Sean’s Mental Walkabout

Having been at a Web 2.0 conference for a chunk of the week, I figured I’d finally download an try Adobe AIR, as they announced a Linux version last week at the Linux Collaboration Summit. I am massively underwhelmed.

First off, only 1 of the top 6 air apps on their site actually run on the Linux build of AIR. That app, an rss reader, which is basically a clone of Liferea, but not noticeably better in any way.

Secondly, transparency doesn’t work. I installed the Screenboard app and the Ruler app, both of which we useless as they didn’t do alpha channel.

Thirdly, their AIR app installer makes a new Gnome application menu for Air Examples each time it installs an application. So I now have 3 Air Examples folders in my application menu, each with 1 application in them.

Finally, air fonts seem to be hard coded to something smaller than my desktop settings, with no clear way to scale them up. Any application framework that doesn’t respect my system font settings is pretty useless to me.

Hopefully a lot of these get fixed in the near future. The only thing that AIR seemed to do was a lot of animated menus, which are pretty, but not actually useful. Perhaps if the alpha layer stuff had worked, I’d be a bit more impressed, but without that all the demo apps seem pretty pointless right now. And the one app that I might actually care about, TwittAir, uses functions the Linux AIR runtime doesn’t have yet.

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A vendor can often be their own worst competition if they create good technology, but put it out in a way that is too limiting, in platform support or licensing, than their prospective users would like it to be. I’ve often refered to this as the Anti-Market among colleagues. The rules of the Anti-Market are more or less as follows:

If you create a technology that is useful, but 90% of your prospective market can’t use it for various reasons, they’ve got a good chance of getting together and writing a replacement for your product.

Example 1: KDE vs. Gnome

Gnome created out the anti market that KDE created. KDE is built on QT. Back in the early days of KDE, QT was licenced in rather funny ways by Trolltech. The funny license meant that Red Hat (and other Linux distros) didn’t want to ship it. Mandrake was originally just Red Hat + KDE to fill such a need. But with the bulk of the KDE user market blocked because of bad licencing, a void existed to be filled. Gnome did that. A decade later Gnome is the primary desktop environment on nearly ever major distro, and while KDE 4 has gotten some recent press, it is definitely now a minority player.

KDE was brought down because it created an anti market. People wanted that kind of function, but the way it was delivered was not acceptable to its users.

Example 2: Java vs. Mono on the Linux Desktop

How many Linux desktop apps are you running right now, or ever, that are Java based? How many that are Mono based? The only Java apps I run on the desktop in any frequency are Azureus and Freemind. On the Mono side F-Spot and Tomboy have seen a lot more use. Until very recently Java remained under a license that made including it with the Linux platform quite an issue. Mono is under an MIT license, and has been since day one. While Mono has a number of short comings, the fact that it’s so young, and so much more used than Java in the Linux desktop space speaks a bit to the anti-market that Sun created by waiting forever to open source their baby.

Example 3: MySQL vs. everyone else

In 1995 Linux was already being used to run key parts of the internet. None of the traditional ISVs were paying attention to it (DB2 showed up in 1998 on Linux, and too my knowledge, was the first big database vendor there). You know what you need to run the internet, a reasonable database. MySQL popped out of the anti-market created by there being a platform people were using quite a bit, but lacking ISV support. People needed the function, but couldn’t get it even if they wanted to pay for it.

I continue to be amazed at how much of an anti-market MySQL took advantage of.

Closing thoughts

The Linux Desktop space is full of anti-market applications, some of which have even seeped back into the Windows world, like OpenOffice, Gimp, and Pidgin. Adobe just made a very astute move and got Air out for Linux before they forced a new anti-market there. While the Linux Desktop space isn’t the highest volume space for users, the developer to user ratio in the space is very high, which means ignoring it means there is a real chance of creating an anti-market.

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts or examples here, comments are open, have at it.

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I just did the upgrade of my linode (which hosts mhvlug.org, planet opensim, dague.org, and a few other sites) to Xen. I had put in the request to join the beta for Xen a couple weeks ago, got in, and was slow on my side to actually kick off the migration (which was painless, but required about an hour of down time). It turns out that all of linode is now going to Xen. Based on very simple latecy tests, the box feels much snappier on serving up wiki pages.

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John came over prior to the game bringing his HD-DVD Video Essentials, and given that we had some time prior to the game, we spent some time tuning the set.  Honestly, most things were pretty good, though we had to tune down the color and up the brightness just a bit.  There was one adjustment we made that I can tell immediately made a difference, which was tuning the sharpness down to nothing.  One thing that had always bothered me was how Jack’s beard in lost seemed to shimmer in odd ways, though I was never really sure what caused it.  It turns out that sharpness on digital TVs pretty much just takes the digital artifacting and makes it 10 times worse.  The image looks a little softer now, but there are no annoying random artifacts on thin lines throughout the picture.

Thanks to John for bringing that over.  I still have the kit as I’m going to do audio balancing this week (as we didn’t quite have the time to do it before people showed up).  While my living room is only so tunable, I’m still looking forward to actually trying to balance in the sub woofer in a reasonable way.  I think it will be amusing to see how off my course grained adjustments are.

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Nick and I chatted the other night, catching up on all things life and work.  Nick has kicked off his 4th semester as a professor at West Virginia Tech, adding a new class on open source software development to the curriculum for his students.  Our tentative plan is that I’ll come down late in the spring, hang out for a week, and give a guest lecture on Open Source Development.

I’ve discovered there is an Amtrak line that runs from New York City to Chicago via West Virginia, conveniently stopping in Charleston. I started getting all excited about this idea, until I found the following:

In most Amtrak trains, First Class and Business Class seats and sleepers have standard 110-volt electrical power outlets available to supply power for electronic devices. Very few outlets are available, however, at Coach Class seats.

This train doesn’t have First or Business Class seats. 15 hours of train is much better than 9.5 hours in a car, if I could get work done during it, but lacking that, driving looks like a better option.  If only they had power….

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I finally got around to using my Amazon Web Services account this weekend and push the entirety of my digital photos into S3 (it’s in progress right now, doing a nice job of exercising my fios connetion). I thank Sean O’Conner for pushing me over the edge here, as he brought his use of S3 up at dinner after the last MHVLUG meeting.

As I’ve been working on wedding photo book, I started to realize it would be good if these photos existed somewhere besides my raid server at home, in the event of catastrophe (man made or otherwise). Wedding photos can’t be replaced. At the current bill rates, it will cost me $1.50 to upload my 15 GB of photos, and $2.25 / month to keep them hanging out in S3. For less than $30 a year to eliminate a single point of failure, I’m all for it.

Amazon did something incredible with S3.  They decided that they weren’t providing an end service, but a component to build end services.  As such, they created an incredibly simple programming interface (via a REST web service), seeded the community with sample code in a slew of languages, and said “have at!”.  The results are somewhat impressive.  There is a firefox plugin which provides a reasonable browsing front end so you can understand what your bucket / bin structure looks like.  What sold me over is s3sync, which looks and acts like rsync, but has S3 as either the target or source.  A single command, and all my content is being pushed into S3.

S3 also has a rich access list and meta-data interface, which has me pondering a photo album creation application using S3 on the back end.  That will wait until the new year at least, but the possibilities seem interesting to me.  The fact that there is a bittorent creation interface for S3 is also quite interesting, and would make for very reasonable distribution of things like ISO images.

While there are other applications more specialized for photo sharing, like Flickr, the general purpose nature of Hardware as a Service that Amazon provides intrigues me. The programmatic interface on it is also something that I’d like to get a bit of experience with, as I think this model for service delivery is going to become far more prevalent over the next few years.  S3 is a pretty easy start point for that, though I’m still thinking of interesting projects for EC2 and the Mechanical Turk as well.

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Not all that exciting, but I did do a wordpress update today. Everything looks good to me, but if anyone sees something off, a comment would be appreciated.

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I was really hoping to avoid the whole facebook thing, but today someone that I haven’t seen or heard from in 7 or 8 years found me on facebook… and I gave up resisting. The value of these networks for me is giving me a handle to go catch up with people (mostly from high school), that I’ve lost touch with in the intervening decade and a half.

Off to make sure my facebook profile is even vaguely accurate from the account I made a while ago.

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Over the summer I moved my blog from livejournal to wordpress.  There were a lot of reasons to do this, and overall my experience has been very good with wordpress.

Once google indexed me, it came up with the following:

Which was odd.  That description didn’t show up anywhere on my site.  At first I marked it up to finding a new wordpress installation, but others didn’t seem to have it.  Then I marked it up to the xfn tag in the headers, but removing that didn’t seem to help either.

Then, today, I found something that makes this officially declared as a mystery.  I did a google search on the phrase If you search google on the phrase “Includes personal information, photographs, family, and friends.”.  Guess how many hits are found?

No… really… guess.

I don’t think you actually guessed yet…

Seriously, this is more fun if you play along.

6… 6 ?!?!

And I am 5 of the 6 hits.  Ok, what is going on here?  Anyone with any theories would be appreciated.  While it is amusing, I’d love to actually get real content indexed for dague.net again.  Feedback appreciated as comments.

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After reading cote’s blog post on the chumby, I got intrigued.  The chumby is a small linux device, specifically designed to run flash based widgets, served up from the chumby servers.  It looks like and interesting device, priced at a reasonable price point, and eminently hackable.

The only dig seems to be the Developers Agreement, especially section 3.1:

…

Your Modified Device and/or Licensee Applications must comply with the following: (i) your Modified Device and Licensee Applications must not enable you or anyone else to access the Chumby Service and/or servers without an active network ID issued by Chumby; (ii) your Modified Device and Licensee Applications must not block or interfere with any advertisement that is served by or distributed through the Chumby Service and/or servers; and (iii) any Modified Device or Licensee Application that connects to a Consumer Content Network must also enable the end user to connect the Modified Device and Licensee Application to the Chumby Service in substantially the same manner as the Modified Device or Licensee Application connects to the Consumer Content Network.

Which pretty much counts me out.  The license which is “you can only write software for our device that registers with our service, and that serves our ads” seems to completely miss the mark of having a fun, openly hackable device.  It’s frustrating when a consumer electronics company comes so close to making an open piece of hardware, but then freaks out at the last minute with their licensing and substantially shuts down their community growth in the process.  Hopefully they’ll realize that and adjust their license in the future to be actually open.

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