Puma, XBOX, Acquavita, Cisco, Ben&Jerry's, Apple und so weiter. TO BE CONTINUED SOON.

It's now official, bloggers are the new scientists/journalists of the 21st century, new figures of authority, omniscient and savvy jack-of-all-trades.
I remember the times where you turned to the natural providers of knowledge when you wanted to learn more about a particular topic. Be they journalists, scientists, politicians, their curriculum was enough for them to be considered skilled and knowledgable.

Nowadays, everybody wants to be everything... journalists want to be singers, singers want to act, actors want to be NGO spokespersons and politicians want to become pornstars (at least that's my conclusion based on how they like to stuff it our collective ass). Despite of all this cultural mumbo-jumbo, the vulgus pecum still needs intellectual gurus. And this is just the segment bloggers intend to fill and thrive on. But basically who are bloggers? Bloggers are huge nothingness funnels, they produce a content devoided mashup for everyone to not care about, and are pretty successful at that.

According to a recent study done by myself, the actually interesting/noone gives a shit ratio of the self-proclaimed "blogosphere" is just above 0.00000001 (which actually came as a surprise to me). But since the medias like to think they know about what's going on on the net (not later than yesterday, they broadcasted the afroninja video on TV!!! WOOOOOOOOO 1999), they give us regular feedback about the last installments of the pimpled, friendless, talent crippled, reference-wannabe bloggers.

I'm beginning to be really pissed by this tendency of Linux-related software to lose features over time. It drives me crazy when after some system upgrade I discover that some nice functionalities I used have disappeared.

Browsers

These are really the best example. I got used to Galeon and like the way it handles popups and other things.

But unfortunately, the developers are flying away from it in the direction, as it seems, of Epiphany. So great, we'll soon have a brand new browser! Heh, you wish. The brand new browser is mostly rewritten and most of the previous features are missing. Then it appears that implementing those features would break all the code written so far. This is what I would call a software design fault and when it happens, the best thing to do is actually rewrite all that crappy code.

Gnome

Here we also have a few losses to deplore. Where is the PCM volume control? Oh, somebody decided that you don't need to change that setting. That's good news, since it means that it isn't lost after all, I was affraid that some developer might have decided to remove it completely!

The thing is that in some cases (read: in my case), people need to have access to that control and nothing really explains the hiding away of it.

If only the drivers would expose a consistent set of volume controls, unilateral decisions like those would not harm so much. More on this later.

XMMS

Yes, I'm still using XMMS, mostly because I happen to like its crossfade plugin very much. I like when whatever happened during the CD rip, I can't hear any blank between continuous tracks (say, on a like recording) and when I skip inside some track, the sound is not jumping but changes smoothly. Okay, the GUI may not be that fashionable in the days of Gnome themes, but I don't care. It's enough for my MP3 player to play MP3s fine, I don't need to be looking at it all the time, it won't hurt my sense of harmony.

Everything would be fine if it weren't for the fact that when users tend to desert such a software in favor of some newer Gnome-aware ones, the developers move too and the bugs don't get fixed anymore. The old software eventually dies.

I would really love to use some modern MP3 player, but I won't switch at the cost of losing my favorite features.

OSS vs. ALSA

I own an SB Live 5.1 card. This is the one with a nice EMU10K1 chip on it which can do many funny things. I happen to have an awkward setup with two amplifiers and two pairs of speakers connected in a 4.0 fashion to the card. The thing is that I don't have any one knob with which I can set the overall volume of sound.

I'm still using the OSS driver because it allows the use of two nice tools emu-config and emu-dspmgr with which it is possible to control many aspects of how this card works. Among others, it is possible to make it so that the PCM volume control really controls the output of all four speakers when playing digital audio.

The OSS driver has one major flaw: it's not so much maintained nowadays, since ALSA is now the official driver set in the Linux kernel. And guess what? The ALSA driver has no way to configure the EMU10k1 as finely as emu-dspmgr. Besides, the mixer controls are really a mess. There is no one knob to control the overall output on all four speakers, not even the digital audio output.

The strangest thing for me is the observation that ALSA allows a pretty fine configuration of inputs and outputs in the ~/.asoundrc file, but really no way to customize the volume control (like control named Master in fact controls all outputs on front and rear speakers)!

Conclusion

If I can keep my good old software, I will as long as the new one doesn't offer me at least what the old one does. In case I can't, because it would otherwise make more things worse, I'll try to fix/add features in the new one.

Developers: please, please, please, don't mistake simplification with progress. Think twice, if some feature exists, there are most probably people using it, so provide at least a way to achieve something equivalent.

With the second and last hardware failure I thought now everything would be running okay... if I don't mind the winning, though.

But I was mistaken, as Apple has no shame.

So last night it appeared that the laptop did not respond anymore. I tried to turn it off and on again, but to no avail. It wouldn't boot. The little LED on the lid latch did pulse as in a last attempt to communicate with me. "Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't boot that."

Today I discovered that removing the second RAM module allowed it to boot, but after exchanging the supposedly defective module, the nullness of Apple did came into highlight: the no-brand memory module is probably more robust that this piece of alu crap. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, once again, for your laughing pleasure, Apple failed, miserably.

Putting a RAM module in the second slot prevents the laptop from booting. No matter which module sits there, the machine doesn't boot, period.

So now I just have to give up half of my ram until I can send it for repair... GREAT.

To be continued...

To be completed : Of course it's still experimental and WIP, but still, here are a few thoughts on Xgl/AIGLX + Compiz

• Memory consumption
• Desktops are now on a line, that feature was useful
• Bugs (expose for example)
• Redundancy (gconf-editor? gset-compiz? compiz tray icon?)
• Themes are ugly, and the font on the window frame behaves strangely when parent window is maximized
• Some options are hard to deactivate, requires deep knowledge of the toolkit

THE WORST DAY EVER (TM)

I don't know how myths are created or how they're propagated from a generation to another. They're so intertwined in our lives, such an essential part of our cultures that we don't even think about thinking about them anymore.
I'm willing to give it a shot nonetheless...

• BLACK PEOPLE HAVE HUGE PENISES

  Wrong. My guess is that this myth was created in a racist attempt to tokenize the whole black "race" to a phallus. The whole "black people are like animals, they have sex all the time, they have huge dongs" bullshit has been used throughout history to separate them from the rest of us. As if they were more like animals (after all, they live in the jungle and eat human flesh....)
  However all the studies done on the subject never proved this theory true. Famous black authors like Frantz Fanon even pointed out how dangerous it was. The following wikipedia article puts all this in perspective.

• HITLER WAS AN AWESOME MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER

  Wrong. Last time I checked, Adolf Hitler was Austrian, and thus spoke german. This language is known for its guttural roughness. as a matter of fact, it's even used by beast tamers in their work with lions and tigers, because it sounds very authoritative. Another thing is that Hitler was angry. Well, after all, he was promoting aryanism, while he was short, dark eyed and brown haired... I would have been pretty pissed off too. And last but not least he was high on dope : http://amphetamines.com/adolf-hitler.html
  My point is that any angry german on dope would have sounded just the same. Boooooo Hitler, you suck my balls.

• FRENCH PEOPLE ARE BAD WITH FOREIGN LANGUAGES

  Wrong. The thing is that we don't have it easy with our stupid dubbed movies and TV shows. while the northerners have good lessons in school and FUCKING SUBTITLES!! Anyway, the following graph proves that we're not that bad after all : PROOF
  I say let's forget about french in the entertainment sector, and we'll top Europe in terms of language skills.

I was watching a football game on TV like three days ago (world cup heh) when I switched the channels at half time. They were showing Desperate Housewives.... God, I hate this show.
Of course you could point out the fact that I'm not part of the target audience : the frustrated 40+ year old housewife. And you'd be right. I'm even the total opposite : I work hard everyday, I'm the proud owner of a Y chromosome and only 25.

Still, that show really gets on my nerves. I mean how are these spoiled, lazy, unfaithful, rich, holier-than-you white bitches "desperate"? It's like the bitch wakes up at 11AM, sucks the gardener's cock, takes a 1-hour-long shower, gets rammed by the plumber, then goes to the restaurant, shopping for 8 hours straight, then comes home, gets a special face skin-care, courtesy of the electrician, drives her fancy Lexus "Super slut edition" SUV to the $50.000/year school her kids attend (courtesy of her super rich husband), drives them home and then bitches and moans to her husband about how her life is hollow and meaningless (like he cares after having worked his ass off for a solid 14 hours).

HOW IS THAT DESPERATE??? Get a job and shut the fuck up.

All I wanted was to get a certificate to sign my income declaration.

First try with Galeon: the operation failed at the very certificate generation. Obviously, it took a few seconds to generate the key, but Galeon somehow did not notice and continued displaying that lame bouncing progress (or is it "regress"?) bar. After a few more failed attempts, I surrendered.

Next try with Firefox: the generation went fine, the form edition went fine, but at the time of signature, no way... clicking on the "sign" button did nothing at all.

Next try with Epiphany. Since Galeon appears not to be maintained anymore (O RLY?) and this is to be its über-successor. No way to use the existing certificate (Firefox and other browsers can't just agree on some common certificate database) and no way to create a new one either (thank you French government, this is soooo clever -- what if my hard disk dies?).

No J2RE 1.5 plugin for Firefox on Ubuntu Dapper. This would be so much futuristic that it would have to be science fiction. Dumped 1.4 packages and installed 1.5 by hand in /usr/local/, made manually the necessary symlinks and ran Firefox again. Tadaaaa, this time it worked, at last.

Next time I'll surely fill the paper version of the form.

THE BEST DAY EVER (R)

OLOLOL XMMS sucks my balls. It takes the first one and sucks it then proceeds to the second one. XMMS has a killer feature, in the form of a shortcut to close the application. To use it, just scroll the playlist quickly and POOOOF!! Case closed. I wiped it out of my hard drive shortly after noticing that "keystroke". I don't have clusters to waste for that kind of Winamp clone bullshit, KTHX.

After having hacked my way through the installation of Linux on my mactel laptop, I thought I'd give a hack at the MacOS X I'd left there essentially for play.

Of course, that system being very minimalistic in terms of "customizability", I was looking for ways to make the machine behave as I like, having found out that Apple did not consider useful the kind of features I like on a laptop (like *not* getting to sleep when the lid is closed and other stuff like that).

Disappointment #1: user accounts

Coming from the unix world, I expect to have a normal user account in addition to the root administrator account. The idea being that a normal user can't just play baseball in a porcelain shop. I must have been wrong, since the system expects the only user account to have "administrator" access, whatever that means. After a little digging around, I discovered that it meant among other things, that the user is in the wheel group and that a lot of system files belong to that group and are group writable. GREAT.

In some way, don't ask me how, I managed to get the font file for Andale Mono erased (?!@#$%). Fortunately I also manage to copy one from some Linux box, but still...

Disappointment #1.5: welcome to 1995

I had long forgotten about sharewares and there I just did not expect some trivial software (additional customization preference panes and the like) to be available only as shareware. Hey crappy teenage software writers, taste GPL!

Disappointment #2: "... ended unexpectedly"

I understand that there might be some buggy software, but usually software just *is* buggy and doesn't *become* buggy. Well... unless you're using Windows. that has this strange ability to shoot itself in the foot at some point. It seems MacOS X is no different from that standpoint.

So my "System Preferences" application has become buggy in some panes and I could not adjust displays, sound, mouse, etc without it miserably, systematically crashing.

I thought I'll try to "reinstall" that part of software, because I'll be obviously unable to trace back the causes of that nasty behavior. Unfortunately, Apple did not care to include that feature and the only option I had was to reinstall the whole system.

Conclusion

The installation first wants to "check your installation DVD" which takes soooo much time that I had time to write all this and it is still not done.

Update

After all that waiting for the installation process to just check the DVD, it failed. There is this window with "There were errors installing the software" and "Please try installing again".

Now I'm kinda depressed...

Update #2

After some fighting I surrendered and decided to wipe the Linux partitions out. I suppose that either MacOS refuses to install in presence of a Linux partition or simply hates rEFIt (which I use to dual boot). Fortunately I had made a backup and the restoration was straightforward.

Epilogue

I managed to bring the beast back to a usable state. Then the fan on the right began to vibrate...

Please, don't mention Apple in any conversation about solid hardware makers, ever.

Oh man... A golden (brown??) fucking nugget everyday

The interface is clean and simple, and the handling very straightforward. I proceeded to import my music directories. When Banshee was finally done, I waited for the software to refresh the screen, cause it was only a bunch of white and blue lines on the screen in place of my traditional library. I waited for like a good thirty seconds... only to realize Banshee had never intended to display anything on that screen in the first place. You can admire the result here (well in fact you can't).

EDIT

EDIT OF THE EDIT

(Note that I'll be rolling my eyes in sign of sarcasm all along this paragraph)

Linux is soooo frustrating sometimes... On one hand, it really has set foot into the future (content rich applications, eye-candy, great filesystems, awesome networking tools), but unfortunately the future doesn't look so bright on the other crippled hand: the GUI part.

No mistake here, I think Gnome (my preferred desktop environment) is a nifty piece of human interface. Too bad some parts of it are still so insanely crappy. I just had a strikingly negative experience (and it's not the first time it happens): I was using Nautilus to move some videos I had downloaded a few weeks before, nothing too serious, I was just trying to move 5 videos from a folder to another one. I selected the files and proceeded to drag and drop to the left side of the interface (I use the tree view there). Nautilus suddenly hanged violently and never responded.

The keyboard wasn't responding either so I couldn't even try to kill X so I had to force reboot my box. I mean, it's nice to have a grand vision of what the Linux Desktop should look like in the future, but if we're doomed to be stuck to the all-in-console experience, I think there's a real problem. Everyone can easily understand that if the most basic feature of a modern GUI (namely the file explorer) doesn't work properly there is a big flaw in the model. Nautilus requires a rewriting (or even a code profiling) before we can all move on and pretend to compete with the "best" (MacOSX, Vista).

BREAKING NEWS

Once again. 1992 strikes once again. I wasn't asking much, just to wake up the box I use to download torrents from another remote computer. Turned out to be a pain in the ass, and it ended up not working.

Now I'll have to boot my computer every morning or something to have access from the University. It'd be so cool to have a minimal Unix system setup on the Freebox with a SSH server (I mean, not everybody can afford a gateway...)
Am I just naive or simply not realistic?

I was reading /. this morning and stumbled upon the news that Philips filed a patent for some stuff to force a viewer to watch the ads on a so called multimedia platform.

The idea is very simple, as usual with patents: block the remote control when the ad is showing, possibly show a warning message to the viewer. Since this could be very frustrating, the patent suggests that the viewer could pay a fee to be able to regain control over the device.

The best thing is that this "technology" is intended to be used on broadcast and recorded material. So now that DVD prices are quite high, that fair use is hot legitimate anymore and that we are required to pay for each copy of the same record, we'll be forced to watch shitty ads every time we want to watch some movie.

I think any mafia on the world should report prior art for this patent, since it is plain old blackmail. I propose an even more "innovating" technology: each citizen is put in jail and not released until she pays the ransom. Great, huh?

WARNING: Commercial software bashing again.

To put things clearly: I like minimalistic programs that perform one simple thing but do it right, in the like of the UN*X command line tools. For everyday use, this approach has proven to be very effective.

Sometimes, of course, a command line interface (CLI) is not the most convenient, and graphical user interfaces (GUI) have been invented decades ago for this purpose (some other times, unfortunately, a CLI would be enough, but a GUI has been implemented, so there is no way to run the program in the background for example, but that's another story).

In any case, there are some idioms that are set and reused, so that anyone a bit accustomed to one program feels at ease with another which has the same kind of user interface (CLI or GUI). This applies to, say, the option switches on the command line (-h or --version) or the "open file" dialog box on all GUIs.

As of today, the vast majority of modern applications share a common and very convenient idiom: the file directory. Some call it a "folder", but the idea is exactly the same: put your stuff in separate boxes, to keep things organized.

Nevertheless, for a mysterious reason, there are still some commercial application developers that find it clever not to respect this fundamental idiom.

I'm actually working with a commercial program that surprises me every day.

Surprise #1

In the "open file" dialog box, there are only some directories available and in each one of them, only some kind of files. No way to change the supposed "file type filter", no nothing. Where are the files I just put in my home directory? Read on...

Surprise #2

The only directories that can appear in the "open file" dialog box are declared in some obscure "environment" file (this is another broken idiom: it is in fact a configuration file). So when I want to add some new project file, I have to edit the configuration file by hand or through a shitty "preferences" dialog box.

Surprise #3

After having changed the list of declared directories, I had to restart the application entirely, because it was unable to notice the change.

Surprise #4

Okay, now I can work on my new project. At some point, I asked an addon CLI tool provided with the software to create some file I needed to go further. No luck, no way to make the file appear in the directory. After a while I found that the file was created not in the current directory as I expected, but in the "default" directory, the one you can mark as such in the "open file" dialog box (!@#$).

Surprise #5

After having changed that default directory to the one I was working in, the file would still not be created. I was beginning to loose my nerve. It finally occurred that the tool was "seeing" the file in the other directory and "believing" it was the one I wanted to re-create.

The revelation

Aha, I eventually got it. The directories were just a masquerade: all the files are seen equally as if they were in one big directory. That explained why all those file names had such long and explicit names, to prevent them from smashing in each other in a big bang of sparks, smoke and segfaults.

That also explained why, after installation, all the software's directories were world-writable (it would probably require files created from provided sources to be built in the same directory as the source).

Hey lousy commercial software companies: WELCOME TO 1970!

I hate when people make typography comments on my blog entry at half past midnight on a dubious IRC channel. And I hate myself for waking up at 4 in the morning, seeing the aforementioned comments and thinking: "yeah, that's right. Why did I put spaces all over the place?".

Consequently, I modified my past entry to be compliant with Nitpicking Standards 2.0... Enjoy.

Take 2.
I did not really realize it before but someone, say with write access to this blog, did modify my entry before me. I don't like it. Don't do that. Never. You hear me? Just don't. I'm so angry that I did put back all the spaces and some more to make my text typographically incorrect and visually insulting on purpose. I don't want my "iFolder" entry, or any other entry I write here for that matter, to be modified by anyone but me. Period.

Prout, prout, prout, prout, prout....

Warning: The following text breaks several typographic rules on purpose.

... or the story of how a bunch of mentally deficient folks would recode CVS from scratch if they were asked to do so ... and if they worked for Novell.

Being all hype and mighty, I wanted to give that piece of shit a try. Anyone who is a bit in the know heard the big news : Novell is releasing its "iFolder Enterprise Server" under an Open Source Licence. Cool, I'm not stuck with the "toy" free server they provided before.

I thought that an "enterprise server" level application, deserved at the very least the $43.99 one was once charged in exchange for that crap. Boy was I wrong. Despite the fact that it requires an up and running apache web server with mono web services enabled, that there is absolutely no documentation (except extracting the postinstall script from an rpm package and finding what it does), that for some reason it is marketed as "can connect to from anywhere" and yet does not support a simple ssh gateway, and finally that you need some post-install voodoo to manually add a regular user (it seems that you cannot add an user if you are logged as admin on the web interface...), despite all this, I thought "ok, maybe, it's still young but the features implemented must be rock solid and efficient". Let's see how I pushed this program far beyond its limits by performing very uncommon tasks such as :

Task number 1 :
Upload of my Work directory from my laptop onto the server. Basically , that's what iFolder is made for. That's what they say here. I emphasize that i was on a local network and that an scp from my laptop to the server (my desktop machine) gave me an average tx rate of 8MB/s. So i start the applet, select my Work directory and push the upload to server button. Said directory is 60MB « big » and contains 3321 files, most of them being small text files. iFolder client starts uploading files... whaoo neato ... but wait 3321 ... 3320 ... 3319 ... why is it taking so damn long? Come on, the average speed is like 7kB/s !!! Speed up stupid bastard !!! You've got all the bandwith you want, go for it !!! But then, I realize that the files are being uploaded through an http connection. For each single file, iFolder opens a new http connection. Good job dickhead, you are sending more overhead data that the actual size of most of the files ... Flashing results: 35 minutes to upload 61 MB.

Task number 2 :
Upload a file from my desktop machine to the server (which happens to be the same computer). iFolder fails miserably to select any directory in my home directory. The only reason I see is that $HOME is an nfs directory. Something that is of course unlikely to happen in the professional network setup of a company. (Hint : I'm being ironic).

Tomorrow's mission : I will test Hula mail server to see if it's as superior to exim as iFolder vs CVS+cron. (you would think that iFolder uses inotify to tell that a file has been modified? No, it crawls your filesystem from the bottom up every 5 minutes ... yet it works "silently behind the scene". Hint number 2: something that takes 100% of my ressources to see if a file has changed is not working "behind the scene". It's fucking crapping a liquid diarrhea on my shoes).

Okay, shame on me, I ordered the just-released Macbook Pro.

That being said, as may already be obvious from my previous posts, I am an everyday Linux user. Since I had to make a choice for a laptop paid for by my employer, I thought I'd give Apple a try.

After approximately one month of waiting, the machine arrived at the lab and I could at last have my first experience with a brand new, much hyped for being so-easy-and-intuitive-my-mom-could-use-it, Apple laptop.

First, I noticed that the case is bent. Just above the latch button and the whole lid just doesn't seat nicely once closed.

Then, after playing around with the first-steps-with-your-new-mac thing, I found that the little colorful rotating cursor appears a bit too often and for too much time. While this little bastard rotated, the system wasn't responding, go figure.

Then the first crash. The laptop went to sleep when I closed the lid. BTW, why is it impossible to prevent it from sleeping while the lid is closed? I, for one, happen not to like it so... Anyway, the machine was dead — except for the disk which was spinning like mad — I had to press the power button for a few seconds to turn it off.

Needless to say, I was already VERY disappointed. I would obviously have to send it back for exchange.

But that was not all. At home, I noticed that when the AC is plugged out, there is some very annoying hissing sound coming out of the case. After some digging on google, I found that it came from the processor and that shutting down the second core — using some extra for-the-hackers extension — stopped the hissing. WOW that's impressive: you pay for top-of-the-shelf processor and end up using half its power to avoid annoyance...

Many Apple fans told me that this was because the machine is soooo new and that it needs some time to mature. Come on, gimme a break. Apple is fucking its customers in the ass hoping they would like it anyway.

Apple: I DON'T LIKE IT. Hire your quality control staff back.

There are many problems in the world right now:

• AIDS
• Wars
• Extremism and terrorism
• A few people getting richer and richer at the expense of 95% of the world population
• Racism
• etc.

But in my not so humble opinion (yeah... not so humble, I'm not being politically correct here), the MAIN problem in our society is the lack of ecologic conscience. Let's be honest, I'm far from being perfect as well, but that doesn't stop me from realizing how bad the situation has gotten.

A lot of reports have been lately warning us about the risk of a non-stoppable climatic phenomenon called global warming facing us in the years to come if we don't quickly change our habits of filthy Mother Earth raping westerner pigs.

I mean look at all the multiple problems we're experiencing right now:

• ramping destruction of the forests (Amazon in particular) which is cutting our oxygen supplies at the source
• mass usage of cars that fill the ozon layer with tons of carbon dioxide
• booming economies in the two most populated countries of the world (China and India), where more and more people will be willing to have access to all the comfort we've taken for granted for many years now (cars, fridges, air conditioning, nuclear plants, the list goes on...)
• the melting of all the ice at the poles
• destructing eco-systems in the process and filling the oceans with water
• the melting of the permafrost in Siberia, which will potentially let loose millions of tons of methane in the atmosphere
• countries like Australia, Japan, Russia or the United States of America not signing the Kyoto protocol (which is not a solution, but at least a step towards better behaviour)
• the USA (again) drilling the soil in desperate search of oil or gas in natural parks (Alaska for example)
• the extinction of many animal species
• the appearance of more and more weird climatic episodes (hurricanes, floods)

HOW MANY FRIGHTENING SIGNS DO WE FUCKING NEED???

I was watching the news the other day, and there was this report on how the government was changing the cars of our dear gendarmes (military police force, kind of...)

And guess which brand of car they went for? Renault? Guess again. Peugeot? SAME PLAYER SHOOT AGAIN!!! Mercedes? Nuh huh... Audi? Ferrari? NO. The mofos will now drive Subaru cars (they can apparently speed up to to 240 km per hour according to the TV anchor). I mean, it's not that I want them to drive pieces of shit or something, but seriously, France is part of the European Union... SO WHY IN FUCKING HELL ARE WE BUYING JAPANESE CARS? There are plenty of good european car brands. So our leaders should as well have shown some "patriotic" common sense and fueled the EUROPEAN economy. That's what you get for electing a bunch of asshats without giving it a second thought.

My old pragmatic buddy Carcajou just reminded me of one itchy stain stuck in my crack: Jamie Cullum. Let's give it a good wipe.

I don't know why I hate this guy, but hell yes, I DO HATE JAMIE CULLUM.

He incarnates all I despise in contemporary jazz:

1. He's young and like coming from nowhere, pure product of music majors that see a niche in jazzy-vibes-for-little-sisters. Just look at that, c'm'on, gimme a break.
2. His album hits are flooding my jazz radio station all day long. NO I WON'T BUY YOUR CRAP, NOT EVEN DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE.
3. Nobody pays enough respect for real crooners, I mean like Frank Sinatra (do you hear that, Peter Cincotti).

The Gimp is really great, don't get me wrong. It is a great piece of software that I use from time to time (among others to work on pictures for this site).

But there are things that I don't really understand about it. Why the fuck do people contribute such useless filters as "Map Object"? The intent is great, but hey come on, there is no way to tune the fucking focal distance!@#

Oh, and there also is no way to move the image mapped onto the object. I really don't see the point in putting such gadgets and pretending to be serious...

My Microsoft Sidewinder Game Pad says it's not!

Commercial software is often frustrating, 'cause you can't fix it when it fails. On Linux, they are usually a port of some Windows or other shit, which means that some crappy toolkit from the 20th century was used that adds up to the bugs.

If in addition to that, there some sort of fascist license management system that shoots itself in the foot if you only try to workaround the bugs, then you're not anywhere close to being set.

Buggy software is a pain in the ass. But when you use free software, your spend time hoping for the developers to consider your bug reports and hunt the beasts down for the next package update.

Of course, you could fix them yourself, but you usually have enough work with your own bugs. Besides, you just can't fix software as effectively as its maintainer, without spending 500+ hours diving in the code.

When the updated packages of your favorite distribution becomes available — well, say you don't use Debian — you expect most of your bugs to be fixed. While this could be true, unfortunately, if you use the Gnome Desktop Environment, you can also expect haft the features to be gone.

For example, Galeon is not maintained anymore, because Epiphany is set to become the "official" Gnome browser. So you can be sure that most of the cool features won't be re-implemented before another year... GREAT!