Monomania affecting Ubuntu users far and wide?
Last night in bed I was reading some more of a novel (Not Novell) called “The suspicions of Mr Whicher“. It’s an interesting book, based on a true story about infanticide in the middle 1800s and one of our very first real “detectives”. But I am finding it a bit on the “dry” side truth be told…
Anyway, about 1/2 way through the book I discovered something amazing. A reference to a psychological condition called:
Monomania
How on earth could a 19th century detective know about the long running saga of a rather large and bloated software stack designed, it seems, simply to drive a wedge into the FOSS community and act as a trojan horse for our most [ahem] loved convicted monopolist?
The Wikipedia informs us that:
Monomania (from Greek monos, one, and mania, mania) is a type of paranoia in which the patient has only one idea or type of ideas. Emotional monomania is that in which the patient is obsessed with only one emotion or several related to it; intellectual monomania is that which is related to only one kind of delirious idea or ideas.
In colloquial terms, the term monomania is often attached to subcultures that to the general public appear esoteric. However, the differences between monomania and passion can be very subtle and difficult to recognize.
Truth is, of course Mr Whicher couldn’t have known. No one could have written such a tale of intrigue, double-crossing and skulduggery. But then neither could one have imagined the horrific tale of poor little Saville Kent’s untimely demise.
I was minded to post this piece mainly because I had just read a rather well put together history of the Mono saga so far by The Mad Hatter.
If this story doesn’t contain any monomaniacs then I’m a March Hare!
New: Public Domain Government IT Spending Dashboard!
Wow!
Get this, there’s a new web site that looks to have been built using the Open Source Drupal CMS (At least the blog portion did when I looked at the XHTML) as the front-end which lets anyone see a “dashboard” of spending on Government IT projects:
It has been an exciting time since we launched the IT Dashboard. There have been more than 20 million hits so far…
20 Million hits? I hadn’t heard about this. Had you? It gets even better.
For anybody just joining us, the “IT Dashboard” is a new, one-stop clearing house of information that allows anyone with a web browser to track … IT initiatives and hold the government accountable for progress and results.
Bloody hell. That’s amazing!
Where’s the catch?
Ahh. You sussed it.
Yep. It’s in the USA, at a site called USA Spending.
Come on Gordon. Let’s see how you are REALLY doing with spending on IT in Education, the NHS or Defence…
The Google Chrome Key
Back in 1995 something very odd happened. Microsoft released a new version of their operating system, jumping from version 3.x to version 95 which, as well as being a pretty innovative bit of version numbering, brought in a few other new things including the start menu. Now to get the start menu to work they pulled off an astonishing move and added a new key to computer keyboards, not just keyboards made by Microsoft (I am not even sure they did make them at the time) but keyboards made by all manufacturers. This key had a little windows advert on it and was called the Windows key. Quite how the competition regulators let this pass at the time and ever since is a mystery to me, but to this day if you go and buy a Logitech keyboard for your Ubuntu Linux desktop you will have a windows logo staring at you as you type like the eye of Sauron.
Keyboards without a windows key are few and far between. Here is a picture of one from ZaReason.
Todays announcement from Google that they are going to release an operating system may cause keyboard manufacturers to think about their little windows adverts a bit more carefully. Initially Google is targeting netbooks with integrated keyboards, presumably they won’t tolerate a windows logo on the keyboard. If and when the Chrome OS moves to a more desktop like platform will Google start pressing OEMs to add a Chrome key? Or will the key be neutralised to a more generic symbol that doesn’t advertise an operating system at all?
Google Chrome OS
This could be pretty big.
Google announced, in their own rather subtle way – via a blog post – their new Google Chrome OS. It’s quite exciting simply because it is from Google and what the objective of the OS is:
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.
For us Freedom lovers there’s good new too:
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010…
… We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We’re excited for what’s to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.
Techcrunch had a great headline on this announcement: Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb On Microsoft. And It’s Made of Chrome.
Here’s a quick thought that that headline inspired…
If Google are ultimately as successful in the OS space as they have been in the on-line space, then I can see some major investigations and calls from such places as Redmond for Google to be split into smaller entities. In a somewhat ironic repeat of what happened to AT&T back in the 70s.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in my mind. Even though Google claim to “do no evil” a monopoly is a monopoly is a monopoly. This is early days and clearly we aren’t anywhere near there yet but they are growing fast and becoming even more ubiquitous than AT&T; which was essentially only a USA monopoly.
I’d love to hear other thoughts on this:
Do you care what happens?
Do you think it is too early in the morning and I should stay in bed rather than talk drivel?
Do you think Google Chrome OS is a non-entity?
Promises, promises
Microsoft made an interesting announcement, they are promising not to sue people for using Mono. Jolly good of them really, it is nice not being sued.
Lets just assume for the moment that this promise means what they say it means (forgetting about the partial implementations exclusion and the fact that the promise needed to be made in the first place) and it makes Mono totally safe to use now, even in countries with broken patent laws. I still won’t be using Mono. Mono is a useful tool for solving the problem “how on earth am I going to run all this .Net code I wrote when I switch to Linux?” I for one don’t have that problem, but for those that do, Mono is the tool for the job.
The reason I won’t be using Mono is that the .Net framework is already embraced by Microsoft, it is already extended by Microsoft. It was from the beginning and will probably always remain so. Mono is playing catch up and people want to be using the leader. This goes for Moonlight and Silverlight too. Silverlight 2 came out, some misguided websites moved to it, Moonlight 2 is in progress, but following. The only glimmer of hope for Mono as something that is more than a specific problem solving tool is GTK#. In this, the Free software community is taking the upper hand by extending Mono, in ways that Microsoft won’t follow. Maybe if .Net/GTK# applications become the norm on Windows this would be a good thing overall. Personally I will stick to Python/GTK on Ubuntu for my fairly limited desktop app programming requirements.
OT: The Open Sourcerer’s Allium Harvest
As some of you will know, I like my garden and growing stuff, especially chillis. This year’s chilli plants are doing quite nicely in the greenhouse; the small “birds-eye” varieties are looking like they are nearly ready to start picking (I’ve tried a few but they were still immature) and have been quite productive by the looks of it, the habanero varieties will be a couple more months yet I guess.
We are lucky enough to have quite a big garden and we try to grow other veg as well when we have the time, although young kids do tend to restrict the amount we have quite considerably. My darling wife Helen manages to fit more into a day than I and should take most of the credit for our food production. Anyway, we’ve been merrily chomping away on new potatoes (Pentland Javelin) for over a month now and you really can’t eat better when they’re so fresh. We’ve also been eating Broad Beans too which are really tasty and have been a really good cropper along with various salad leaves etc.
Today though was time for the Allium harvest.
Back in February/March planted my favourite shallot, called Longor which is an elongated French style shallot with great flavour and excellent keeping properties (I mean like a year or more!). And we also grew a smaller quantity of the more typical round shallot found in the UK and some Garlic as well. These were all ready to harvest today.
Here’s the results (click the pics for close-ups):
The Allium Harvest
I’m very pleased the quantity of shallots and Garlic this year. All this lot came out of just one of our eight raised beds which are each about 10′ (~3m) long by 4′ (~1.3m) wide.
The Longor Shallot
The Longor is this lovely elongated shallot used extensively in France and elsewhere in Europe but not often seen in supermarkets here. We bought the original sets from the Organic Gardening Catalogue and from each bulb, you normally get between 5 and 8 shallots when they’ve finished growing.
Garlic Bulbs
We eat quite a bit of Garlic so the 30 odd bulbs here won’t last us very long but it’s always nice to have grown your own.
All of these plants will be left outside (hopefully) now for a few days to dry off in the sun, or alternatively we’ll put them in the greenhouse if it rains. Once dried they’ll keep for a good while. The Longor Shallot we’ve grown before and it really did keep very well – we were still using them a year after harvest.
Of Alliums in general we have found that they don’t take up much space, are very easy to grow and need little maintenance during their growing cycle. I’d highly recommend them for easy and tasty home-grown produce.
