Stop password nagging in Ubuntu

Finally... turn off the Gnome Keyring in Ubuntu that nags you to enter your password again immediately after logging in. This has bugged me since I started using Ubuntu, and I've tried to turn it off before, but couldn't make it work. Finally now there's an easy(-ier) way to do it.

Ubuntu Forums: Stop having to enter keyring over and over again

Developers vote with their feet

Market share of developers working on Microsoft Windows is down twelve percent since last year, from 74% in a 2006 survey to 64.8% in a 2007 survey. Linux jumped 30% from 8.8% to 11.8%. That's a scary trendline for Microsoft and everyone who has their trailer hitched to their semi.

Use of the Ruby language is expected to grow 50% over the next year. Note that almost all Ruby on Rails development will target Linux (as per manufacturer recommendation), and there's no economic reason to run it on Windows. There is virtually no desktop software written in Ruby.

The shift to web-based application development is picking up serious steam. A tiny minority of Windows defectors might target Linux desktop software, but most of them are targeting Linux as a web hosting platform. For example, most people who work at Google target Linux servers and generic browser clients, although the Picasa and Google Earth teams include Windows alongside Mac and Linux in their target platforms.

These developers that are abandoning Microsoft are not switching teams: they're switching games.

Critical Mass

I participated in Critical Mass this evening: a bike ride where approximately 1,800 people take over the city streets. It was a lot of fun, with a great sense of community and wonderful, safe views of the city. It's the only way to see the city by bicycle in total confidence, and without polluting.

Some drivers were inconvenienced, and often lost their tempers because cars were blocked from the street. However, the street was actually being used more by the bicyclists than it was by cars, as the actual human density and throughput was much higher. There is the conception that the road belongs to cars – something that you'll never see in statute, but you certainly notice when you're riding in traffic next to a stressed-out yuppie drinking coffee and talking on his cell phone when he suddenly decides to take a blind right turn, or when you get forced off the road by a twit in a wide-body pickup truck.

Louie rode in the basket in front of me. He was adored by all that noticed him (he's awfully small). Adolfo didn't join me this time, but says he wants to come along next time. He took the picture and video from our balcony as we rode by. The crowd was interesting: freaks and geeks, students and professionals, bike nerds, unicyclists, dope fiends, earth-firsters, ecofeminists, anti-globalization weenies, dreadlocked redheads, and the occasional granny, adolescent, and urban planner.


The police keep their distance, and the only time I saw them was when we had stopped for our victory rally at the middle of the Lions' Gate Bridge. A young man shimmied up one of the cables and hung one-handed from a metal spar, and then climbed back down. The fuzz talked to him briefly. There is no central organization to a Critical Mass event, and everybody takes turn "corking" (blocking intersections) and helping with breakdowns, defusing altercations, and clearing the way for emergency vehicles. It's one of the most interesting social movements that I've come in contact with, and I hope it lives up to its name some day with a critical mass of cyclists on the roads to take back our cities from the plague of automobiles.

Selling Ontario to Atlantans

Somebody asked me how to recruit folks in the Atlanta area to move to Ontario. It was a great move for us – our situation required that we leave the states, as my husband is not a US citizen and we couldn't stay there any longer. So Canada was great for us on that level, and for gay people a whole hell of a lot better place to live in general. Not having to listen to constant anti-gay rhetoric in our daily life is quite liberating, and we don't miss the constant reminders of second-class citizenship in every official capacity, from taxes to insurance to hospital visits. Similarly, Black and Hispanic friends who have left the states for Canada have been generally happy, as have various non-US people who went there to work for a while (particularly Moslems, and some Asians and eastern Europeans, and notably expatriate Canadians sick of the states).

Progressive/liberal straight white Americans like to say they want to move, and I've read stories about them, but I've never actually seen it happen (they're kind of like unicorns). The tax disadvantage is quite profound, with the mortgage interest deduction in the states, the lower federal and state income taxes, sales taxes, etc. The real estate situation in Atlanta is hard to beat, especially if size is your criteria and you don't mind driving for hours a day. Livable communities are a lot easier to find in Canada, but for homeowners the price would be very difficult: Atlanta's in a slump, so they'd have to unload their gargantuan white elephants in a buyer's market, then buy a crackerbox in a seller's market in Ontario (or rent, which isn't so bad). Very few straight white folks would be feel any urge to make a switch at present. The healthcare system is a possible magnet, though Americans have been fed a line of fear on that one too. Perhaps people who want to desert from the armed forces, or skip out on their student loans? Maybe people who don't like having a lot of retail selection but do like paying more? (I'm reaching here. :)

So disenchanted minorities of all stripes, recent immigrants without green cards or citizenship (the process here is much faster and easier), recently graduated international students... there's the sweet spot. Otherwise, I would think it would be hard to sell an Ontario opportunity in Atlanta.

Less gas, more ass

The World Naked Bike Ride is June 9. The event is to call attention to the way we are all indecently exposed to automobile emissions, and how cyclists are vulnerable to vehicular homicide on a daily basis. The Vancouver ride starts at Sunset Beach (Beach and Bute) at 1pm.

Lembranças do Brasil

Three months later, tiny grains of golden sand are suddenly coming out of my ears again. Such sweet souvenirs seldom stay so long. I like to think that they are from Ipanema.

Feature creep and bloated products

James Surowiecki has a lovely piece in the New Yorker this week about feature creep and bloated software. He talks about the "internal-audience problem":

the people who design and sell products are not the ones who buy and use them, and what engineers and marketers think is important is not necessarily what’s best for consumers

The article mostly refers to physical artifacts, and he doesn't call out the major motivation that feeds software feature creep: the desire for annual upgrades. In the packaged software world you have to motivate customers to buy your product again and again, preferably every year. With subscription-based or free software, you just have to keep up with the competition, but with licensed desktop software you are competing against the version they have already purchased. via BoingBoing

Sun gets it

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz gets it: software patents are bad juju, and he's promising to use his patent portfolio to protect Red Hat and Ubuntu from the depredations of the Beast. Here's a guy that understands the business, and although his company has seen some hard times since the party ended back at the beginning of the century, Sun is taking risks and trying hard to ride the free software commodification wave. The earlier you bend to the inevitable the more likely you are to survive. Sun is showing admirable flexibility; sometimes a sharp downturn gives you license to take bold steps that a gradual decline does not.

Nortel's continued sad decline

Once-proud Nortel is back in the news, this time with a funny story about how they have a hard time keeping their former subsidiaries as customers. This is especially funny since Nortel's big successes in the go-go 90s were selling switches to Baby Bells who defected from Western Electric when they needed more switches.

For a while there it seemed like half the people I knew went to work at BNR/Northern Telecom/Nortel, and then just as quickly, none of them worked there anymore. The telecom boom died, and everybody had more than enough expensive circuit-switched almost-obsolete equipment depreciating noisily in their expensively airconditioned telecom equipment rooms – around the same time that people really started using blackberry and VOIP in a serious way. The Bay Networks acquisition never fared well against Cisco. Nortel never managed to come out with anything that resonated in the marketplace again, and their financials reflect that.

The telecom industry has become very rapidly commodified, and Nortel's half-cousin and arch-enemy Avaya has become the standard for awful, expensive local PBX solutions, while Asterisk-based solutions are ruining the party for all of the lumbering giants. Nortel could have ridden the wave of open source to become a new low-price leader, but instead seems intent on circling the wagons and riding its customer base down the drain.

And back to the earliest item: they apparently don't have any competent public relations staff. That's pathetic.

Greenscaping gets a free pass

A polluter bribes a wildlife group to provide PR cover, then pays a newspaper to treat it as great news.

I read in Wednesday's Metro^* that Land Rover built their four millionth vehicle and donated it to the Born Free Foundation (a wildlife nonprofit). This was reported as straight news, right from the teat of the press release, apparently with no other sources, and presented with no other context. The vehicle in question will be used as a "'Rapid Response Rescue' vehicle for deployment across the UK and Europe". Whatever that means – sounds like a lot of driving around.

So allow me to do the "newspaper's"^** job by providing additional context. In the fifty-seven years that Land Rover has been producing its four million vehicles, the climate of this planet has changed dramatically, and the ongoing holocene extinction event has eliminated between 20,000 and 2,000,000 species in that same time. The four million vehicles that Land Rover has produced will vent 228 megatonnes (2.28x10¹¹ kg) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (conservatively speaking, as that figure is for average vehicles that run for 240 Mm, and Range Rover sells heavier-than-average vehicles with poorer-than-average fuel efficiency). That single car "donated" will itself vent 57 tonnes of CO₂. As any reporter or editor should know, CO₂ is a greenhouse gas which is demonstrably causing mass extinction. So how can it be that a nonprofit that aims to be a Lorax sells out endangered species... for a free car? And why doesn't the "newspaper" call attention to this screaming contradiction?

It is obvious that Born Free likely has more than a passing interest in the corporate wellbeing of Range Rover. It is also clear that Range Rover wishes to position itself as a supplier of choice to environmentally sensitive gas-guzzler drivers everywhere (tread lightly indeed). So there are lots of troubling aspects to this deal, and the "newspaper" is kind enough to preserve our peace of mind by not questioning them. Even if one were to presume innocence and claim that the "newspaper" is simply incompetent doesn't explain this episode completely.

Which raises the deeper question: why would a "newspaper" present such a piece of bald PR as a news story? Ford (owner of Range Rover) advertises^*** in the publication, and the press release was handed to the editor by the PR department of the dealership/manufacturer and told to run it, which the "newspaper" did unquestioningly. Their reasons for printing this press release nearly verbatim are obvious and two-fold: publishers are beholden to advertisers, and publishers are notoriously lazy about producing articles.

So why the outrage? News media is in bed with advertisers – like, wow. But I call attention to this particular case because it exemplifies how the news media, "environmental organizations" and polluters are colluding to the detriment of our living environment and the destruction of the very things they depend upon to survive: paying customers. The results of the supremacy of short-term corporate profit and damn-the-consequences growth, coupled with a compliant and quiescent public and subservient news media, is a hellishly clear path to destruction.

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*^Powers, Lindsay. "Four million and counting: Land Rover gives animal welfare a helping hand" Metro News Vancouver, 2007-05-16, p 13.

**^Why am I using "scare quotes" around the word "newspaper"? Because the "newspaper" in question is freely distributed and not taken very seriously, although the circulation is pretty good for these publications. They are an attempt by the failing newspaper industry to maintain some sort of advertising market as they are eaten alive by television and internet news infotainment. The "scare quotes" denote my contempt for this source of "news" as biased and unprofessional, with the article as a case-in-point. But because they have the word "news" in the title, people confuse it with a professional news reporting organ, which plainly it is not since professional news reporting organizations have standards of journalistic professionalism about disclosing conflicts of interest.

***^In this issue there are no actual Ford ads that look like paid advertisements, though there is a Ford vehicle on the cover, and four glowing articles that mention or feature Ford vehicles.