cropping, or transcoding. What, does time grow on trees? But then I also like inventing bizarre toys in it.

Tcl/tk/wish - It's strange that I still use this. When I need a fast desktop GUI solution, whipping off a quick 'wish' (the windowing shell extension) script is still the easiest way I know. If it hadn't been for wish, I would have never gotten into Tcl. I actually hate Tcl.

Lynx - Before you laugh, my daily browsing is in Firefox. Instead, I find Lynx indispensable for a number of cases: (1) To quickly view a web page chock full o' stupid, where I don't want to have to turn off ads, Flash, Javascript, Java, images, CSS, and sound all at once, (2) To script - Did you know you can script Google queries and store the results in a text file, for instance?, (3) To view web pages when my desktop is otherwise occupied (such as a game running full-screen).

ANSI art - Not a program specifically, but still very old-school. The associated programs are tetraview, aaview, and the caca library. I do have a whole category on this blog devoted to it, after all.

less - Still the fastest way to view any text file stored on my own machine. 'Nuff said.

Just for a notice, I have to bite the bullet, take a deep breath, and once again plunge headfirst into the sea of snakes that is the code for this blog. This won't be happening all at once. I'll try to keep it to night hours. My deadline is by the end of August. But during the transition period while I'm building the new style and fiddling with some code rewriting too, there may be chaos at any time.

This won't affect the rest of the site, just the blog.

During the next two weeks, visitors to this blog may experience 404 errors, 503 errors, unreadable pages, garbled PHP errors, missing posts, dead links, skin rashes, blank text, plagues of frogs, missing images, hungry zombie hordes, holes in the space-time continuum, dancing hamsters, haiku poltergeists, narwhal attacks, spontaneous break-dancing, and class-3 tornadoes. On a mild day.

But it will be all worth it, because when it's over, we'll never have to look at this cotton-candy-boxes theme again. Plus after this, I will only be able to blog on the walls of my padded cell, holding the crayon in my toes since my arms will be secured by straight-jacket.

For those of you wondering where the blazes I've been - this should answer your question! Between the manic pace of pre-Holiday-season work and getting back into Diablo 2 again, I haven't been much good otherwise.

The back-story is that I saw the post on Slashdot where CodeWeavers was giving away licenses to CrossOver for a limited time. So I'd been curious about it, but not urgently. This was just the time to try it.

Got the coupon-code and downloaded it and installed it, but I was stuck for what to do with it. Most anything Windows-based I'd already gotten running on Wine or DOSBox over the years? What's left? I wanted a real challenge to put CrossOver through its paces. Then I remembered that I still have the full Blizzard's Diablo 2 + LOD expansion disk set and dug it out.

It runs like a dream! My hints for CrossOver are to go ahead and try something even if it's not listed as being officially supported, check the Wine database for clues as to what you'll run into for that program, and learn the concept of bottles really well.

A bottle, as documented by CodeWeavers, is simply the container for a program or set of programs. As opposed to Wine, which puts everything in /drive_c/, or DOSBox which mounts whatever you tell it to as the C:\ folder, CrossOver lets each program think that it has "Windows" all to itself. You can install more than one program in a bottle, of course, which is necessary to do things like get the whole Diablo 2 thing in there.

This pains a lot of people, even on Windows, so I'll describe it here. For getting Diablo 2 going, choose the FULL install of all three disks, exit, use CrossOver's "run Windows command" option to install the official D2 1.12 patch from Blizzard, install the LOD expansion disk, exit, do the same for installing the official D2 1.12 LOD patch from Blizzard. Many users online complain about the game not finding the disk. This is a bug which is fixed with the patch. Do not try to fix it with "no-CD" hacks and moving files around, they will not work. There's lots of bad advice from script kiddies out there telling you different.

One more common complaint, especially trying to run it on Linux, is lousy performance. The game will freeze or be very slow and the sound will stutter. This is caused by picking the wrong option at the end of the video test. Run the video test and no matter what it tells you, pick the top 2D option. See image:

After you have all that going, have the LOD play CD mounted and start Diablo 2 LOD through CrossOver. During play, I've even been able to switch to a different virtual desktop (how I got Gimp to take the screenshots) and consoles (how I'm writing this), with no issues; D2LOD will be minimized when you come back to it, but still running fine. I've got it running smooth on hardware from the turn of the century, even with Firefox and Emacs running with it at the same time.

So now that we're on the subject, I'll be the typically self-indulgent RPG geek and bore you with the gallery of my character builds in Netha- , ah, Diablo:

Lucky, level 16 Barbarian
specialty: combat masteries

I named him lucky because I hope he'll be a good little magic-finder some day. Right now, though, he's not very exciting. I'm trying to keep him as focused on pure passive masteries as I can, because I'm tired of characters who are mana pigs.

Lupina, level 24 Druid
specialty: lycanthropy, wolf summoning

Obviously, a wolf motif. His sword is a gladius with the Runeword 'Steel' socketed, which helps with his attack. Probably going to go all the way.

Marrow, level 18 Necromancer
specialty: bone skills, skeleton summoner

My billionth-or-so attempt to build a pure skeleton necro that will be able to play all the way through the game. Yes, I know necromancers suck and skeletons are weak. I'm stubborn that way. He was pure hell to level until 18, when he can finally use bone spear; now he rocks. I have the unique helmet 'Wormskull' ready for him when he makes level 24.

Vanity, level 32 Assassin
specialty: traps, shadow skills

My advice if you want to play through the whole game as a single player is to use the insanely-over-powered assassin, as long as you:

1. avoid claws and martial arts skills like a necro avoids poison dagger.
2. weild an ultra-damaging melee weapon. I have the unique morning star 'Bloodrise', which is working very well.
3. do not melee, but use Blade Fury (in traps) for your main attack. Blade fury uses 3/4 of your wielded weapon damage. Counting damage mods from charms and such, I'm currently doing 77-120 per shot, which makes it the most damaging skill in the whole game for a paltry 1.8 mana.
4. pump Burst Of Speed (in shadow skills), which also boosts your attack speed. Add any gear that increases both running and attacking speed.
5. add skill points in the Shadow Master summon, keep a few traps handy for backup, and keep your Act I rogue mercenary.

Course, I haven't been into Diablo in years, so it's slowly coming back to me. Anyway, I've tried CrossOver on various other sundry little tasks and it performs excellently. It's very well-behaved, and is less clumsy that raw Wine. It's actually kind of a front-end for Wine, so I assume anything Wine can do, CrossOver can do, with much less work. I don't know if I'd be using it if I hadn't gotten it for free, since my need to run Windows software on Linux is not that urgent, but for those out there aching to do so, CrossOver is a good solution.

Yours truly, happily level-grinding through the holidays (until I get tired of it again)...

Dear Santa/Fairy Godmother...

There's a number of new graphics applications that I've been searching all over for. They may or may not have been invented yet. So I'm posting this little list, to the purpose of either...

• discovering through some reader's comment that such a creation exists, with link and recommendation,
• inspiring some development team out there to pick up the idea for their next project,
• or finding out that if I'm ever to see such a program, it's up to widdle old me to create it.

#1 - An Isometric Image Editor

We're close already. Gimp has an isometric grid and snap-to-grid feature in the GFig plug-in, and it's also possible to render isometric perspective with POVRay and Blender. But what I'm actually after is a drag-n-drop block editor. The closest thing to what I have in mind is a Windows program named "AnkerCAD", uncovered over at Rea Maor's. I tried it out, but it behaves funky.

#2 - A combined POVRay/Flash Editor

As anybody who's followed my Flash explorations knows, I've frequently used pre-rendered ray-traced graphics in building Flash animations. My favorite POVRay front-end is KPOVModeler, which sadly looks like it's going to be abandoned in favor of the new K3D. But anyway, if we had something like KPOVModeler with a plug-in to automatically integrate a build-script for swfc, defining frames of movie-clips... I don't even know exactly how this would work, but with better integration between POVRay and SwfTools, it could save the step where you have to write your own custom-hacked Bash script to run the two together every time.

#3 - A MakeHuman Fork For Animals And Cartoons

MakeHuman, previously raved about here, here, and here, continues to be a source of delight for me. Now, if only we had it so easy to make animals, and make lower-polygon human models that could easily be converted into manga/anime Ω style models.

#4 - A Sims Clone

The whole family has gotten back into Maxis' "The Sims" games (on the only Windows box), except, as before, we don't care a whit about the actual game play. The fun of the game comes from subverting it, making and using custom-hacked objects, and letting your imagination run wild in making up whatever kind of game you want. A whole subculture of object modding has grown up around the Sims franchise. Now, really, it's time we had a whole open-source system which also - duh! - ran on Linux. One that breaks out of the narrow, confining game play of the Maxis game and just lets you have a complete open sandbox. True, we have Second Life, but it's too tied in with online play, and also it's commercialized to the hilt. Maybe a fork off of OpenSim for a small, casual desktop toy.

#5 - An ANSI-to-Unicode Converter and Unicode Graphics Editor

I'm talking, of course, of ANSI-character graphics like you used to see on Bulletin Board Systems. I've almost got a system worked out myself for converting ANSI graphics to Unicode - once you have a handle on DOS code page 437 and Unicode box-drawing and block elements, it would be simple to translate between them. Now get the colors right - ah! You'd have to come up with the closest match between how they displayed in a terminal and HTML hex color codes today. The main stumbling point is that I have no idea how to protect against server-scripting attacks if I put up a PHP program to do this with uploaded ANSI graphic files.

And that's what's going on in my dream-world!

Ω I've gotten quite into manga myself. I never used to be, but my gateway drug finally came along: Deathnote! God, I loved every issue, and devoured the series in a week-long marathon. What an idea, what characters, what story! And then since then I've been searching for another manga with the same flavor, and so far haven't found anything close. My manga tastes run to the exact opposite of Shonen, so DragonBall-Z and Bleach are out. Fullmetal Alchemist so far looks interesting.

What if manga swam back across the pond and culturally combined with independent underground comix?

Who's left standing at the altar? Windows users, that's who.

Windows has now become the only proprietary operating system without a free-software or open-source equivalent. Apple has Darwin. Solaris has Open Solaris. Unix has Linux and BSD. Even the extinct systems whose surviving fan base can count themselves in the triple-digits have a free alternative that they're working on. BeOS has Haiku, and Amiga has AROS. DOS has FreeDOS. CP/M has CP/M, after Lineo threw up its hands and released it. Ditto for Lucent and Plan Nine From Bell Labs.

And Windows has... nothing!

Yeah, sure, ReactOS. Look, I've been unfailingly optimistic, but even I'm ready to give up on ReactOS. It's never going to happen. They've been picking at it for 12 years, now, and the last time I tried it (less than a year ago) it couldn't stay going more than a few minutes without choking unless I left it completely alone. Linux is 17 years old, and at one-third that age had progressed farther than ReactOS has in its entire lifetime.

I'm tired of pointing people to it, I'm tired of hoping for it. The problem with this parrot is that this parrot is dead. If you hadn't nailed him to the perch he'd be pushing up the daisies.

I could write a whole book with the title "What killed ReactOS?" and just frustrate myself chasing half-answers that don't answer the whole question. It's the curse of Windows. Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. There are no answers to be found.

Instead, we have emulators on Linux. I've blogged extensively on the joy of DOSBox, which has so far not failed me a single time no matter what DOS program I downloaded and ran on it. And I've been noticing that Wine is really shaping up on Linux - at least 80% of the time, I can get a Windows-native program to run on it without issue, with only occasional tweaking.

Anyway, all that we're seeing here with the Windows-to-Linux friction is the effect of the largest user base looking for alternatives and being very frustrated. Somehow, the same grit that got the users of other operating systems to build a free version just isn't to be found in the Windows republic.

I think it's probably the philosophies of the cultures of each system. On Unix, the philosophy is "Do it yourself!" and on Apple it's "Let us do it for you!" and on Windows it's "Do what we tell you to do!" Why is it that the GPL and some hobby hackers can make a Unix-like system and a DOS/Windows emulator to run on top of it while they have 2% market share, but we can't build a GPL'd Windows-clone when Windows has a 90% market share? Is this a big conspiracy to drive us all crazy, or what? Yes, I know, lawyers. Lawyers haven't stopped Wine.

*Ahem* - now, if the above paragraphs serve to build a fire under the tail of the ReactOS/Windows community to spur their liberated-Windows forward just to prove me wrong, so much the better. It would be the most delicious plate of crow I'd ever eaten. Hope springs - or trickles - eternal. Maybe the official retirement of Windows XP and the backlash against Windows Vista will finally cause the uprising needed to at last make all platforms equally liberated. Anyway -

How hard is it to make the transition from Windows culture to Linux culture? Here's a true story. An actual conversation I had with my kids' bus driver when we got on the subject of computers:

• HIM: "What operating system do you use?"
• ME: "Linux."
• HIM: "No, I mean what version of Windows do you use?"
• ME: "... Linux?"
• HIM (now talking to me like I am a child): "No, you see, an operating system is Microsoft Windows 98 or XP or Vista. Which kind of Microsoft Windows do you have on your com-pu-ter?"
• ME (now DESPERATE for an opening): "I have Microsoft Windows Linux."
• HIM: "Linux? When did they come out with that?"
• ME: "They didn't. I was kidding about the 'Microsoft Windows' part. Have you heard of Apple, MacIntosh, iPod?"
• HIM: "Oh, so you're saying that you have an Apple?"
• ME: "No. But now that we have established that there exist two computer companies, Linux is yet a third computer company."
• HIM: "Oh."

He then quickly changed the subject. Pardon me for simplifying the explanation for him so much, but did you see how many tries it took just to get him to speak this foreign word? We happened to get on this subject for reasons I'm sure we're all familiar with - his computer is slowing down with malware, and he knew I am a 'computer guy', so he was asking me for advice. Should this same person come back to me some day wanting to try Linux, what distro should I point him to?

Certainly, I need a definite answer. Condensed, to the point. Without going into the GPL and kernel compiling and even KDE vs. Gnome. The thing that I look for is not the distro itself, but a distro that has the right culture. With Ubuntu, I know that minutes after his arrival in the Ubuntu community, he will meet dozens of friendly, understanding people who will patiently walk him through the steps, because they, themselves, were new arrivals very recently.

Ubuntu is our Ellis Island. We had a need for one, and presto, one has evolved.

One more example: Just in time, I found "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower", an essay on the difficulties of teaching English 101/102 to students who simply don't get it. I'm including it here for the story of "Mrs. L" (scroll for it about halfway down). The relevant blockquote:

"Ms. L., it was clear to me, had never been on the Internet. She quite possibly had never sat in front of a computer. The concept of a link was news to her. She didn’t know that if something was blue and underlined, you could click on it. She was preserved in the amber of 1990, struggling with the basic syntax of the World Wide Web. She peered intently at the screen and chewed a fingernail. She was flummoxed.

I had responsibilities to the rest of my students, so only when the class ended could I sit with her and work on some of the basics. It didn’t go well. She wasn’t absorbing anything. The wall had gone up, the wall known to every teacher at every level: the wall of defeat and hopelessness and humiliation, the wall that is an impenetrable barrier to learning. She wasn’t hearing a word I said."

And there we are again. There's that impenetrable wall. It is our obstacle as well. We could point fingers and argue all day, but the *only* way we will make any progress with the Mrs. L's of this world is to acknowledge their problem, and build some steps over that wall. Whether it be by "Linux-lite", ReactOS, or even a baby toy computer. The needs of Mrs. L are different from the needs of geeks, and it is senseless to try to jam all of us into the same category. The best we come to is a halfway solution: Too restricting for us; still too scary for them.

People who would call me 'elitist' for seeing things this way are just bigots projecting their own hatred onto me. But I'm out to call attention to the people problems. Unfortunately, that's going to involve telling some people the brutal truth, and they're going to take it personally when they shouldn't.

In closing:

Take this away with you: The story of the OS wars is just as much about people as it is about programming. Humans haven't had more than 30 years to deal with computers on an everyday basis. Computer systems continue to evolve at a dizzying pace. But humans will evolve only at a constant rate. Specifically, the attitudes and mindsets that humans have towards computers is something that we cannot affect. We have to patiently put the computers out there and let the people poke and prod at them until they get used to them.

If most of the Linux community gets its way, Linux will gain users. If Linux is to gain significant users, they have to come from Windows. So - what are we to do with them?

Human nature is a factor which we ignore at the risk of perpetual frustration. Getting back to Taoism, it is nature that we fight, and when we fight against nature, nature will always win. Human nature is like water. You can dam the river, but the water will find someplace else to go. You can't just change the water's mind and tell it to stay upstream. Put the water to work, and it will boil your egg or turn your wheel for power. Fight the water, and be drowned.

I have to assume that 90% of the tech pundits on the Internet enjoy wasting their time fighting water. They rant and rave and fume: desktop this versus desktop that. Interface A versus interface B. We have to have the year of Linux on the desktop. We have to convert Joe Sixpack. The problem of Linux adoption is driver this and license that. It's the Linux user's fault. Don't call me noob, you elitist! Don't call me elitist, you noob! For God's sake, it's been going around and around in circles for fifteen years!

Yes, I'd love to see the whole world liberate itself and use Linux, or at least any Free Software system. I believe that technology freedom is actually crucial to the future of humanity itself. Now, if we could get some kind of realistic grasp of the true problem, perhaps we'll be able to solve it.

But can we? Can we quit blazing trails and pave a highway for the new Linux user to follow? Can we stop with the mindless advocacy that pitchforks people into Linux without giving them any idea what step two is? Can we stop frantically spinning in circles accomplishing nothing and then blaming each other? Can we stop adopting new users only to set them up to fail?

Can we be as good at people-engineering as we are at software-engineering?

I'm well into middle age now, and I'm still reading the same tired dogma and rhetoric in computing debates that I used to assume people would be over with by the time I'd be old enough to smoke. So I'm resigned to the idea that I will never see progress in my lifetime, but I have hope for my children's lifetime. Either computers are going away, or the human race will have to come to peaceful terms with them.

What is so hard to understand about this?

Why is this part titled "The Black Hand"? Well, because I started this series using a nations metaphor. Citizens of Windows who expatriate and immigrate to Linux will be "foreigners" in Linux. And, if you check that Wikipedia article on the Black Hand - an example of which is seen in the "The Godfather" movie series - you will know that Black Hands are just one of the intimidating challenges facing immigrants.

But back up: First, let's talk about culture shock. Have you noticed that the differences in major computer platforms really do seem to make them like different countries? The different ways we do things like run system tasks, open files, shut down and restart, have different file formats and character schemes and default fonts. These are very much like the international practices we have of eating with chopsticks or forks or driving on the left or right side of the road or each country having its own currency. The same barriers to switching countries apply to switching operating systems.

Step by step, let's go through the culture shock phases and find their equivalent in computing-culture shock:

• The "Honeymoon Phase" - When you move into a new computer or operating system, don't you look for things to like about it? Wow, look at this desktop theme! Hey, that file opened right up, this is a fast system! Oh, I like this new game they have on here. You even send a postcard to the folks back home, don't you? Sure you do! That's when you set the coolest wallpaper/theme combination you can find, take a screenshot, and post it in some forum to show it off. "The weather is beautiful, wish you were here!"

• The negotiation phase - Ask any Linux user if a second-week new user in a help forum negotiates. It's a freaking negotiation orgy, OK? "If Linux wants to gain market share, it needs to...(blah blah)" "I would be able to use this system if only I could get this wireless card to work." "On my old system, we did things this other way; why can't you do things that way on this system?" "You'd better answer my question nice if you want me to keep using this system and help it gain market share!"

• The "Everything is OK" phase - assuming that the immigrant didn't run home back to where they came from, they are now settled in more or less. They might even - finally - crack open a manual and get to know their new culture in depth. They're getting enthusiastic about the system's culture. They might upgrade or try out new things. They're Googling for the operating system's cultural in-jokes, because now they're finally funny. They might even lose their native accent.

• Reverse Culture Shock - Amen! Probably the biggest enemy of Windows is an ex-Windows user. The old culture is ceremonially vilified, degraded, ridiculed, flamed about, as part of a healthy transition to the new culture. And if it is necessary to revisit the old culture, it is immediately evident that you've now become acclimated to somewhere else. When I check the web on a Windows box when I'm at a library or cyber-cafe, after all these years of Linux usage I'm sitting there trying to hit Alt-F2 to switch virtual desktops and trying to open new tabs in IE6. I'm going "Doh!" like Homer Simpson every minute. The librarian comes by and asks "Do you need some help, sir?"

Does it sound like we're singing a familiar tune? Culture shock is, again, a people problem. If we were robots or even bees or ants, we wouldn't have culture shock. We would soullessly begin assimilating ourselves into the new culture as reflexively as we did our native one. Thus, it does not matter what a different computing culture looks or feels like. It is still not "home" unless it's a perfect clone of home, and then it's a lawsuit.

It takes a long time to adapt to a new culture. During that time, whether you're an Italian migrating to the USA or a Windows user migrating to Linux, you will rely on a set of coping mechanisms. You might try to take things slowly. You might become defensive of your non-native status. Most likely, you will be more prone to identify with a very narrow peer group of other immigrants. In cases where there's large numbers of you, you might band together and form a second, smaller sub-culture for you and your friends, just a little piece of the old culture which you bring with you and use for a grounding base while you adapt to the new culture.

Certainly, you've seen this in any large city. The immigrants gravitate, partly by choice, and partly when they're forced to by circumstances, into little areas. Little China, Little Korea, Little Mexico. The barrios. That's what we're seeing happen with Ubuntu.

Like any ethnic immigrant haven, Ubuntu lives by the rules of the country it's physically located in - within Linux - but also has a sub-set culture of its own. "How do I make what I did in Windows work in Ubuntu?" is the number one type of question in the forums. Cheat sheets of DOS commands translated into Bash are traded, tips on how to make a proprietary program run in Wine are shared. Ubuntu has become Linux's Ellis Island. These are the lucky slaves who left their oppressive dictatorship and moved to where they would be free. They either never had the fear (the kind I talked about in part 5), or they did and stared it down.

Now, you could rationalize that just as the barrios are part of America and that's why we have this great melting-pot culture, Ubuntu is just like any Linux distro because Linux belongs to everybody and we can mold it and shape it however we want. The GPL is their constitution and the penguin is their national bird and the Four Freedoms is their pledge of allegiance. Of course Ubuntu is Linux!

But let's not kid ourselves. People do not come to Ubuntu looking for Linux any more; they come to Ubuntu looking for a Windows replacement. People who immigrate from other lands to the USA do not move to the barrio because they're looking to be Americanized. They move to the barrio because they're homesick. They want someplace where they can order a carne asada with mole sauce and not have to explain what they mean. They want a place where they can still celebrate Cinco de Mayo and Diaz de Muerte, even if they also celebrate the Fourth of July.

Just as we have ethnic slurs for people from foreign lands, the Windows refugees have a word that they hate. "Newbie". The clueless newbie! They hang out in Ubuntu because within the Ubuntu subculture, they are not newbies. Just as an ethnic group, when oppressed, will lash back, the Ubuntu subculture has a word to fling back at us: "elitist". This is the word they can fire back in defense when they perceive that they are attacked by the mainstream Linux culture.

Suppose that this trend of Windows user migrating to Ubuntu continues, so maybe ten years down the road, the desktop market share now looks like this:

Is it still correct to say at that point that Ubuntu is just another Linux distro?

Are we convinced yet? We have users telling us over and over what they want. They are showing by their actions that this is what they want. Ubuntu is providing that solution. All those people complaining that all the different choices of Linux distros is too confusing for them now have a definite answer: choose Ubuntu. Ubuntu, to quote their motto, is "Linux for human beings" - which is actually coded talk for "Linux for people who are scared of computers, but don't want to use Windows any more". Just remember, I'm not the one who set Ubuntu apart. "Linux for human beings" suggests that those using non-Ubuntu distros are something other than human.

So, what is wrong with saying so? Where am I saying anything bad about Ubuntu here? I'm saying that they have made a commitment to new Linux users and they have kept it. Certainly, when Ubuntu established itself, it was looking to "break the mold" of the Linux distro. It is evolving a step forward towards making a Linux for non-geeks. Yeah, OK, we don't have to insist that "non-geek" = "Windows". But "non-geek" is how Windows and Apple were intended.

New arrivals to Linux have their subculture distro where everybody else is new enough to be able to understand what it's like to immigrate. This is the solution to the 145-1 (or 15-to-1) ratio of migrating Windows users to native Linux users. Help the new arrivals a little bit, then direct them to a distro where they can all cluster together on a forum and learn together.

I don't know why so many in the Linux community cringe at this concept. There's nothing wrong with it. It's the kind of solution that Linux is good at: customizing for individual's needs. Within Linux, we have emulators for DOS and Windows, systems that can be embedded and virtualized within other systems, window managers that can be made to look and feel like CDE or NeXTStep or Plan 9. Obviously, somebody finds them useful, or they wouldn't be here.

Obviously, somebody finds the Chinatown district of Los Angeles useful, or it wouldn't be there. Obviously, somebody finds a distro for new immigrants to Linux useful, or it wouldn't be there. We can live in denial of it, or we can quit imposing our flaky judgments on who's a "Joe Sixpack" and who's a "guru" and who's a "True Linux user" and who's a "poser" and who's an "elitist". We can objectively look at the trends, listen to what people want, and give that to them. Isn't that what having a "melting pot" culture is all about? At a 2% market share, Linux doesn't have a very large native culture. If we really want more people to use Linux, we're going to have to accept that the only way for a tiny country to turn into a big country quickly is to accept a melting pot culture.

Preferably, we do that before the Black Hand gets them. Because we have Black Hands all over the Linux islands. We have the dictator from that other computing republic buying up Linux distros to try to set up an alternative landing point for Windows expatriates. Yes, Microsoft is falling victim to the same bad logic that many in the Linux community are: they bought Suse, Linspire, Xandross, and TurboLinux based on the mistaken belief that people are leaving Windows for Linux. They aren't; they're leaving controlled Windows looking for a liberated Windows. Once again, we mistake a people issue (desire for more liberty), for a computing issue (different operating system).

And then there are the other Black Hands: the small-timers who carpetbag for Linux. They look at Linux and they don't care about the GPL, the Linux way, or even if any work gets done. They just have dollar signs in their eyes. If they can just slap a Tux sticker on any flat surface and find people who've never heard of it before, they can jump in front of Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and the Linux companies and misrepresent themselves to take full credit for Linux itself. And there comes the hand, palm up!

The small-time Black Hands will rip up anybody else in the community but themselves, because they don't want new Linux users walking the streets; they want them in a cage, where they can milk their naivete for all it's worth. To hear these thieves tell it, they own Linux, you never would have found it without them, they set you up - so you owe them, and you'd better pay up or they'll kick you right back out of Linux again. And so the Black Hand goes door to door every month collecting his protection money, while the immigrants huddle in fear of him, not knowing that he's not the government and has no authority.

Many similar scams are run on immigrants looking to come to the United States - example: "the Green Card Lottery scam". If you go to the Federal Trade Commission page on the subject, you'll see where "There’s no charge to enter the green card lottery." And yet, there's plenty of con artists out there who will charge you money to file your free entry for you! Ahhh, making people feel obligated to you for something they could get for free from the original source with no obligation - where have we heard that before?

You might think, in talking about Linux's Black Hands, that I have a specific party in mind, since I did fight a minor war against a cell of them last year. But there are many more where those came from, all the world over. That was just one case. Internationally, software pirates don't care if they've ripped a copy-protected CD or burned a freely-copyable FOSS CD - people pay the same money for it and never know the difference. Don't think for a minute that if Linux gets even half as popular as we hope it will, that we won't be swatting hundreds of Black Hands like cockroaches.

Am I done yet? I'm done with the main idea, but there's some matter to attend to in the cleanup. That'll be part... uh, 7.

Hello, True Believers! It's time once again to pull up a few items from the search-bag, that list of search terms tracked by my b2evolution stats which show some of the phrases which landed people here. What I'm mostly interested in are the "near-misses" - those phrases which show that the searcher came here looking for something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unhere.

bob dobbs ascii art - You asked for it.

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          -"¿.:ö¿ÚY`                                                                   
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bash loop a-to-z - for LETTER in $(echo {a..z}); do echo $LETTER; done

how many words can you make from penguin - 26!

En, ennui, gin, gnu, gun, in, inn, nine, nip, nu, nun, peg, pen, penguin, pi, pie, pig, pin, pine, ping, pug, pun, unpeg, unpen, unpin, up.

gutsy firefox tries to download php - This is a server error. With both Perl and PHP, it's supposed to execute the file and generate the HTML page for you. Just cancel (or go ahead and save it for curiosity's sake!) and wait a minute and try the link again. Some servers do this if they're bogged down.

what penguins signify linux - This page reveals all of the mysteries about why Linus chose a penguin for the mascot.

Had it been my choice, I would have ended up with a bat, because bats are the most exotic winged creature I've encountered. As a result, I have tons of respect for these creatures. And bats would represent Linux very well... Like Linux, bats are everywhere, but not perceived by most people. Like Linux, bats are misunderstood by most people. Like Linux, bats can survive anywhere. And bats can fly and migrate, and they're furry and cuddly, too...

Wait! Where's everybody going? You don't like bats?

bash variable life span - All declared variables go out of scope as soon as you close the terminal session in which they were created. The same applies to all variables created in a Bash script; when the script exits, the variables go poof. However, the Bash environment has several variables built in.

dosbox rocky horror - God help me, as a result of this search query I found the game - who else would have it but Underdogs? - and of course had to try it.

A sad ending is that I didn't get to! I got it downloaded alright, but unzipping it produces a pack of further ZIP files. Unzipping all of these produces a gawdawful mess as it appears that the copy at Underdogs is a CD-rip that's been sliced into chunks by some kind of file-splitting program, and then packed with a "Midnight Commander" ripoff called "Ace.exe" and a gaggle of ANSI art, splash banners, FILE-ID.DIZ junk, and the usual trappings of having passed through the colons of about 100 warez sites. I gave up trying to figure out how to paste it together into something that would run, DOSBox or no.

But the game only came out in bloody 1999! And here it is whiffing of BBS ratio sites from the 1980s! Did it do its own "Time Warp Again" and hop back through a decade? I'll try to find it again some other way. NOTE: This has never happened before with Underdogs - usually they are a quality site and if they offer a game free for download, it is clearly legal to do so and it is in usable condition. It might now be legal to obtain "The Rocky Interactive Horror Show" for free, but if so, we need a copy that hasn't been warezed to a meaty pulp.

#####################################################
# __________                            .__         #
# \______   \ ____   ____    ____  __ __|__| ____   #
#  |     ___// __ \ /    \  / ___\|  |  \  |/    \  #
#  |    |   \  ___/|   |  \/ /_/  >  |  /  |   |  \ #
#  |____|    \___  >___|  /\___  /|____/|__|___|  / #
#                \/     \//_____/       .--.    \/  #
# __________        __                 |o_o |       #
# \______   \ _____/  |_  ____         |:_/ |       #
#  |     ___// __ \   __\/ __ \       //   \ \      #
#  |    |   \  ___/|  | \  ___/      (|     | )     #
#  |____|    \___  >__|  \___  >    /'\_   _/`\     #
#                \/          \/     \___)=(___/     #
#####################################################

PS I've moved "searchbag" posts into their own category. They work better that way for boredom-browsing, since they're an anything-goes collection of potpourri.

Continuing from the first half of the list, here's some more ruminations on the obsolete tech hall of fame...

PDP-11 assembler - The PDPs may, indeed, be long gone, but for those of you who still want to keep your hand in in case they ever come back, the SIMH project can emulate PDPs, and a mess of other iron dinosaurs. SIMH runs on Linux and every other computer in the galaxy - even Windows! I have a copy of it on my boxen, and I'm sure I'd be hacking away on it if I had clue one what I was doing. I've learned the PDP-11 'help' command, though!

Playing BBS door games - Oh, yeah? Get DOSBox to run them on, and download some door games right here! DOSBox is ported to Linux and every other system in existence - even Windows! You might have to finagle some bogus BBS configuration files to get some of them working, however.

I got this 8-way slot door game running, for instance. In all its ANSI glory. Waddaya thinka me nooooow?

Playing arcade games - Yeah, so go get XMAME and play the ROMs on your desktop. Of course, this emulator also runs fine on Linux, as well as many other systems - even Windows!

Removing perforations off fanfold paper so it looks like normal typing paper - Yeah, and what I miss was the "buster". In a mainframe-dinosaur pen where I was a corporate slave until I escaped through the ventilation system, we had greenbar. Note that it was NOT the exact kind I just linked to, but more recent than a PDP-8 and a lot wider. Anyway, we'd get 25 to 70 pages printed out at a time, and rather than tear it all up by hand we had this machine, the "buster", where you dump the wad in one side and it separates the pages with a solid smack for each sheet where it busted the pages at the perf. BAP!... BAP!... BAP!... BAP!... It had the best damned beat rhythm you ever heard. We all used to get up and dance to it.

Speaking Latin in everyday conversation - Yeah, what a bummer. We lost a colorful part of our culture after enough Texans heard us speaking Latin and yelled, "This is AMERAHCUH!!! Speak ENGLISH!!! Or go back to LATINSTAN where you came from!!!" so we all had to quit.⚑

Using an adding machine - This entry makes me feel the oldest yet. Yes, I remember ten-key skills, and the little tape it would print out. Then one day I looked up and saw Bill Cosby said it was time to get a TI-99. I couldn't find it on YouTube, but there was the adding machine commercials he'd done before the TI-99 where he's going "I love to save money!" as he kisses his adding machine and then his wife offscreen says "Oh dear! Guess what I just bought!" Yeah, I used that adding machine.

This list has gotten me thinking - there's room for another kind of list. How about: Technology we WISH would HURRY UP and become obsolete? I'll bet we could fill that list even faster...

⚑ - I do hope these "English-only" bigots understand that the English language is actually derived from West Germanic, borrows a sizable chunk of its vocabulary from Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and French, and was imported from the country which rightfully bears its name, from whom we gained independence in government but not in culture. Furthermore, it has been my observation, as a writer possessed of a formidable vocabulary, that the average blond country-music fan has no more grasp of English than they do of a foreign language anyway, preferring to speak in belches and grunts which they believe are charming.

But I digress...