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Penguin Pete's Blog

Penguin Pete's Blog
Being an extraordinarily geeky site about Free and Open Source Software and the wonders thereof. Full site features include the hippest FOSS blog on the 'net, a gallery with over 400 wallpapers at this count free for download, source code, distro rev

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What's Up With One-Word Search Hits?
2008-07-18 07:22:00
Dear LazyWeb (as Jamie Zawinski would say), Every now and then, I get one-word search hits from MS's Live.com. Example: It's always like this. Like some bot was going through a dictionary file and visiting every hit returned from each word. It's almost never in groups like this, usually only one or two at a time. I'm not even on the first page for these words. These are the only kinds of hits I get from search.live.com, and every other search engine comes in with normal searches, never with a single word (unless it's a very uncommon word). Just out of curiosity, I was wondering if anybody else has noticed this and what does it mean. Is this an SEO study, or is it really how MSN indexes the web?
More About: Site News

Must have $YEARS experience in $ACRONYM
2008-07-12 00:25:00
Slashdot has a very good story up on The Web Development Skills Crisis. The discussion in the comments is very educational for new tech workers entering the market. Yes, kids, it really is that stupid. The HR who wants one year experience in a platform that just broke beta yesterday, the manager who insists you know some buzzword that's entirely unrelated to the task, the insane expectations of mastery in exchange for the depressing low wage: they're all true. They aren't even the most extreme cases. And freelance tech workers will recognize the trend trickling down into one-shot contract jobs as well. You can tell when you're dealing with a company posting through HR as opposed to a lone webmaster: The home or independent business webmaster tells you what they want done, and leaves it to you to decide what tools to use. The company churns out a page of acronyms and leaves you with no clue what it is they want done. It sounds Web-two-point-ohey and synergistic and will be kind ...
More About: Humor , Experience , Years

My Most Obscure Hobbies
2008-07-05 18:42:00
Hey, just because I'm a hardcore geek, doesn't mean I'm one-dimensional! When I'm not doing anything involving a brain, here's some little ways I like to keep myself - and others - busy. Think of them as psychological happy-slapping, or little ways to add to the world's surrealism. * Provoking people to ask me what my sign is, so I can say it's 'no parking'. In my astrology chart (which is just as valid as any other), the signs are: "lane ends merge left", "yield", "signal ahead", "school crossing", "four-way stop", "no stopping any time", "one-way", "speed limit 60", "no parking", "do not enter", "road closed ahead", and "road work ahead". You want to see my chart? * Whenever I see a commercial on TV with a phone number saying "operators are standing by", I like to call the number and ask, "Why won't your boss give you a chair so you can sit down?" * I like to sing the words to 'Amazing Grace' to the tune of 'Gilligan's Island'. See, it works be...
More About: Humor , Hobbies , Obscure

Interface Obsession Syndrome - round two...
2008-07-04 11:58:00
Follow on from The Six Kinds of Anti-FOSS Trolls, where I dropped a little bomb about interfaces, and followed up with Interface Obsession Syndrome . Thank all of you who've been responding, and have kept your rebuttals in the 'discussion and debate' range, rather than getting hot about it. I of course don't expect everybody to see it my way. I've seen this before; I get ahead of my time and what I say today, others end up saying five years later. So, I'll just gently nudge us towards a few points I'd like to point out, helped along by your well-thought-out comments, and probably leave it at that for now. "The king is wearing no cloths Troll" posted... "Some FOSS projects are half-done and really need to be fixed (a geek might like em, but real users need it finished, so not to have to dig in and do command line this and that)." I will never understand the stigma against command lines. Are there people out there who were beaten with keyboards when they were children? Ev...
More About: General , Round

Interface Obsession Syndrome
2008-07-01 23:33:00
Who has Interface Obsession Syndrome ? The computing world, that's who. All of it: designers, users, open source software, proprietary software, web designers, web surfers. Everybody. It's a disease. Last post, I boldly proclaimed (using my proclaiming voice, which makes the font bold and a size larger), "There is not a single thing wrong with a single FOSS program's user interface, anywhere, period." And I expected to get some reactions, and I did, and I'm ready to explain that line. I'll tell you right now: you're going to disagree with me. This will be one more of those times when you all wonder if I've gone off my rocker, and I will have to explain it again and again, and then a few more readers each time will gradually pick up the idea, until I've reached all that I can reach. But what the hey, you probably needed the intellectual exercise anyway. Here goes nothing: (1) Before there were computers, before there was technology, there was just humans and nature. (2) N...
More About: General

The Six Kinds of Anti-FOSS Trolls
2008-06-30 19:41:00
Since I wrote about the seven kinds of anti-Linux FUD pundits, it occurred to me that plain old forum and blog-comment trolls could be classified, too. Why does Free and Open Source Software get trolled so much? You'd think we were doing something awful by just writing programs and giving them away. While it is true that a lot of it could be mere paid asstroturfers courtesy of large commercial software companies, that doesn't explain them all. Over the years, I've seen so much online flamage - and even some in person! - that I couldn't miss spotting some patterns. You'll recognize these common trolls in this list. Most of them could almost be cut-and-pasted. Direct one here the next time you see them, if for nothing else than to urge them to get a new trick! The Stockholder - This is very sad, because we have Joe Sixpack and Susie Soccermom out there with their 401-K being 50% tech stocks in proprietary software companies. And they then assume that all competing software comp...
More About: General , Anti , Trolls

Bill Gates Would Like Apt-Get
2008-06-25 12:19:00
I think if Bill Gates met a Debian system and installed a program from the repositories, he might just go to his engineers and say, "Why can't it be like this?" What provoked this thought was this article by Mashable. Mashable, like many other tech blogs, has been following up on the Bill Gates legacy now that he's stepping down. Unlike many other tech blogs, Mashable is not spending its time fawning over him, but is instead taking a harder, grittier look at the behind-the-scenes workings of Redmond. That in-depth research led to the discovery of an email in which Mr. Gates complains about how hard it is to install Moviemaker. Go check out that email - it really is classic. I was wondering if it might be a hoax, it is so to the point. Stan Schroeder of Mashable arrives at the conclusion: Essentially, I think that this example brings forth the problem all (or most) giant companies have: they?re stuck up so far up their own ass that they, as a collective, have lost all reasoning...
More About: General

New short film produced on Blender - Big Buck Bunny
2008-06-20 15:20:00
http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/200 8/06/big_buck_bunny_open_source_ani.html? CMP=OTC-7G2N43923558 A cool new short cartoon has been released from the Apricot/Peach project. Not only will the link in the title take you to the page at Hackazine with the YouTube clip, but it also has a demo showing how the animation is controlled. This is an excellent example for anybody out there trying to pick up the complexities of animating a figure, and also goes directly to my own paid work this week. I loved the movie, too, which is actually funny and as professional as anything you'd see in a theater. I totally ? Big Buck Bunny !
More About: Film , Blender , Short

Why Can't We Throw Away Desktop Trashcans?
2008-06-17 15:06:00
Trashcans have followed me around from platform to platform since my first GUI experience with MacIntosh system 7. I was alarmed upon my first encounter. Up until then, the 'delete' key was the Key Of Consequence, not to be frobbed lightly. Delete was forever. Everybody apparently understood that. Then I killed a file on the Mac, and this trashcan icon which I had previously ignored suddenly bulged. I clicked the trashcan and lo, the file lived still! I had to delete it - again!!! I immediately said to myself, "That's the stupidest damn thing I've ever seen anybody put on a computer! Has Apple lost its mind?" Oh well, the fad couldn't possibly last. After all, cars don't make you step on the brake twice to stop them, doors don't make you turn the handle twice to open them, elevators don't make you push the button twice... logically, users would shun this obvious maldesign! They didn't. I fled to Windows, and the trashcans followed me there under the alias of Recycle Bin,...
More About: Humor , Desktop , Throw

You Can Shove Your NSFW Tag!
2008-06-16 11:45:00
You almost can't find a social news site on the web any more without also finding a bleating choir of whiners sniveling about every single link, complaining that it's "Not Safe For Work"(NSFW) and that they weren't warned before clicking it. I'm calling them the NSWF-Nazis. They came for our movies, music, books, and video games, and now in the name of being a lazy slacker goofing off at work, they're coming to politically correct our Internet. I occasionally slapped a "NSFW" label on a link in the past, out of my own courtesy. However, now that it's being demanded of us all by entitled surfers, I regret ever doing it. I refuse to support NSFW tagging censorship. As usual, a mob opposes me. As usual, my logical reasons for my stand will be shouted down, but with the optimism that has occasionally helped me discover sentient life forms on the web, I'll put them up anyway. Here's why if you click a link I submitted while you are at work, you're taking your chances: #1. It...

A Little Talk About Google SketchUp
2008-06-04 07:25:00
A motto of mine: To keep your sanity and balance, break your own rule every great, long, once in a while. So, on a site devoted to FOSS, while being a raving FOSS zealot, I will now kind of, sort of, review Google SketchUp, a proprietary graphics application. I have yet to blog in detail a philosophy about open source and quality which I have called "Tools vs. Toys". But briefly, my rule of thumb is that if it is a Tool, (editors, operating systems, programming languages, mission-critical apps) it must be open source or it is not worth the memory bytes to store it. Toys, on the other hand (games, video, music, entertainment), have near-equal quality regardless if they are proprietary or open source. I've been able to comfortably keep that philosophy intact for years, but Google SketchUp challenges it. I used the (beer) free version of SketchUp 6.To get it running, I used the Wine Windows-emulator. This blog post, complete with the comments, was all the help I needed. Specifically...
More About: Reviews , Talk

Can "Work Ethic" Work For You?!?!?
2008-06-02 00:01:00
A REVOLUTIONARY METHOD TO ACHIEVING FINANCIAL FREEDOM!!! Much energy has been spent in our society to ferret out the latest productivity trend that will lead to maximized profit potential. The spokespersons for each business philosophy come and go, each one going over the selling points of their various plans. Yet, no definitive leader has come to the fore - until now! Now, industrial successfulness analysts have uncovered a new productivity key that has already been deployed throughout history and been shown to work with 100% effectiveness. The secret to this successful path and the discovery of its simplicity has led many successful entrepreneurs on the path to economic victory, and what is even more amazing - it is ABSOLUTELY FREE to deploy. That's right: no costly seminars, complex implementation, expensive software, or involved training... is required! All it takes is a change in your thinking. Hold on! ...
More About: Humor , Work

Now Hiring - Astroturfer, apply at Microsoft
2008-05-29 19:31:00
Glyn Moody over at ComputerWorld UK made a nice catch today. He points us to a job posting over at Microsoft 's "Port 25" site. Evidently, a "Senior Marketing Manager" has the responsibility of: "assisting in defining and driving core marketing initiatives ? most specifically online & offline community-building" "further the dialogue on the value of the Microsoft platform to open source audiences" "be a cornerstone for a global thought leadership website and will be regularly featured in industry press around the world" "act as a visible external evangelist for Microsoft" Wow! That's all direct quotes from the job description. It is so blatant, I'm beginning to wonder if it's some kind of joke. Particularly the 'evangelist' line. Kind of like the famous Halloween documents, this posting really tips Microsoft's hand and shows us exactly what they're thinking. After all the smoke and mirrors over the deals with Linux distros Suse, Linspire, Xandross, and Turbo Linux, this...
More About: General , Hiring

Jack Thompson About To Go Out of Business
2008-05-21 20:38:00
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/2008 0520-judges-report-in-jack-thompson-case- guilty-on-27-charges.html Ars Technica shares with us a moment to lift the spirits of gamers everywhere: "In early 2007 the Florida Bar filed a five count, 38-page complaint against Florida Lawyer Jack Thompson , seeking sanctions against the outspoken critic of video games." ... "The trial ended in December 2007, and the verdict was expected in late April of this year. Judge Dava Tunis had asked for an extension in order to, among other things, deal with 400 'pleadings, e-mails, letters and missives (including pictorials)' sent by Thompson since the end of the trial. Judge Tunis has now released her report, with recommendations that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 charges." That's... let's see here... how do I feel about this? I'll let Mark Slackmeyer from Doonesbury sum it up for me: Boy am I going to miss this guy! Never has there been a more flamboyant public descent into insani...
More About: Business

You Can Hack An OS But You Can't Hack People - part 7: Left Standing at the
2008-05-15 19:51:00
Who's left standing at the altar? Windows users, that's who. Windows has now become the only proprietary operating system without a free-software or open-source equivalent. Apple has Darwin. Solaris has Open Solaris. Unix has Linux and BSD. Even the extinct systems whose surviving fan base can count themselves in the triple-digits have a free alternative that they're working on. BeOS has Haiku, and Amiga has AROS. DOS has FreeDOS. CP/M has CP/M, after Lineo threw up its hands and released it. Ditto for Lucent and Plan Nine From Bell Labs. And Windows has... nothing! Yeah, sure, ReactOS. Look, I've been unfailingly optimistic, but even I'm ready to give up on ReactOS. It's never going to happen. They've been picking at it for 12 years, now, and the last time I tried it (less than a year ago) it couldn't stay going more than a few minutes without choking unless I left it completely alone. Linux is 17 years old, and at one-third that age had progressed farther than ReactOS h...
More About: People , General , Hack , Left , Part

You Can Hack An OS But You Can't Hack People - part 6: The Black Hand
2008-05-13 19:16:00
Why is this part titled "The Black Hand "? Well, because I started this series using a nations metaphor. Citizens of Windows who expatriate and immigrate to Linux will be "foreigners" in Linux. And, if you check that Wikipedia article on the Black Hand - an example of which is seen in the "The Godfather" movie series - you will know that Black Hands are just one of the intimidating challenges facing immigrants. But back up: First, let's talk about culture shock. Have you noticed that the differences in major computer platforms really do seem to make them like different countries? The different ways we do things like run system tasks, open files, shut down and restart, have different file formats and character schemes and default fonts. These are very much like the international practices we have of eating with chopsticks or forks or driving on the left or right side of the road or each country having its own currency. The same barriers to switching countries apply to switching oper...
More About: People , Hack , Part

You Can Hack An OS But You Can't Hack People - part 6: The Black Hand
2008-05-13 19:16:00
Why is this part titled "The Black Hand"? Well, because I started this series using a nations metaphor. Citizens of Windows who expatriate and immigrate to Linux will be "foreigners" in Linux. And, if you check that Wikipedia article on the Black Hand - an example of which is seen in the "The Godfather" movie series - you will know that Black Hands are just one of the intimidating challenges facing immigrants. But back up: First, let's talk about culture shock. Have you noticed that the differences in major computer platforms really do seem to make them like different countries? The different ways we do things like run system tasks, open files, shut down and restart, have different file formats and character schemes and default fonts. These are very much like the international practices we have of eating with chopsticks or forks or driving on the left or right side of the road or each country having its own currency. The same barriers to switching countries apply to switching oper...
More About: People , General , Hack , Part

You Can Hack An OS But You Can't Hack People - part 5: No Help For The Help
2008-05-12 16:03:00
Going forward, I'd just like to point out that I don't claim to have all the answers. What I am doing here, is attempting to ask the right questions. How can we even hope to find the answers if nobody can ask the right, logical questions first? This time I can fall back on a previously-written piece. In "Does Microsoft impose a prisoner mentality?", I speculated that years of using Windows seems to do something to people. Something kind of creepy. It seems as if it steals their intelligence, or their will to learn, or... something. At the end of the second part, after I took one commenter's questions and made a case study from it, I closed by saying, "Beyond freeing our software and our media, it will be useless unless we have free minds to go with it." A lot of commenters wrote in to agree with those posts. Even some Windows users stepped forward and said, yes, they did feel that Windows had given them a prisoner complex, where they got into Linux and were absolutely paralyzed...
More About: People , Hack , Part

You Can Hack An OS But You Can't Hack People - part 4: Godzilla moves in wi
2008-05-12 02:50:00
And so, many (but not all) Windows citizens now want to emigrate to either Apple or Linux. I assure you, this situation is far, far graver than any of the rest of you seem to know. As much guesswork as it is figuring out who runs what, I'm going to take this recent Ars Technica article and give both Apple and Linux the benefit of the doubt. I'll hedge their numbers up to 4% desktop market share for Apple, and 2% for Linux. That leaves Windows at a mere 94%. These figures match our conventional wisdom pretty accurately. Oh, sure! Hey, let's convert all the Windows users to Linux! Gosh, it's that easy, is it? Piece of cake! OK, let's say every carpet-ba... ah.. I mean "Linux evangelist" gets their magical wish and *poof*, overnight, all of the Windows users decide to switch to Apple and Linux. Here is the point that just about everybody seems to fail at: logistics. Let's start by illustrating the math a little more clearly. This infographic illustrates the relative sizes of ...
More About: People , Hack , Part , Godzilla , Moves

You Can Hack An OS But You Can't Hack People - part 3: More Maps
2008-05-10 23:22:00
Since Apple's story is the shortest, we'll tell it out of order. Now, the three computing republics, Unix, Apple, and Windows, had different approaches to autonomy. In Unix, they teetered cheerfully on the edge of anarchy. There was only very little attempt to reign in the free spirits there. In Windows, no stepping out of line was tolerated, but it was necessary to maintain perfect order and the people there loved it. In Apple, however, there was a balance: things were "officially" controlled, but since it was so expensive to live there, the government of Apple chose wisely to occasionally look the other way if the people wanted to go off and do their own thing. After all, giving people what they wanted was what they had in mind. So eventually, Apple's government formed something of a partnership with the citizens. They could have a sort of controlled pseudo-freedom. They could have a free version of their operating system, and could also choose many different ways to experien...
More About: People , Hack , Maps , Part , Part 3

You Can Hack An OS But You Can't Hack People - part 2: The Computing World
2008-05-10 03:57:00
Once upon a time... Hold on here. I'm going to simplify the story down to three operating systems. Is everybody cool with that? I know all about GNU/Linux, GNU/HURD, Minix, BSD (Free, Open, Net, and PC), Solaris, Plan Nine From Bell Labs, Darwin, OS X, BeOS, Amiga, Tandy, OS/2, Xenix, and so on. For the sake of fairy-tale brevity, we're temporarily pretending that there's three operating systems, or computing republics upon the desktop. We'll slide some of the others in in their due time. Just wanted to make that clear. Start the projector! Once upon a time, there were three computing republics. Apple, Unix, and Windows. They spread out to cover all of the land until the map of the world looked like this: Each of the republics was wildly different in the ways they did things. So much so, that it is quite difficult to this day to effectively translate between them. Yet all of the computing republics had this in common: they were all ruled by governments that were very much l...
More About: People , World , Hack , Computing , Part

The Tragedy of Linux: You Can Hack an OS, But You Can't Hack People
2008-05-09 16:32:00
This will be a seven-part series. Introduction: It's about time I tackled this ugly task. I've been promising a follow-up to Ubuntu is not Linux . Because the broad point that I'm trying to make needs to be hammered down, I will explain it again and again and again, more and more clearly each time. Why is this idea so apparently hard for others to grasp and so nose-on-my-face evident to me? Perhaps I'm more socialized than my geek peers. I took a psychology course once. I've always been fascinated by sociology and culture studies. And I worked a couple years in my youth as a taxi driver. You find out all kinds of things about people that you wouldn't otherwise. Perhaps it is this forbidden fruit of knowledge of human nature that puts such a gulf between me and the geek world. I balance my computer knowledge with my people knowledge, while other geeks stay more exclusively computer-knowledge. Of all the responses I got, probably the one that came the closest to showing under...
More About: People , Tragedy , Hack

Iowa wildlife report: bunnies!
2008-05-07 20:38:00
Excuse for not mowing the lawn lately #137: I have a nest of bunnies. The kids discovered a bunny nest on our front lawn. Evidently, rabbits dig holes in the ground, birth their brood, and then cover the hole with some dried grass and bits of their own fur. We have been careful not to touch them so as not to leave human smell on them, and so far they seem to be OK with our occasional intrusion. As I understand it, rabbits lactate like any mammal, and the mother nurses them only a few minutes out of the day, but rabbit milk is powerful nutritious, so it balances out. Bunnies take about a month to mature enough to go it alone. Also, rabbits aren't particularly attentive mothers. We've seen her come back to the nest at night. Usually she leaves it with more grass and fur piled on it, in an attempt to hide it better. With wilderness all around us, I don't know why she chose the lawn of a suburban home for her nursery. So the pics aren't too sharp, because I'm trying to be...
More About: Site News , Wildlife , Report , Iowa

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