Rubenerd

I must admit a certain level of professional ignorance when it comes to cloud computing; much of my own commentary on the subject has been limited to security problems and my general anger with the way sites like Facebook have abused their users. It was refreshing to see some good stuff :).

I almost went to it!

Its one thing to feel frustration when you can’t attend an event on the other side of the planet, it’s quite another to know the CEO of SalesForce is hosting CloudForce Singapore less than two kilometers from your house and you didn’t register in time to attend! As usual I found about the event on Twitter but it was too late.

Instead I opted to watch the webcast as I done so many times with events like this that previously I couldn’t attend because of geographic isolation, and fortunately there were plenty of friendly people on Twitter discussing the events and ideas; I even met a few new people. That whole sentence could have been phrased better.

It’s not what, it’s why

It’s almost become a journalistic cliche to compare every keynote speech with Stevenotes, but I’m neither a journalist nor am I worried about cliches ;)

Steve Jobs does such an amazing job building buzz and with the delivery of his Stevenotes, partly due to the cult of personality surrounding him and his mysterious company, but mostly for a reason I think most people miss: he takes the time to explain why his company is developing things and not just what.

SalesForce’s CEO Mark Benioff was such a treat to watch for the same reason, instead of discussing a dry list of features he explained throughout the presentation why he was doing things while being refreshingly humble and candid. Enterprise software tools from Lotus, Microsoft, Siebel and Oracle are limiting and not enjoyable for people to use (both my father and I have personal experience!) Why can’t enterprise software act more like Facebook or Twitter which people are flocking to in droves and are using to answer questions instead of asking support teams?

Impressions

Forgive the use of weasel words and general awe and glow with these nest few paragraphs, I only just finished watching the keynote and am still in awe!

Cloud 2 and Chatter looked phenomenal, particularly when they were demonstrated live through their Singapore data centres throughout the talk. Much of the interface was deliberately designed to resemble social networks that people are (according to them) now in more common use than email as of 2009! Not only was it internal to SalesForce, but it even made it possible for the likes of support technicians to reply via Twitter.

I could see people wanting to use these services instead of being forced to, which in itself could drastically change how people communicate in businesses. The difference between feeling compelled to use something and being forced to is something most business software vendors seem to have been either blissfully ignorant of, or haven’t cared because they’re too busy worrying about what they look like on paper or for the developers who’d be implementing it.

To me one of the more salient points made was that while Facebook in particular is a compelling platform, it lacked privacy, security and trust which limited its future growth and use in enterprise and SMBs environments. If I were using their services I’d be adopting a wait-and-see approach initially, but if SalesForce can deliver on these promises I could even see it putting pressure on sites like Facebook. Not necessarily in competing with users, but with attitudes.

I also liked their demonstration of being able to change the entire interface into foreign languages without any extra work, and using Simplified Chinese in their example (this being Singapore and all). Xie xie :)

Apples and Microsofts

I must admit I enjoyed the many playful jokes Marc made at the expense of Microsoft such as explaining the reason why he used an iPad was because a Microsoft tablet wouldn’t work, or to Google’s Singh that he felt no need or want to upgrade expensive Office suites every few years; even going as far as to call their cloud computing efforts merely a half arsed, last gasp attempt to remain relevant and as a stepping stone between their past and the future.

To highlight the cross platform nature of Cloud2 and Chatter in particular, he made use (to put it mildly!) of iPads, iPhones and a BlackBerry showing information and photos being transferred in real time regardless of where it was coming from. A few people on Twitter seemed angry that he’d lambast Microsoft and do advertising for Apple, Marc even saying that it goes against their message as being platform agnostic. Personally I saw it as using the best platforms available, which can be done because they’re platform agnostic, and as he answered in the Q&A he did show his BlackBerry too.

My sincerest apologies

Forgive the terrible grammar and long, convoluted sentences, I wrote this just as the keynote ended and I wanted to get all my ideas down before I started forgetting stuff. If this were going into a magazine column or a blog network, no doubt I’d be fired. Heck, that’s why I don’t do either, right? ;).

I tell you what though, this whole talk was a fantastic advertisement for SalesForce, I’ve been rather apathetic with cloud computing but now I want to check it out and start developing on it! Well, once I’ve got all my Django and ncurses stuff done. Gosh darn it, why does there have to be so many interesting things to study now!?

I wonder what Mitch Kapor thinks of Chatter?

"Kyon? This is God. You’re not thinking about Mikuru again are you!?"

As with my beloved FreeBSD, Fedora has a /etc/fstab file that lists partitions to be automatically mounted on boot, but with one important difference: Fedora defaults to using a partition’s UUID and not its label.

Why?

I was all ready to pose a question in a newsgroup myself, but fortunately Bill Nottingham from this old thread from the Fedora 9 days put it simply:

UUIDs are unique. (In theory, anyway.) Labels aren’t.

Bill

Fair enough, I suppose you could have unintentionally labelled two of your drives the same thing. I never have because I like to use unique labels that match their mountpoints to keep things simple, but I suppose if Sarah Palin or Stephen Conroy ever installed Linux they’d probably try a stunt like that.

Anyway so it seemed if I wanted my brand new formatted drive to be mounted when Fedora booted, I needed to find out what the new drive’s partition UUID was instead of just using the label I’d just assigned to it.

How do I find out a partition’s UUID?

Good question. A cursory Google search returned this page from ServerFault which lists a dizzying array of options with plenty of justifications. blkid worked for me:

# blkid /dev/sda
> LABEL="moe" UUID="#-#-#-#-#" TYPE="ext4"

If this doesn't work, you may not have /sbin in your $PATH. In that case, just run it from that folder, no worries.

Once you've got the UUID, you can finally add it to /etc/fstab/ along with the file system and mountpoint.

I still can't say I'm a fan, but I suppose that's the way things are going.

So I want to get a new 2TB drive for my FreeBSD and Fedora tower. Looking at the Cybermind pricelist most of their Western Digital drives referenced EARS, an acronym which I'm assuming has nothing to do with the drives being able to detect audible messages from their operators, or allow them to operate a European aerospace conglomerate. Oh wait that's EADS, never mind.

Now hear this, sorry, really bad pun

It turns out EARS is (amongst other things) a new formatting method for Western Digital drives that uses 4KiB blocks instead of the regular 512 bytes. It seems to me like its a cost cutting measure and would decrease drive density due to greater file size rounding. As far as I can tell no other manufacturer is doing this yet.

Potential performance and density issues aside though, what I'm more interested in is compatibly. Scouring FreeBSD and Fedora web forums it seems a lot of people have been having issues with these drives using any OSs other than Windows Vista or Windows Vista Second Edition/7. Whether it's something FLOSS OSs will adapt to in the future I can't say, but for the time being it makes these drives useless for my needs.

Insert required personal experience here

On the whole I've had good experiences with Western Digital drives; I was burned quite literally by a Seagate a few years ago when it irreversibly destroyed the desperately needed FireWire port on my MacBook Pro and Maxtor are really just a cheapie brand for Seagate now. Then again I've also heard plenty of horror stories from people about WD drives, including ones that WD use refurbished drives in some of their external enclosures.

I suppose hard drives are universally bad and it all comes down to user preference. It's a clever ploy because drive manufacturers can skimp on more stringent QC and lower tolerances, and then tell people they need to buy more drives for backups for when their crappy drives fail. It's one of the few consumer goods that are terrible but can be fixed by buying even more, it's genius!

Is there an economic model that shows a correlation between the demand for a good and a decrease in quality at the same price? It wouldn't be an elastic or Giffin because price isn't the reason people buy more, but it wouldn't be inelastic because that shows a sustained amount of consumption regardless of price. Or perhaps it would be then? Its been a while since I've studied economics ;).

It's official, Microsoft's breakout Windows 3.0 "operating system" turned 20 today. Well, really it was yesterday but we'll pretend it was today so I can write this post. Mikuru looks horrified at it running on the desktop ;).

First machine nostalgia

My dad has worked for multinations his entire career (you can tell by his greying hair and high blood pressure), so he was stocked up with IBM busienss machines throughout the 1980s. As a result, when he bought our first home computer it was an IBM with a flavour and version of DOS I can't recall now. What I do remember is shortly after this he installed Windows 3.0 with MME on it, and later Windows 3.1 which is perhaps the more famous iteration.

Being a kid at the time I didn't know anything about the incredible Amiga and my experience with Apple was limited to a few underpowered Apple IIs our school had been given as part of some Aussie education scheme, so I didn't know what I was missing with Windows 3.0. With heindsight it was another of Microsoft's lame, crappy knockoffs of competing products, but suffice to say I spent many long hours as a pre-school kid developing myopia staring at that computer screen using software on it.

I can remember 3.0 didn't tax our 486SX with 4MB of RAM as much as other peoples' machines, but we used Brown Bag Software's PowerMenu to launch it so if we wanted to use DOS applications we wouldn't need Windows running and consuming resources. As you can see from the screenshot above, I still run it in DOSBox and even use PowerMenu to launch it along with the likes of WordPerfect and Commander Keen :).

Relative age comparion!

Looking back hurts my… back

On the whole Windows 3.1 was a vast improvement which was reflected in its much stronger sales and the fact more people know of it now than it's older brother, but there were a few little things that 3.0 did better. I can remember the horror I felt when I discovered Reversi had been replaced with Minesweeper, and I thought that — while pixellated — the colour schemes and flat icons in 3.0 were cooler.

Then Windows 95 rolled out later that decade and the likes of Program Manager and File Manager were buried in the Windows folder without icons never to be used again. Oh yeah that reminds me, File Manager in Windows 3.0 was TERRIBLE! I think they were attempting to implement the Mac's spatial file manager, but it was an unmitigated disaster. I reckoned the File Manager from 3.1 was better than Explorer.exe from Windows 95, but File Manager from 3.0 could take a flying leap off a tall building and collapse into a heap of it's own fail.

Windows XP (aka the Fisher Price edition) and Windows Vista finally convinced me to move off the slowly sinking Windows ship, but I still run these classic 16-bit shells in DOSBox to relive the old days. Windows 3.0 is so much more reliable when it has 64MB of memory to mess around in instead of 4 ;).

Newt and Calista Gingrich, please report to the south coast of the US for cleanup duty.

The problem isn't that you're paying too much for petrol Newt, its that you'd rather spend time and effort drilling in the middle of the friggen ocean instead of developing alternatives, all under a thin veil of patriotism. Any temporary reduction in prices would only provide temporary relief, and would do nothing to solve either the energy crisis of which you speak, or energy independence.

I'm assuming he wasn't being sarcastic, if you were sir then please disregard.

Having got used to Python 3.0 development on my Mac through MacPorts, I was a little surprised to find it currently unavailable for Fedora, at least in Constantine (Fedora 12, the current stable release) without any third party RPM sources.

I suspected it may have had something to do with many of Fedora's tools depending on Python 2.x, so one solution would be to do what the MacPorts folks did and implement them as separate ports, or RPMs. I'm still getting used to the lingo ;).

According to the Fedora Wiki for Fedora 13, that seems to be their intention. From the Benefits to Fedora subheading:

Fedora has long been a great platform for doing Python 2 development, but we don’t yet have Python 3. Having Python 3 available via rpms will extend our Python coverage.

Note also:

• Python 3.0 was released almost 10 months ago, on 2008-12-03, and the latest release of the 3.* branch is 3.1.1, released on 2009-08-17.
• Other distros have python 3, though not necessarily with anything “on top” resembling the full python 2 stack.
• We have a working, valuable python 2 stack, which is used by critical system components (yum and anaconda): we must not destabilize the python 2 stack.
• Python 3 is sufficiently different from python 2 that we need them to be independent software stacks.
• The Spanish Inquisition. Spam spam spam. The knights who say… the soft cushions! The comfy chair!

I can live with that. As far as Linux distributions go, I like how transparent the decision making process is in Fedora and enjoy reading their discussions, even if in this case they seem to be a bit behind.

As for me, Django still uses Python 2.x but I'd started moving some of my personal projects over to 3.x. I suppose I can keep using the -3 flag with the Python 2.6.x interpreter to warn me of any deprecated features I may be inadvertently using.

Because of some licencing issues (that from a pragmatic point of view don't really bother me) TrueCrypt for Linux isn't usually available from package managers unless you add third party repositories. I really hate that word. I prefer installing it manually, and the installer lets me choose where to put it.

The quick way

1. Go to the TrueCrypt downloads page and choose the Linux install for your system architecture.

2. Do the usual tar extract, and execute the resulting file much as you would an installer. For example, the latest (at the time of this post) for 64 bit CPUs:

% tar xzvf truecrypt-6.3a-linux-x64.tar.gz
% ./truecrypt-6.3a-setup-x64

1. Choose option 1 when the installer prompts, then hit [Page Down] a few times and enter "yes" to accept the licence agreement.

2. Fedora places TrueCrypt in the Accessories groups in Xfce and Gnome, I assume it would for KDE and LXDE too.

The more custom way

If you prefer, in step 3 if you choose option 2, TrueCrypt extracts itself into /tmp so you can place them where you prefer. For example, because of my FreeBSD history I like having resources I install to be run from /usr/local, so once I've extracted them I move them to where I want. Done and done :).

And the best part of all…

Once you have TrueCrypt installed, you can use it to hide whatever you want from overzealous and legally dubious Australian customs officials (Aussie customs can now search laptops)!

Then again, if you're running Fedora or another free/open source operating system I doubt they'd even be able to figure out how to use it let alone perform a constitutionally illegal search.

Then you can use it to hide everything from overzealous legally dubious Australian customs officials.

Hey, when I saw these two stories in my sleep induced state early this morning it made my smile ;).

For what it's worth, I've never personally called women birds, but I've heard it a lot. I thought it was an Aussie euphemism, but Jesse Lloyd says it's a British thing. I guess she would know, being a bird and all!