Vista drops another one

Adolfo's continuing voyage into the land of Windows Vista produces the usual endless frozen windows and similar boring frustrations, but every now and then it comes up with something truly inscrutable. Today it squeezed out another little gem:
"What am I supposed to do about this?" Adolfo asked. "What does it mean? Do you understand this?" "Well, yes, I think so, but I'm a developer," I replied. "Well, I'm not a developer! How am I supposed to understand this?" I smiled. "I told you so," I said helpfully.

There are two things that amuse me about the phrasing. First, the accusatory tone of the dialog box is great: "OK, mister wise guy, now you did it, you tried to copy a file without its properties. Let's see you get out of this mess." The second is the window title: "Property Loss". Is he already screwed? Does that mean he can take a deduction on his taxes next year? [I could argue that buying a Vista PC should qualify him as a disaster victim.]

What I suspect was happening was that he was trying to copy files to a network attached storage device that won't let him preserve ownership. Well, so what? It's a computer, it should figure out what to do. Twenty years have gone by, and Microsoft is still using "Abort, Retry, Ignore?" Granted, they have at least swapped out some words, but it's the same error message. And yes, the dialog box is prettier under Vista. I look at this dialog and say "this is what the Mac would look like if it were designed by chimps."

2.54 cm of anger

Hedwig and the Angry Inch has arrived in Vancouver. We went to see it on Saturday, and it was pretty good – especially Edmonton Block Heater which played The Angry Inch. The Media Club is a pretty good stand-in for Bilgewater's, and if you get there early you can get a sofa up front. Until May 12.

Canadian immigration

Adolfo and I get a lot of questions about Canadian immigration. We first came to Canada on a NAFTA work permit based on letter by my employer (issued in less than an hour at the border), and once we were here we applied for permanent residency. The process took 21 months from the time we arrived until we got our residency cards.

Canadian immigration is pretty straightforward, as the basic federal system works on a point system: you get points for education, work experience, youth, children, and language abilities, and once you cross a threshold (barring any criminal or health problems) you're in. That's the process we followed. There are also programs where some provinces (not Ontario) can select you based on specific labour needs they have: construction (and everything else) in Alberta, construction in British Columbia, etc. With these programs there are few prerequisites, and you can come to Canada very quickly. There are also numerous work visa programs.

We worked with an immigration lawyer when we came, and it was very helpful. If your case is in any way problematic, or you are under time pressure, I highly recommend consulting a professional to understand your options. You may wish to work with a lawyer in the province where you plan to settle, as they will probably be the most familiar with the provincial nomination programs.

Our lawyer was Peter Rekai in Toronto. We found him and his staff to be very knowledgeable and professional; and another friend also had a very good experience with him. I have also seen many mentions of barbara findlay in Vancouver, who handles many lesbian and gay immigration cases (including landmark cases).

I am happy to answer questions, but IANAL and am not qualified to give legal advice. The best advice I can give is to get started today, because every day you procrastinate further delays the end of a sometimes stressful process.

Ouch... breaking backwards compatibility

Joel Spolsky on Microsoft's latest versions:

I tried to open some of my notes which were written in an old version of Word for Windows. Word 2007 refused to open them for "security" reasons and pointed me on a wild-goose chase of knowledge base articles describing obscure registry settings I would have to set to open old files. It is extremely frustrating how much you have to run in place just to keep where you were before with Microsoft's products, where every recent release requires hacks, workarounds, and patches just to get to where you were before. I have started recommending to my friends that they stick with Windows XP, even on new computers, because the few new features on Vista just don't justify the compatibility problems.

Time for a reboot, folks: your old documents are better supported in OpenOffice.org than they are in the newest version of Microsoft Office. Furthermore, when this many important thought leaders are abandoning the Windows platform it is in serious trouble.

A friend went to the MySQL conference last week. He said it was like waking up one day and finding that the world had changed fundamentally: everybody was doing web development; practically nobody was doing desktop, and those few were doing Linux. He said 25-30% of the attendees were using Macs. When I went to the MySQL inner circle meeting last year roughly 1/3 of the PC laptops were Linux-based. Granted, MySQL developers aren't the entire developer population. They're just the part of the developer population that is growing.

Adolfo clued me in that there's a Microsoft advertisement here on my blog. It made me uncomfortable for a moment, but then it made me laugh to see Microsoft paying Google to counter my statements with their tired, expired FUD. Since Microsoft can't even provide backwards compatibility anymore, what possible reason is there for giving them money for an upgrade?

Adobe Flex now open source

I hadn't paid much attention to Adobe's Flex, but the announcement that Adobe is releasing the Flex libraries under the Mozilla Public License caught my attention. Instead of being a boring proprietary play for developers to work on Flash, this is a rather arousing engagement of the open source world.

The promise of Flex, as part of the Apollo Project, is that it will be a platform-independent development platform for Web 2.0-style applications with rich UI, no installation footprint (for applications, obviously not for the Flash player) and, perhaps most interestingly, disconnected use scenarios.

Currently there's no way to make your AJAX applications work offline. Yes, you can get halfway there, but once you lose your browser state you lose your work. So if you disconnect you'd better not lose power until you connect again. This is a real barrier, as anyone who works in online applications knows. Browser developers and others are working on solutions for this, which is essentially the last mile for full Web 2.0 adoption.

So, the MPL is a fascinating choice of licenses. It gives Adobe the advantages of a weak copyleft to keep a commercial developer from stealing their cookies, but still allows software developers to ship their product without giving up their own code.

Before you go thinking that Adobe has gone all communist on us, they are not talking about open-sourcing the Flash player. That may not matter too much, as the Flash player is now available on the three top platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) but it does keep it from spreading to unexpected platforms like Symbian or BSD or whatever. As far as a mixed licensing model goes, it's kind of the converse of what Sun did with Java (GPL runtime and compiler, proprietary libraries).

My guess is that Adobe plans to follow the gold rush business model and get rich on the tools, much as they did with Adobe Acrobat. It's a departure for them, as their core customer base has never been geeky Windows or Unix developers but instead tattooed and pierced cool kids who develop websites on their Macs. They're losing their grip on the PDF market, and I guess this is their way to strike out into a blue ocean. (Apologies for further propagating that cliché.)

Presidential candidates compared

Cecily sent me this link comparing the pros and cons of the various presidential candidates. "Dude. Come on."

If Russ Feingold would run I'd quit my job and follow him around like a Phish tour.

Web 2.0 platforms considered

So I've done some research (see posts below) and have come to the following conclusions:

• .NET is slowly gaining market share
  
• LAMP is slowly fading
  
• Java is static
  
• Ruby on Rails is growing exponentially

Based on that data, which one would you pick, and why?

Promoting Linux in your workplace

A friend is marshaling arguments to switch his company's infrastructure to open source. One reason he's using is the bad faith built in to the Vista architecture as explained in the now legendary suicide note.

Regardless of those important issues, for me the biggest reason for an enterprise to switch to Linux is to get off the Microsoft treadmill of forced obsolescence, software maintenance, and shifting standards. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is an excellent example of the sort of model that is attractive to businesses: a platform that enjoys a lifespan at least comparable to that of a houseplant.

I did enjoy the suicide note paper. Adolfo's experience hasn't illustrated any of those issues... well, except that video editing is inexplicably slow and choppy and that might not be a coincidence. Although the Vista Server kernel might be busy checking all of your server traffic for watermarked Hollywood crapware, that'd show up in benchmarks (provided anyone is allowed to publish them).

Extermination of civil society

Naomi Wolf writes in The Guardian today about the recipe for the march to fascism, and how the US is slouching in that direction. Yes, yes, all of the "Bush is Hitler" parallels are tired, but he's not the real problem – it goes far beyond him. Sinclair Lewis warned us long ago, but we have allowed our institutions to corrode to a dangerous point. There is so little independent media with any real voice left that it can be effectively silenced at a very high level (and there are plenty of examples of how it is already happening). (via BoingBoing)
After reading the above, note today's example: Tom DeLay says Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are "getting very, very close to treason".

My switch to Ubuntu

When my brother-in-law asked me about my experiences I realized I needed to write an article (and beat Cory Doctorow to it).

I switched my Dell Latitude D600 to Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) back in December of 2005. I haven't looked back. Although sometimes I run Windows in emulation, that's becoming increasingly rare. Basically, I use free software for almost everything I do, and it feels great.

I'm using Edgy Eft for my work desktop, as I haven't set aside two hours to rebuild it. But I just installed Feisty Fawn on Adolfo's old laptop (amd64) and it is quite nice -- a big upgrade from Edgy in terms of ease-of-setup.

Automatix is the must-have resource for downloading the usual necessities like codecs.

Device drivers can be problematic as some things (like Blackberry) are just a black hole. Digital cameras however almost always just use the standard USB disk driver, so that "just works". iPods work too (even without iTunes). USB scanners that I've tried have just worked as well, as have the webcams I've used. So, no complaints.

The biggest problems are generally with Broadcom wifi chipsets, cheap printers, and ATI video cards. Feisty has built in support for them, but you still have to jump through a couple of hoops at setup, depending on your hardware. Depending on the printer it can be kind of a pain (my HP Laserjet 1000 was just hopeless, and although I got it to work, I finally just gave it away). However, if the printer isn't local it is usually pretty straightforward, as the biggest problem is around firmware. [Man, I hate hardware manufacturers who put the device firmware in the driver.]

Samba is pretty easy these days, though mostly I don't bother (except as a client) -- I have a NAS drive that I use for file sharing, and a network-enabled printer (new colour laser!) -- so if you're setting up a laptop, networking shouldn't be a big deal.

I don't use any virus scanning at all. It does exist, but who cares: I get my stuff either through the official Ubuntu packages (apt-get) or I download source (and the latter very rarely these days). Basically, you just don't worry about viruses or spyware on Linux. The software updates are all centralized in the distribution, are fast, and don't nag you about rebooting. In short, a much better user experience than Windows. But what isn't these days...

A year and a half ago when I first tried it Ubuntu was quite an adventure, but it has now become quite polished. (I flirted with Gentoo for a while, but lost interest in the flexibility. Choices == headaches.)

I have officially stopped providing free Windows support. I thought I was helping friends & family all those years, and it turns out I was just letting Microsoft continue to ship crappy software. Now I have an alternative – and I will help friends run Linux, but not Windows. Microsoft: I quit. Good luck replacing me.