Well, the response is in. I am not pleased. I skimmed through much of the DOJ's response, and it was immediately apparent that the entire document does little but run defense against the opposing comments. It seems to me that a response in keeping with the spirit of the Tunney Act would actually listen to the comments rather than systematically dismiss them. I can only hope some of the more clueful and less ethically-challenged congressmen (Boucher? Feingold?) will raise a stink over the DOJ's obvious attempts to settle this case quickly rather than fairly.

And yes, I do have the right to bitch, because I did send in my comment. Sadly, my opinions on the necessity of disclosing MS Office file formats were dismissed as beyond the scope of the case. It seems to me that any potential solution to Microsoft's monopoly position should by definition be viewed as applicable.

Today the 'ol cable modem went down for a good hour and a half. I was not pleased. In fact, I was so not pleased that I began hacking. When I was done, I had a Python script that logs network downtime. At the end of every month, I shall enjoy demanding a corresponding credit on my bill. If I'm paying $45/mo, I better darn well get the 24/7 access that I'm paying for.

Update 02/20/02: It's been 10 days now, and the net connection has been rock solid. Strangely, I find myself a bit disappointed...

Every so often I like to spend time playing around with new software, to see what I might be missing. Today I got turned on to a couple of cool items.

There is a demo of Qtopia (formerly the Qt Palmtop Environment) available for x86. Qtopia is the primary environment that will run on the Sharp Zaurus, along with a Java VM. I thought the demo was pretty slick--the environment felt very professional and was consistent across apps. Handwriting recognition seems pretty good too. In my opinion, Qtopia seems like a better choice than X11 for a PDA, since there is little need for powerful window handling mechanisms on a quarter-VGA screen.

I also found the ROX filer today. This is a blazing fast GUI file manager. I have tended to stay away from file managers in the past, since I am pretty quick with the command line. I've played with Konqueror, Nautilus, etc., but have been disappointed with startup speed and the time required to render new windows. ROX, on the other hand, is fast enough that I may actually use it regularly.

A couple of nights ago I converted my Mandrake 8.0 box to a Debian (testing) box. I've been running Woody on another box for several months now and have been very pleased with the experience. Here's what I dig about Debian:

• Freedom from RPM dependency hell. Mandrake, like many other RPM-based distros, has packages that depend on specific library versions. This is bad. Debian packaging policy, and the veritable army of maintainers that support the policy, takes care of this problem almost completely.
• Apt-get works. Two commands and you've got an up-to-date distro.
• The init scripts are decipherable. RH-derived distros tend to have init scripts that are edited by all sorts of GUI configuration tools, and the resulting mess can be a real pain to dig through.
• Access to Debian (unstable) means I can generally get new software updates (Galeon, Mozilla, etc.) within a few days of release.

Here's what's not so great:

• The installation routine is nowhere near as polished as Mandrake's. But it gets the job done.
• 'dselect' has an incredibly nonintuitive interface. Fortunately 'tasksel' can handle much of this work, but there has to be something better. Maybe there is a third party tool (Progeny must have had something) that I am unaware of...
• Configuration of XF86, lilo, etc. must be done (mostly) by hand. Fortunately I am capable of that. This isn't such a big deal, you set it up once and you're done.

I also built a fresh kernel right away. I'm using 2.4.17 with the kernel-preempt patch. It does seem like preemption improves X responsiveness a bit. More importantly, the 2.4.17 VM beats the crap out of the early 2.4 VM that shipped with Mandrake 8. I used to hit some nasty swap storms, which seem to have disappeared now.

Anyway, life in Linux land is good once again.

Except for the announcement that Neverwinter Nights is likely to be delayed until Summer 2002. This does not please me.

The other night I was over at a friend's place, fulfilling my duty as a Linux geek. He had recently purchased a shiny new 1.7GHz P4, and wanted a Linux partition primarily so he could edit and compile LaTeX using emacs. I suggested he go with Mandrake 8.1, since I've used 8.0 personally and feel that it is a pretty good distro for newbies.

So the install goes great. Mandrake does a beautiful job on hardware autodetection, and the partition manager is pretty slick too. After the install, I start tweaking things. After modifying the ugly-by-default desktop, I proceed to snag those binary-only NVidia drivers that everyone raves about. I install the rpms, then restart X. X promptly crashes. I remove the rpms. X still promptly crashes. I reboot. X still crashes. I figure, "Okay, I'll reload the XFree86 rpms off of the CD." Linux does not comprehend the iso9660 filesystem.

Now I'm becoming irritated.

After some dicking around, I finally realize that lilo is loading up a kernel which does not have all the corresponding modules installed. The kernel that *was* being used, which *does* have all the appropriate modules, is no longer in /boot. Furthermore, I am unable to fix the problem because (a) I can't access the CD and (b) I can't use a boot disk since the floppy drive was dead.

Finally I decide I am wasting time, and I take 20 minutes to reinstall the freaking OS. WITHOUT the binary NVidia drivers, which my friend would probably not use anyway, since he has a shiny copy of WinXP on another partition.

I am rather uncertain how I feel about Mandrake 8.1 at this point.

On the bright side, I inherited my friend's old 500MHz box. He was about to throw most of it in the dumpster. I was rather happy to swap that motherboard in place of the 200MHz machine I had sitting out in the living room.