Cafe Bucky

So I’m sitting in the Oakland Airport again, not a power outlet in sight.

The hills from Petaluma on down through Marin are all nice and green. The Golden Poppies are out. The Lupines are luping, or whatever it is they do in their Purpleness. Prince would approve of ‘em.

And I’m leaving it all behind for a bit.

Back To NYC

I’ll be in NYC until late June. Call it “July”. Some advantages to being there are:

• my wife and daughter are there. I mean, I could just stop right there, ya?
• no commute! (driving to the Mission District, finding parking, and dealing with a dodgy neighborhood saps about 2.5 hours a day. I want that part of my life back for a while)
• easier to find other developers to meet with, all sorts of talks to go to, more energy
• Central Park in Spring
• hey, it’s New York!

On The Plane, Just Trying To Get Going

I always sit in the far back. That gets me on the plane, stuff stowed, and in a wonderful position to check out all of the hubbub. I would recommend this strategy to any frequent flyer, but since there’s only so much room at the back, you should just pretend you never heard of the idea. The East Coast Feistyness starts right away. We’re not even off the Oakland tarmac. Of course, when half the plane is New Yorkers, you’re not going to get the “could we all, just, just, get along?” speech. Jumping ahead for a second, I had nothing to do with what I am about to describe. For reals.

So 55ish Mr. Self-Righteous Preppy in row 12 starts lecturing two gals who, it must be said, have had ample augmentation and are quite cute in a “hang out in the Hamptons” kind of way and and … anyways so security gets called. The Gals dared to move Mr. SR Preppy’s overcoat! They wanted to store their carryon bags in the overhead bin. And, get this, they’re paying passengers! But, oh my gawd, he’s “been flying for years” and thinks “this is an outrage”! He has all of his feathers ruffled. We just might mistake him for an Emu.

Can you believe it? I mean, to think that Mr. Power Trip isn’t entitled to actually take up an entire overhead bin. What’s the world coming to when you fly economy and can’t store your $1000 camel hair overcoat in peace? Must be quite a comedown from the Private Jet days. By comparison, my London-bought Wool overcoat is stuffed in some cardboard box right now, jammed on some smelly UPS truck barreling its way to New York (being driven by a beatnik poetry spouting pony-tailed guy in his 60’s, thoroughly wired on benzydrine)

Security arrives. The PA reverberates with constant “if you’d all just sit the fuck down, like, right frikken now, we can be on our way, dig!?” implorements. The aisle gets crowded up there with our wonderful crew. They’re looking for the portable “super high decibel” Klaxons (they’re next to the Animal Crackers, I think, that’s where they usually are). Personnel under the plane are readying a instant crowd control foam barrier. I sit back in 26C and am thankful to a) be close to all of the drinks and the loo, too - b) away from Mr. SRP, and c) possessing an extra PowerBook battery.

Security hauls the overcoat off the flight deck. It doesn’t go quietly, whining for its “beloved tailor” or somesuch. Everyone leans over to the port side windows, and with much mirth, we watch the expensive linen being force fed into the #2 engine. The cloud of wool emanating from the exhaust amuses everyone (except one peeved Goober Doober). Not content with that, Mr SRP is bound with shrink wrap, made to wear fuzzy bunny slippers, and is escorted to the cargo hold. The cabin breaks into applause as the sight of the bungy-corded Jerk is beamed to our seatback screens. The crew high fives the passengers. We ask the security guy back for a curtain call, and we finally start taxiing. Ground crew pass around a “Victory Spliff”. The captain yodels over the PA. We’re finally fucking airborne.

Ok, that’s a little embellished.

What was it, a few days ago I was talking about all of the different Linux distros, and that there wasn’t enough of a common face?

Well, allow me to restate, update, and elaborate … There really ARE way too many Linux distros. I think many of them are more from the idea of “hey, I figured out how to make a distro!”, than the idea of “hey, let’s advance the state of the art in some way…” Consider what the situation looks like from the POV of someone still mentally stuck in Windows la la land - they peek at the Linux world, get scared at what looks like chaos, and go running back to the illusion of Windows comfort and safety. Keyword: Illusion.

So with that in mind, it’s been an interesting week, because Ubuntu Linux got a major update. It so happens that I’ll be doing a round of Linux installs soon, so I’m in the market to find something, anything, that saves me from the tedious process of dealing with Debian. (plus I know I’ll be dealing with new hardware…)

Ubuntu is based on Debian, but with some important differences:

• the install should “Just Work” - hardware detection is very good
• updates new versions available every six months
• more recent kernel

I also like the fact that it seems to have a very well developed web site, an active community, and what looks to be a commitment of money (free CDs shipped to you, if you’d like) from Canonical (which gets support from Mark Shuttleworth). It looks like it will be there for a while, and that a lot of thought and effort is going into it.

Winding back to “here and now”, I’m about to head back to NYC for a couple of months, and know that I’ll want a Linux box or two there. I figured I’d take a little time to install Ubuntu on an old iMac DV I have lying around [1]. I recommend using BitTorrent to download a disk image to burn.

Some things noticed installing to a Mac iMac DV (400 mhz):

• text installer - but so what, it detected everything
• there was a hiccup of the “multiseat” module not installing. Ignored this. (it turns out this has to do with multiple users simultaneously hitting the window system (x.org))
• didn’t have to answer any silly questions about my framebuffer, or my mouse. Gnome comes up, and it “Just Works” as advertised
• scrollwheel mouse works out of the box - w00t!
• Mpeg streaming (SomaFM) does not work out of the box, but a quick Google search gives me hope

All in all, Ubuntu seems to live up to the hype. It’ll be the distro I use on PC or PPC hardware when I get back to NYC (that’s another post).

[1] Sorry Sophia, I have co-opted your west coast box! But your old PowerBook may be getting a new friend soon :-)

“The Open Source Initiative has begun an effort to pare down the number of open-source licenses in widespread use. ”

It was good to see the CNet article “Open-source group to corral licenses” this morning. It’s been a long time coming. There are just way too many versions of Open Source licenses that all basically say the same thing. Take a look at the OSI site.

I got hung up on this a little bit when it came time to consider a license for FlexiPhoto - which to choose?

Another example of way too many: the myriad variants of Linux distros. My concern is that the common “enemy”, as it were, is Windows, but the F/OSS comunity wastes a lot of energy by not presenting enough of a common face to the outside world. Too many licenses to think about. Too many Linux distros vying for attention. The Bazaar has a lot of alleys these days …

I’ve been wondering how I might express some feelings about the passing of the Pope. I like what Bono said:

“The best front man the Catholic Church ever had. A great show man, a great communicator of ideas even if you didn’t agree with all of them, a great friend to the world’s poor which is how I got to meet him. Without John Paul II its hard to imagine the Drop the Debt campaign succeeding as it did.”

That’s a great sentiment. I knew he’d have something to say about it. On the one hand, I don’t associate with any particular religion (to me, it seems, so much depends on where in the world you happen to be born and raised - who’s to say which way of expressing a faith has “got it right?”) On the other hand, it’s undeniable that the Pope will be missed by over a billion people, and that he did so many positive things. One senses that his shoes will be hard to fill.

I’ve always regarded Daylight Savings Time as an anachronism. Turns out that Benjamin Franklin is credited with coming up with it. I say that the man is entitled to have one stinker of an idea, but I wish we’d stop following it.

“Leave Time Alone!” says I. I don’t like all this mucking about with clocks.

It’s calendars I want to mess with, and the work week in particular. Yes, I want longer weekends, and you do too. We’re going to figure out how to rearrange the calendar … This is part April Foolishness, part thought experiment.

We get 52 weeks a year (364 days), where many of us work 5 days a week (260 work days). The seven day week is basically 5 on / 2 off. Let’s change it! Since many take off two weeks vacation, let’s call it 50 work weeks, times 5 days = 250 work days.

The one constant you can’t play around with is the length of the year. Our little thought experiment doesn’t involve changing the orbit aroud the sun. The 365/366 thing is the Law.

What if we had a 10 day week? 36 weeks per year (360 days), plus 5 or 6 days at the end that are a sort of “holiday week”. In the 10 day week, we’d work 6 days on, and have 4 off. This is great for getting a lot done on the 4 day “weekend”, but it only adds up to 216 work days. Ah, but bump it to 7 days on / 3 off, for 36 weeks, and you get 252 work days, and every “weekend” is 3 days. Hmmm.

The calendar people will love this. They’ve been trying to think of a way to increase sales for the last 500 years … this ought to do it … They get to come up with the names of two or three new weekdays, and this one detail gets tied up in “standards committees” for a good 15 years.

A variant is to think of a 9 day week. 40 weeks a year of 9 days gets you 360 (and then there’s the wild 5 or 6 day party at the end of each year, especially at the calendar companies, which suddenly seem to have unlimited budgets). What if we had 6 on / 3 off? Well, 6 * 40 gets us 240 work days. That’s pretty good, except some Scrooges out there will drag their staff back in during the 5 or 6 day “end of year” party, in order to get closer to the old-fashioned 250 day “ideal”.

The other thought in this is that there would be a lot of overlapping schedules (i.e. “my weekend is not always your weekend”). A plus in this is that traffic gets spread out a bit, and work facilities are used every day. A big minus is that everyone runs around consulting time scheduling programs, trying to figure out the ever-increasing “when is everybody free to get together?” problem. Those that put on weekend-oriented events are pissed off, because 60% of their usual attendees might be working on any given day.

On paper, the math all works out. In real life, I don’t see how society would cope - “7 days” is what we all know, right? It would work pretty well for a subset of jobs (and some do this now: more than 5 days on, more than 2 off). In any case, it all makes more sense to me than the Daylight Savings Time jazz!

Ok, for any OddTodd fans, go see the April Fools cartoon. Of course, it kind of helps to be familiar with the the back catalog.

Mep!