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Here’s an interesting post on the Green’s site about the Indian Reva electric car and the attempts to get a permit to drive it on Australian roads.
From the Reva site it seems that the Standard model is a 750Kg two-door hatch-back car to seat four people that bears a resemblance to the most widely known Smart Car. The top speed (of something like 50 or 65Km/h) is also reminiscent of the smaller Smart cars. The Reva site indicates that the Indian government is offering a subsidy to people who purchase such vehicles to try and solve pollution problems.
In Australia we have a standard of living that is a lot higher than most people in India experience. But it doesn’t have to continue like that. If the poor leadership shown by the Australian government continues and the Indian government continues doing sensible things then our positions could be reversed.
If there is a Reva in Victoria then I’d like to try driving it, even if only on private property.
In a comment on a previous blog entry I was described as an active Fedora advocate, I don’t think that is an accurate description. I advocate it to appropriate people, which is mostly non-programmers – but as I mentioned that means a larger proportion of the population than to whom I can advocate Debian. It’s not that I’m trying to advocate Fedora, just that it fills a need for many people. I believe that the term Fedora advocate means someone has an objective of increasing the use and to use Fedora, I don’t have such an objective. I am a Linux advocate, a Free Software advocate, and sometimes a Unix advocate (Unix meaning the entire family of Unix-like operating systems). Merely promoting something does not make you an advocate for it. I don’t think of myself as a Debian advocate at this time, but as I am a Debian developer this may change.
It seems that the people who run the Fedora Planet think that my blog has suitable Fedora content, it’s been added to that planet. Also the Fedora Planet appears to be running an older version of the Planet software as it has the same problem with my blog that Debian Planet had before the upgrade.
Now on the issue of gratis vs libre: As I am not a Red Hat employee I can’t maintain a kernel-xen-nopae package and give it the same status as the kernel-xen package. Even when I was a Red Hat employee I couldn’t have done that – it would require some amount of management approval. I believe that this fundamentally makes Fedora less of a libre distribution. There is no room in Fedora for someone who is an upstream developer and who just wants to maintain their own package. There is Fedora-Extras, but that has a second-class status. Only Red Hat employees can maintain packages in Fedora Core. This makes Fedora fundamentally less libre than Debian. I am not trying to suggest that Red Hat change things in this regard, I believe that Fedora is meeting all it’s goals and that making Fedora as libre as Debian is not possible given the goals of making a profit on selling support of RHEL.
Chris made a good point. I also believe that MP3 codecs should not be in Debian/main. But I believe that people making mistakes about some issues is not a factor in judging the entire project. I believe that Debian is more libre although some bad decisions were made – largely due to lack of overall management. Fedora has hierarchical management, so when the legal team declares that some software can not be distributed then it gets removed without debate. I guess I could propose a GR to exclude MP3 codecs from main.
Also it should be noted that RHEL Extras has some of this software that is not in Fedora (RealPlayer for example). The Red Hat legal advice was that MP3 codecs need a license, so they ship a licensed version in their commercial distribution. This is the right thing to do for their customers (it’s handy to have and I’m sure that they get a good deal by paying license fees for all their customers) and removing such things from Fedora is the right way to offer a gratis product without unreasonable legal liability.
Naturally Fedora is much more libre than any secret-source OS. Every user has the option of downloading the Fedora source and recompiling it as they wish. I could compile Fedora with a Xen kernel that runs on my hardware and with SE Linux policy that is more restrictive than that which Fedora currently has. I could build custom Fedora install CDs to install things the way I want (which I considered doing when I worked for Red Hat). But the liberty to fork a project does not compare to the liberty to join it, and the liberty to create your own packages in extras does not compare to the liberty to add your own packages that do things differently to the default package.
There are of course positive and negative aspects to this. I started work on SE Linux in Debian in 2001. In 2003 I joined Red Hat to work on SE Linux, in Red Hat I was not the only person dedicated to SE Linux work and other people spent part of their time working on it. The SE Linux work in Red Hat soon eclipsed that of Debian because there was management support. There was no possibility for a package maintainer to refuse to fix a bug that affected SE Linux simply because they didn’t care for it. The positive side of this is that the SE Linux work proceeded quickly and efficiently. The negative side of this is that things which don’t have management support don’t appear in Fedora Core. Exim is a fine MTA but is not in Fedora Core. Some people think that AppArmor is a better option than SE Linux, they are wrong – but in Debian any developer has the option to add AppArmor support and neither I nor any other DD can prevent them. The libre nature of Debian means that as long as basic technical criteria are met DDs can add any package that they wish to the distribution.
These issues however are all related to people who are actively involved in Free Software development. For a typical Free Software user it often doesn’t make much difference, until of course your favourite program doesn’t get management approval to appear in Fedora Core. But the counter argument is that the quality of some of the >10,000 packages in Debian is not so high. You can install a Fedora Core package and have a reasonable expectation about how well it works, but Debian packages are sometimes rather experimental.
I also don’t believe that Debian is a very functional Democracy. Some of the problems of Direct Democracy are demonstrated in Debian. In many ways it is more anarchistic, anarchy gives you liberty for good and bad. Maybe we should consider a Representative Democracy model for Debian.
Lars Wirzenius seems to be seconding my idea for using wikis to solve contentious issues.
My latest idea in this regard is to have several wiki pages, one for each opposing view and one for agreed facts. If an issue has multiple parties debating it then there could be multiple pages for the areas on which different sub-groups agree.
The plan is that each faction edits their own page along with email discussion with other factions and then the page of agreed facts is updated when agreement is reached on some points.
Wikipedia is the canonical use of Wikis for contentious issues at the moment. It is based on having a page for each topic and a discussion page for that page where the history is discussed. This works for Wikipedia because the aim is merely to generate web pages. If the generation of web pages is incidental to the purpose of resolving a dispute then it is a little more tricky. Entire areas of disputed content can be left out of Wikipedia pages without any real loss. But often in online debates the key points are the ones most hotly disputed.
I plan to set up a wiki and do some experiments to see how well this works.
I’ll space them out a bit now, no more daily pictures.
Years ago Jon Wright (a well known bearded OS/2 programmer) told me that after you get past a week of growth it stops being annoying, I think I’m getting to that stage now.
Today I discovered a bug in one of my programs, it called system() and didn’t correctly escape shell eta-characters. Fortunately I had written custom SE Linux policy for it which did domain_auto_trans(foo_t, shell_exec_t, very_restricted_t) so there was no possibility of damage.
The log files (which were not writable by the daemon by both SE Linux access control and Unix permissions) indicated that no-one had attempted to exploit the bug.
I’ve read quite a few blog posts about someone leaving Debian and whether they should remain on Debian planet. An official policy on these matters has now been posted which stated what I expected, if you feel that you belong and meet technical criteria then you are welcome.
Not that this solves much, the next debate will be about what content is suitable for Debian-planet with the expected answer being “anything which meets technical criteria and doesn’t offend many people or break any laws”. I’ve already had some comments on my blog from people who want me to change topics. I don’t know if other people get this or whether doing an average of one post per day gets me more attention from the loons.
I started blogging after leaving Red Hat. I considered asking for my blog to be added to the Fedora Planet, but wasn’t sure whether I would be posting much about it. I just checked and it seems that my old Advogato blog is aggregared on the Fedora Planet and there is no mailto URL on that site to allow me to get it changed. I’ve just put a final blog entry on Advogato to inform everyone of the change.
I’m not sure if it’s worth adding my blog to the Fedora syndication. I have just decided to change my main desktop machine from Rawhide to Debian/unstable. The reason is that Fedora is mostly a Gratis distribution and Debian is more Libre. For most computer users there is no real difference as they don’t have the skills to use the liberty that Debian offers. But for people who can code (note that we are in a small minority of computer users) the difference is significant.
The final issue that forced me to this decision is this bugzilla entry about Xen. In Debian there are kernels for Xen on i686, Xen on AMD K7, and Xen on i686 with vserver (doesn’t Xen make vserver redundant?). In Fedora there will be one Xen kernel which won’t boot on the machine that is most important to me and which ironically is the machine that was issued to me by Red Hat (and sold to me when I left).
This issue of a lack of choice is quite understandable from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux side of things. It’s OK to say to a customer who wants to pay for a RHEL-AS license that they need a machine less than 3 years old if they want to use all the features. Adding new kernels adds support costs and I think that most RHEL customers want to have a smaller set of supported options with a higher level of support. I often recommend RHEL to clients and I will recommend that clients use Xen on RHEL-5 – and that they purchase recent hardware to do so.
But for home and hobby use it’s a different matter. I provide all the support I need, I can compile my own kernels without much effort – but it saves time to have someone else do it. Fedora simply lacks choice here by design. I still support a bunch of Fedora and RHEL machines and will still develop RPMs for them. I will put everything I develop under http://www.coker.com.au/rpms/ for anyone who wants it.
Given that if the Fedora Planet people want to syndicate my blog I am more than happy to have them do so. I don’t dislike Fedora, in fact I still recommend that people use it. It’s just that Debian suits my personal needs better than Fedora does. I expect that I’ll have more Debian content than Fedora content on my blog, but there will also be a lot of Linux content that’s not distribution specific.
It will be interesting to see what the Fedora Planet people do.
The day 2 picture had an NSA coffee mug in the background. I purchased it from the gift shop of the National Cryptologic museum at Ft Meade, Maryland. I highly recommend that museum, it has free entrance, hardly any visitors (I’ve never seen more than 5 people in there) lots of interesting displays, and some really intelligent and well-informed tour-guides. If you are interested in technology then you should visit the Cryptologic museum and the Smithsonian every time you visit Washington DC.
Last time I visited the Crypto museum they had a new display about fingerprint scanning. It displayed what the machine read and indicated whether the fingerprint was regarded as a match or not. I learned that I could get a false negative by changing the angle of my finger by about 20 degrees, but apart from that it seemed more accurate than I had expected.
Here is a picture of me touching an Enigma at the Crypto museum! There is also a picture of me sitting on a Cray with some Japanese friends, but I haven’t got a copy of that one.
In regard to Shintaro’s comment about thinking I had a beard after reading backup.te, I was a little surprised, I would have thought that mta.te (which is fairly complex) or chroot.te (one of the most complex and least used policy modules I ever wrote) would have inspired such a comment. backup.te seemed rather mundane by comparison.
Right now I’m just starting to break new personal records for hairyness.
I’ve been surprised that the GIMP isn’t as difficult to use as I had previously thought. I particularly like the preview feature for saving JPEGs. I can use a slider to set the quality of the image and see a preview of viewing the file before saving. In the past with less capable software I used to go through a laborious process of saving a JPEG, viewing it in a separate program, and then repeating until I achieved an acceptable balance of file size and quality. Now I can adjust the slider and see what the result would be in terms of both quality and file size.
Recently I was doing sys-admin work for a company where Windows was the desktop standard. Often we had to send around screen-shots of various problems and the way of doing this was to use CTRL-PrtSc to copy an image of the window in question and then paste it into a MS-Word document because the Windows image had no other program that was capable of dealing with image data. One significant problem with MS-Word is that it doesn’t allow expanding the image or modifying it, so you see it at about half the original resolution. It seems that what I should have been doing is pasting the image data into the GIMP and then saving it as a PNG file (PNG is loss-less compression which avoids the ripples you get from JPEG compression of text and it’s also very efficient at compressing the regular data that is typical in a screen-capture). PNG files would take much less space than MS-Word documents and allow efficient viewing by many programs (including web browsers which are on all machines).
I’ve attached another pic, titled this one day2, which I guess means that day0 (not photographed) was one day without shaving and day-1 (also not photographed) was the last time I shaved.
So far I’m still in the range of “too busy/lazy to shave”.
Blogger beta is living up to it’s name and the functionality I had yesterday for uploading an image and having a small version generated is not working now.
It seems that Toyota isn’t alone in having non-functional web sites. In fact it’s better than some, the basic information on the cars is available and it is possible to get contact information for car dealers, also they have a feed-back form on their web site (to which I submitted my previous blog post). Incidentally the Lexus site had much the same problem as the Toyota site (hardly surprising as Lexus is the luxury marque from Toyota). But I expect that if I phoned Lexus to ask about their vehicles I would get a better call-center experience which would make me less inclined to blog about them.
Daihatsu vehicles are sold by Toyota. Their web site doesn’t use Flash, but it has so little content that it doesn’t count.
I decided to quickly review the web sites of car manufacturers that sell in Australia for a fair comparison. I found three sites worse than Toyota, two sites that were equal (counting Lexus), and six that were better than it.
Holden has the worst site, they don’t display any information if you don’t have flash, they don’t even display a phone number! I wonder how much Adobe pays web programmers to pull this sort of stunt. I can’t imagine Holden management saying “if a customer comes to our web site and doesn’t have Flash then don’t display our phone number or any other contact information, they can use Flash or buy a Ford instead”. Obviously some web monkey has run amok and done their own thing without following directions. Probably some people need to be sacked in the Holden web development group.
Volvo Cars has a very bad site. Most of the content is involved with Flash in some way and refuses to load. There is a mailto reference that is broken, and the overview page for the S60 seems to have a JavaScript loop (I aborted the load after it loaded 245 pictures and was still going). The Volvo page for their other business is quite functional although minimal.
Hyundai has a bad site. The front page works OK, but some of the sub-sites to display information on vehicles redirect to sites such as evolveddriving.com.au which are “optimised for 1024×768” and require Flash and Quicktime while others do strange things like changing the size of the browser window. Overall it’s a very bad site, but at least I could find the contact details for my nearest dealer, and it has a feedback form.
Subaru has an OK site. The only thing I couldn’t access without Flash is information on their AWD (All Wheel Drive) technology. Unfortunately they provide no email address and no form for sending feedback.
The main Ford web page claims that Flash is required, but their site just works without it. In a quick test I was unable to find any functionality on the Ford site that is missing because of not having Flash. Ford have a well designed site.
The Volkswagen site makes no mention of the fact that I don’t use Flash, it does however have some strange unused spaces in the middle of the screen. I guess that it recognised that I don’t have Flash and made a semi-successful attempt to work around it. I could get all information I wanted including dealer contact details.
The main Mazda web page displays a message about Flash not being installed and offers a link to a non-Flash version of the site. The Flash section is at the center and the buttons at the sides work if you don’t have Flash. This seems to be a well implemented site.
Citroen has an OK site, no flash that I noticed (although there were large blank areas on the screen at times indicating that something was missing), the information was all available and browsing was reasonably easy. One thing that annoyed me was that there were movies available but only through some sort of JavaScript that tried to play them in my browser. I have never bothered setting up my web browsing machine for playing movies (among other things it has no speakers) so this is a problem for me.
Peugeot has a good site. No apparent flash and it’s reasonably easy to use. It has more pictures than Kia but the JavaScript navigation stuff is fancy. One nice feature is a single page with pricing summaries for all models. If you have $X to spend on a Peugeot you will easily discover which ones you can afford.
Kia has the best site I saw! Not only is there no flash, but it’s well designed, easy to navigate and it loads quite quickly. Please review the Kia site as an example of how to do it properly!
Let me know if I’ve missed any makes and I’ll post an update.
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