Stop Hijacking My System Tray
Published 2011.03.08 | 
You want to know one of the things that really draws my ire? I mean really makes me want to uninstall your pathetic excuse for a piece of software, remove any remnants or traces of it having ever been near my machine in the first place, destroy the CD it came on with fire called down from the heavens and send ravenous zombie hordes to your home office? It’s when some developer douche bag decides that he knows what I want more than I do.
I don’t mind if you ask me, give me a choice, but not every damn program out there needs to put one or more items into my system tray to load there every time the computer starts and slow down my startup time, eating away at memory and CPU power. Normally this is under the guise of “speeding up the application”. Well, I say that if you need all of those pre-loaders to make your application function acceptably, maybe you should go back to Fortran 101 and learn to write good code in the first place!
What’s worse, are the damn services that get installed and started that we don’t even know about. Why does a simple media player need a web server? Why does my GPS management app want or need to check out my hard drive at night? Have all developers taken refuge at the throne of Bill Gates and Lenovo or something?
“We have a right to look at the user’s private information because they bought our crap.” or “We don’t need to worry about writing tight, efficient bug free code, we’ll just tell the customer to by a new computer and get more kick backs from Intel.”
Not to mention the shift away from ownership to leasing. Now when you “buy” software, you really are only “buying” a license that allows you to use it for a period of time. Screw that noise, man. If I am interested in a certain product and see that kind of license, ffft it’s gone and I am looking at something else.
This is just one reason why Open Source software is so damn good and popular. Microsoft and the other behemoths of the commercial software industry want to come out and tell everyone that free software isn’t really free, it costs you more than the expensive slop that they sell. The thing is, they don’t get it. We don’t mean free as in dollars, we mean free as in spirit and ethics. You get some open source code and you may spend a few bucks to implement it or get some support, or you may not, either way it is completely open. All of the source code is there so you can make damn sure no one is spying on you or stealing information from you. You can make a change to the app if you feel like it so that it fits better to your needs, instead of only getting “good enough”. It’s free like the wind and water cascading down the mountain, and brothers and sisters, that’s a great place to be.
Linux is PRICELESS!
Published 2010.09.07 | 
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Maybe it’s just me
Published 2010.07.05 | Maybe it’s me, and please feel free to drop a comment and let me know what you think. In fact, I am asking you to comment or hit the feedback button/contact form and let me know your thoughts. I have working with what seems like a bazillion different operating systems over the years, to varying degrees of proficiency and intimacy. I don’t just mean various versions of Windows either, I have worked with BeOS, DOS, Linux, MacOS, MenuetOS, NetWare, OS/2, SkyOS, UNIX, and Windows to name a reasonable sampling. That list then breaks down into further releases, variations, versions and more. The point I am trying to make here is that aside from the fact that I enjoy tinkering with operating systems, I have a pretty wide field of experience with many, many different ways to boot a computer.
The one big thing that I notice as a glaring difference between practically all of the operating systems I have tried and Windows is multitasking. I mean true, let us do more than one thing at a time multitasking. Not just do a little here and do a little there, the “hand off a lot, back and forth, and it’s real slow but we’re gonna call it multitasking while we entertain you with pretty pictures” kind of stuff.
My two primary operating systems these days are Windows and Linux, Windows 7 and Debian to be more precise. Depending on where I am and what I am working on those can vary, but here at home, I tend to stick to those two as much as I can. I have gone all Linux before and I loved it, and to be honest I’d love to do it again, but there are games I want to play and some development and music recording/production software that I can only run on Windows that I just don’t want to give up. Therefore I run both.
Now, on to the crux of this long winded diatribe. It seems like I can run many applications, daemons, processes and whatnot on my Linux boxen and it is happy to do so all day long. In fact, I can overload it to the extreme and it will still function, albeit quite slowly. No crash, no fuss, no muss, and once I stop some surplus processes it will come back and to a more or less normal state. Except maybe if I am running Oracle, there seems to be no way to recover from running Oracle.
Compare this though, to my Windows box, where I can literally bring it to it’s knees with two … maybe three processes. And I don’t just mean performance knees either, I mean the box will sometimes lock up, or even if not it never quite recovers (I suspect memory leaks maybe). This gets especially if not exponentially worse if these two or three processes are attempting to access files on the same disk or partition. It’s like Windows cannot stand the thought of sharing disk I/O with anyone, even itself.
Now, all that being said, let me make another note, this is not another Windows bashing article that are aplenty all around the ‘net these days. These are my observations and frustrations that make me shake my head and wonder why slick marketing and strong arm business techniques always supersede quality and performance when it comes to sales (Beta versus VHS comes to mind).
What do you think? Am I crazy? Getting senile in my middle age? Or have any of you out there noticed similar things?
Linux, your iPhone and your pictures
Published 2010.05.11 | I suppose this might work for an iPod touch as well, but the ones I have and have seen don’t have cameras. OK, on to the tip! Recently I wanted to get all of my pictures copied off of my iPhone and onto my computer running Linux, specifically Debian 5.0. Normally with something like a USB thumb drive this is easy, once you plug it in, even if it doesn’t auto mount itself you can at least look in your messages file to see the actual device path in order to mount it manually. However, what I noticed with my iPhone (3GS version 3.1.2) is that not only did it not auto mount, my messages file didn’t list any information about a device path for me to mount it manually.
From here naturally I turned to Google, but everything I came across talked about installing iFuse and some kind of ipod-convenience package or said it couldn’t be done, or my favorite that you had to have a jail-broken phone in order to do it. Now, I didn’t want to install a bunch of packages I wasn’t familiar with just for this, and I darn sure didn’t want to jail-break my phone either. If for no other reason than because I was convinced that if I could do it in Windows (connect to my iPhone and copy my pics off), there had to be a way to do it in Linux too, without having to alter the device. I am hard headed that way, but in this case it worked.
Now this might be obvious and simple to everyone else, and if so I am sorry to bore you, but it wasn’t something I was familiar with. I did have an inspiration though, something so simple I just knew it wouldn’t work but I decided to try it out anyway. I fired up gthumb which was conveniently installed already, and is a tool for doing just what I wanted to do, importing pictures from a digital camera among other things. I then plugged in my iPhone and gthumb picked it up immediately and started pulling up a list of all my pics on the phone. From there I could import, rotate, delete originals and more, easy as pie. It worked perfect, and was very simple, just like it should be.
In the end, I found that I didn’t have to install any software hacks or jail-break my phone, just use the right tool for the job. Ain’t Linux grand?
Misc
