Roses are red, too.
Two times six is twelve.
There are twelve inches in a ruler.
Queen Mary was a ruler.
Queen Mary was a ship.
Ships sail in the sea.
Fish swim in the sea.
Fish have fins.
The Finns fought the Russians.
Russians are Reds.
Fire engines are always rushin'

therefore, fire engines are red.

I suppose it's time. I seem to get them once a year. But I got ten this time, is that new?

I just got back from the Novell Brainshare conference in Salt Lake City. It was a fun week. I attended lots of sessions on Linux and other open source tools. There was free (well, someone payed for me to be there...) food, free massages, free lattes, & lots of swag. Novell had a tech lab giving lots of interesting demos, and there were several dozen vendors and ISVs present. On Wednesday, Frank Caliendo opened for Collective soul at a free concert put on by Novell and open to the general public.

Perhaps the most interesting was a tutorial on using AppArmor. It's a great system for protecting applications. Novell bought the company that produced it several years ago and open sourced it. Basically, you point AppArmor at an application and put it in learning mode. You put the app through its intended uses, and then answer a series of questions regarding what AppArmor saw it doing. For instance, the app accessed a file. You can allow, deny, or 'glob.' Meaning, put in an asterisk. So it could access any file in a particular directory. There are also a series of pre-built templates you can add which allow certain sets of operations. Then you put AppArmor in enforce mode, and it keeps the app from doing things it shouldn't. Even if its running as root.

I'm impressed with Novell's commitment to open source. They are moving everything to Linux. Netware is no more, Netware services live on in Open Enterprise Server built on Suse Linux. Novell gave a great presentation on using the GNU autotools for their partners who want to move their products to Linux. Who knew using autconf, automake, libtool, and the rest could be so easy? Not me.

I've been working on setting up a log server, analysis, reporting, and notification system recently. I'm using Linux HA to fail-over an IP address and restart syslog. The logs are stored on an OCFS2 filesystem shared by the two nodes in the cluster. I use octopussy to analyze, report, and notify, and monit as a client side add in for logging additional information.

A BBC World Service radio program about piracy begins with the reporter in London trying to buy a pirated DVD of Pirates of the Caribbean from a street vendor, how the studios are trying to stop this even as they do films glorifying the pirate mentality, and how typically the countries that tried the hardest to pirate material (such as the U.S. toward other countries back in the 19th century) have ended up becoming the most opposed to it as they became developers of literary and intellectual works. Includes an interview with one of the founders of The Pirate Bay and you can even pirate^H^H^H^H^H^H download a 22 minute podcast of the program from here.

You are probably out of compliance with your software licences.

I have posted a video on You Tube where I spend about three minutes describing my new 30-frames-per-second video camera, but the video is done with my old 15-frames-per-second one. Why? Well, I don't want to reiterate the entire video including the rant of about four minutes I make on why, but the simple fact is that the new camera won't work as a web cam, and the files it creates on its memory card are AVI files. (I have an error in the video; Microsoft Windows Movie Maker creates WMV files; I said it makes Quicktime MOV files.) Despite that it supposedly will allow AVI files, Windows Movie Maker crashes if you try to feed it AVI files.

And I can't find any open-source tools that will allow me to do video editing with AVI files. I do not want to spend a fortune on a video editing program. But apparently video editing is one of the functions that is lacking in open source.

If you want to edit audio, there's no question: Audacity is the premiere tool for that purpose. I use it regularly and it's at least as good if not better in both functionality and in ease-of-use as any proprietary application for audio editing. When I want to develop a raster-based image (which is what SVG files are) because you can scale the image up or down and keep it sharp, I use Inkscape. But if I need to edit a bitmap image, I'm usually using Microsoft Paint or an older version of Paint Shop Pro because the learning curve for The Gimp is too high and its user interface is very difficult.

But I can find nothing in open source that is available for the purpose of doing editing of video files, specifically for AVI files. Maybe there is, but I can't find it. As I say in the video - and I'll focus on this again in a moment - I would set up a Linux partition on one of my computers and space to do this if Linux had the tools to do this as opposed to having them on Windows if they weren't available.

And so, as I (partially) point out in my video above, for those who want to really encourage people to turn to open source, good quality video editing tools available in open source, probably for Linux, would be a serious "Killer Application" that could get people to move. If they're not there, we (as in programmers who do this) need to work on them.

The camera I have came with a video editing tool, but it apparently won't work the the videos the camera creates. I hand it a 15-second clip and it says it can't work with video longer than 5 minutes!

If there are tools for video editing in open source, they have to be usable; they can't be junk or hard to use or they are worthless. The tools have to be at least the equivalent of what is available in proprietary applications, such as the (free as in beer) Microsoft Windows Movie Maker. That means non-linear video editing in a graphical user interface. A timeline. Ability to cut video at either any frame or for compressed video, at any key frame. Ability to insert audio, snapshots, video clips, to mute audio on a clip, to delete clips or to cut clips so I can remove things like excessive pauses, speech disfluencies (a fancy phrase I had to look up meaning use of "uh" in conversation), and errors. (I may do a gag reel containing all of my mistakes; it would definitely be Not Safe For Work. I am extremely polite in writing my blog; I can be extremely profane when I get mad when something goes wrong.)

It also needs to be able to insert titles, it probably should have effects (like various wipes and dissolves), and it would be nice if, in addition to titles, had proper captioning. I'm not deaf, but I caption all my videos. It actually takes a lot longer to add the captions (primarily because Windows Movie Maker doesn't really support them directly, I fake it with a title superimposed on the film) but I do it because it is the right thing to do: it allows those who can't hear to know what I have to say, and in case I slur my words (which sometimes when I get excited I do sometimes talk fast) someone can still understand what I'm saying.

Now if someone knows of good World Class Open Source video editing tools which are at least the equal of, say Windows Movie Maker I'd like to hear about them.

As I said in a previous article on my blog, the original Napster, if it ran only on Linux, would have been a "Killer App" that would have driven people to Linux in droves. And I suspect that if there were easy-to-use video editing tools it could also be the sort of thing that gives people a reason to take up that system, and if you can get your foot in the door you've got the chance to win people over.

Well, things are still going very well with Merrill and Jenny and I. When he and Jenny have problems, he works to resolve them. That's what really matters in a relationship. No one is going to be perfect, and no one can read someone else's mind. But as long as someone is willing to work with you, to communicate, negotiate, and compromise, then the relationship can work.

He's much more comfortable being affectionate, and telling her he loves her. We're starting to think about the future in terms of all of us. He and I still get along great. Quite frankly, we both like a certain amount of alone time, and as much as we love Jenny, it's nice to have days when we can just do whatever we like without a woman hovering over us ;).

Jenny found an article about polyamory in our local weekly, evidently there is a new discussion group here in Albuquerque that meets bi-weekly. We're planning on going. I've found these kinds of groups to be very helpful in the past, as it's comforting to know that we're not total freaks, there are others like us out there. And it helps to talk about issues that happen in polyamory.

This isn't tech-related in the least, but my family just got back from staying at the Ramada Inn in Kearney, Nebraska. It wasn't pretty.

Not that Kearney is a likely destination for Slashdotters, but for those who might find yourselves there: you've been warned.

Here's a snippet from an email from a so-called 'Linux guy' at Novell support. Trust me, I am not taking this out of context.

So, how many errors can you spot in these two sentences? I count three. You don't want to stay away from compiling kernel modules on your own. In fact, any time you compile the stock kernel supplied with SUSE, you compile the modules too. Only non-GPL modules will taint the kernel. Self compiled GPL modules will not, vendor supplied binaries not under the GPL will. And non-GPL modules can be MORE stable than some GPL modules.

This is what we're paying for?

EDIT: More info, they don't support compiling your own kernel. Or more specifically, you can, as long as you leave every single option the same as in their stock kernel. I'm speechless.

Refactoring relationships

Right now, relationships are embedded into the comments section of story pages with tags like:

<span class="zooicon"><a href="//science.slashdot.org/zoo.pl?op=check&amp;uid=198669"><img src="//images.slashdot.org/fof.gif" alt="Friend of a Friend" title="Friend of a Friend"></a></span>

This is ugly for a few reasons. First, it's a mess. Second, it means that every visitor has to have their own custom-rendered comments sections so you can't apply aggressive caching to the page-generation code. I would replace this with per-user CSS.

First, create a CSS file for each user like this:

/* Default class */
a.relationship {
background: url(neutral.gif);
width: 12px;
height: 12px;
display: inline-block;
text-decoration: none;
}

/* User-specific values start here: */

/* Friends */
a.user3352,a.user42 { background: url(friend.gif); }

/* Foes */
a.user666 { background: url(foe.gif); }

Next, replace the HTML in the comments section with generic relationship information such as:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="relationships.css">
[...]
<p>by neutral (1234) <a href="bar" class="user1234 relationship">&nbsp;</a> on 2008-01-20</p>
<p>by Just Some Guy (3352) <a href="bar" class="user3352 relationship">&nbsp;</a> on 2008-01-20</p>
<p>by foe (666) <a href="bar" class="user666 relationship">&nbsp;</a> on 2008-01-20</p>

All "a" tags with the "relationship" class get the default CSS values. If there is also a corresponding "user*" selector in the visitor's stylesheet, then the values in that selector override the defaults. For a sad user with no friends, this means that everyone gets the neutral.gif icon. As that user accumulates more specific relationships, those CSS definitions are applied instead.

This benefits Slashdot because suddenly they don't have to generate a brand new comments section for every visitor. The per-user CSS would also be extremely simple to generate. In any case, it would be no more difficult than the current method of embedding all that information directly into the comments section.

Finally, those CSS files could also be cached very easily. Since they would only change whenever a user's relationships are modified, Slashdot would no longer have to query that information every single time it creates a page.

There are two drawbacks to this idea. First, there are no more alt attributes on images, so users don't see a "Friend" popup if they hover over the relationship button. If that's a problem, replace the icons with little smiley or frowny faces as appropriate. Second, it would take slightly more work to support putting users in multiple categories at the same time ("Friend" + "Freak"). The fix is to create a whole set of graphics like "friend_freak.gif" and "foe_friendoffriend.gif" and corresponding CSS classes. There aren't that many categories, though, so it would require only minimal extra work to cover every possible combination.

How 'bout it, Taco - could you use something like that? Less code, less bandwidth, and less processing should be pretty easily reachable goals.

UbuntuDupe screwed up an Ubuntu installation almost two years ago. He still hasn't gotten over it.

UD, let me give you some free advice: move on. Really. You don't even have to admit that you were wrong. Just stop yapping about it and move on.

Do you notice that every time you bring this up, everyone opposes you? It's not because we don't like you, but because even if you were in the right (which you weren't), after two years we simply don't want to hear it anymore. Stop embarrassing yourself and let it die already, OK?

Fark: Is read by your boss.
Slashdot: Is read by the weird guy in the server room.

Fark: Tries to be corporate friendly.
Slashdot: Links to Tubgirl.

Fark: Garfield.
Slashdot: Doonesbury.

Quit whining about "oh noes this is not teh NSFW!" If you want Fark, read Fark. This is Slashdot.

Happy new years! Me, my wife, her sister, are getting ready for a big old house party. We invited Merril, but this is party might end with gay sex in the hot tub (not that non-gays have to take part) and that makes him a little uncomfortable. Plus, he wants to give the two of us our space, as I was nice enough to let them have the house last night. I went over to my Mom's, too see her and also say goodby to our gay republican native american friend Malcolm, who has been living with her and is kind of her adopted kid, which in his culture is fairly common. It being a matriarchal culture and him being first born male, it is kind of an accepted way for him to get away from his family.

He's moving in with his wife. From what I understand, they met in the army, in Korea. They got married for the pay and tax benefits. I think they really like each other, as friends, but I haven't met her yet. That's an even better way of getting away from your family amongst the Dine or Navajo as we call them. His family are all pretty messed up. His mom is a university professor with a gambling problem, and the rest of them are in and out of jail all the time.

Merril and Jenny and I had a great conversation the other night. We're on the same page. This next phase is the make or break phase, where the infatuation fades and you start to be real with each other. It's definitely more than just sexual between her and Merril at this point. And we are all starting to feel safe to contemplate what the medium and long term might look like.

Merril and I still have a great geek connection. I talked his ear off the other night and then apologized, saying I was in my manic phase and he confided that he's actually bipolar. Ouch. He's on good medication, but I had a friend who was bipolar, and that's serious. Not a deal breaker by any means, especially with modern treatments, but a hard road nonetheless.

I'm quitting smoking tomorrow. It's easy, I've done it a million times. Fortunately, my wife has pretty much already quit, her sister smokes three cigarettes a day, outside, and Merril doesn't smoke except when he's drinking and smokes are around. Me, I'm an addict. I did quit for two years once, and only started because I was around smokers all the time. Wish me strength of will, I'll need it.

Deep breaths. The cravings will pass. Cravings always do, because the present moment provides plenty of other stimuli to engage other seeking-circuits if you just wait. It's a good lesson that doesn't just apply to drugs.

It also applies to sex. I've been trying to be very conscious of my desires there. I'm very sexual, not destructively so, but way more than average. But I don't like feeling desperate. And if I don't get it every day, I feel desperate. I mentioned this to my therapist and said it would be one of my goals to turn it down sometimes between then and the next session. I have, and I don't feel guilty because I know my wife is getting some of the hottest sex she's ever had from Merril.

I came home today and he was still here. I'd specifically invited him to stay fro dinner, but he felt like he was taking advantage. Sadly, he had a dead battery and needed a jump. Unlike Mr. Y., Merril has a moral center telling him what's fair and what isn't.

I have to wrap this up, my lovely wife who is watching me right now has reminded me that we have a party to go to.

It's my birthday and everyone pooled their money and got me a Wii! I told them not to bother, they'd never find one, but they did, after much searching and calling and running about. First thing I'm getting is a Wi-Fi USB connector.

Now I need to figure out what games to get. I'd like to get some good multi player games that my wife, a non-gamer, might like. She like puzzle, rhythm, and party games. I'd also like some good games for me, on consoles I like action (side scroller, platform, etc.) and RPG games.

Any ideas?

Interesting post in an interesting discussion. The reading list and suggested exercises is also a keeper.