anderstornvig.dk

Rant coming your way..!

I use a frighteningly large number of online services/applications/whateveryoumaycallthem. Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Dropbox, Remember the Milk, GooSync, Twitter, WordPress, Delicious and that’s probably not even all of them.

The big sinner is obviously Google. Even though I’m reluctant to admit it, they make some darn great software – too great to not use. The same is true for the other services. One innovative, beautiful web application after another.

What’s scary is that I’m so dependent on them. I get chills from just thinking about something crucial happening to Google.

But I guess Google has reach a size where reliability will never be a problem. Too many users depend on them and hopefully they are aware enough of their responsibility to not just pull the plug.

The next stage after this concern about Google just pulling the plug is the monopoly concern. Just like Microsoft took over the world through your personal computer, Google is doing it through the web. I guess it can be seen as an advantage that everything is streamlined and so on but I choose to be worried. If Google went down, the world would really just halt. Communication lost, appointments forgot, tasks undone, data gone, etc.. Disaster!

Accepting the fact that the evolution is inevitable and that I’m a sucker for Google and other web services takes me to my next subject.

Operating systems (OSs) are depreciating. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Give me a browser and a text editor and I’m ready to take over the world myself!

90 percent give or take of the time I spend on a computer I’m either in Firefox or some obscure text editor. True story.

I’m not saying that OSs are becoming unnecessary, just irrelevant for everyday work. Any modern OS can fire up a browser and a text editor, and if that’s more or less all that’s needed on a daily basis, maybe we need to rethink the entire design of modern OSs. Simplify rather than complicate them if you will.

As point of departure though, I can’t fully support this evolvement because of the statements first in this post. I’m simply not comfortable with the thought of people gullibly putting their personal data in the hands of someone/everyone else.

I would like, however, to draw a final perspective that’s not just relevant somewhere in the future, but also today. On any computer you use for regular tasks like mailing, browsing, documenting, if the OS is irrelevant, why not install an open source one for free? It’s just plain ludicrous to pay for an OS you’re not directly using. You use the applications you’re installing on the OS, and any OS can manage most of those applications, also open source ones.

If you’ve read this far, largely agreed with my points, not quite understood this open source thingy, but – sensible as you are – noted that you can get an operating system for free and free yourself from the monopoly that is Microsoft, you’re probably wondering where. My best answer to that question is www.ubuntu.com. Here you can download a free and open source operating system called Ubuntu built upon the Linux kernel. Highly recommendable.

Rant… over…

Ok, sorry for my inconsistency, but I’m returning to WordPress again. I’ll import my tumblr post now.

Today I went to the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conference in Aalborg. It concerned two main topics, secure programming and real-time/embedded systems. Here are some highlights and reasons I was glad that I went. While it was incredibly relevant for my education, I didn’t find the real-time/embedded part very interesting. It was plain boring, so I won’t comment on that.

Development tools

During the day several helpful tools for software development were introduced and recommended. That included tools for bug tracking, documentation, etc. Especially interesting ones were doxygen, doxygen-gui, graphviz, valgrind and splint.

Git eye-opener

A guy named Esben Haabendal talked about git through practical examples. As opposed to some documentation about git I’ve read online which I found a bit arbitrary and complex, this talk was really an eye-opener for me. Even though the presentation itself wasn’t particularly good, the talk provided an introduction to some terminology within git, basic commands/operations and more importantly the context in which they are used. Also the brief explanation of distributed version control systems and how they implement various workflow models was very interesting. I can definitely see why git outrules subversion or other centralized version control systems in larger projects.

The OpenBSD guys

There were two german OpenBSD developers, Henning Brauer and Sven Dehmlow, present. Two funny but also extremely OpenBSD religious characters. I really enjoyed their presentation about code security and rightness. Particularly, I found the part about chroot and privilege seperation interesting. But also their slides. They were different with colors, beers as progressbars, legos as flowchart, etc.

Book recommendations

Henrik Lund Kramshøj talked about security tools, mainly for programming also. His talk was alright and he recommended a couple of books. They were:

• Secure Coding: Principles & Practices – Principles and Practices by Mark G. Graff and Kenneth R. Van Wyk
• 19 Deadly Sins Of Software Security – Programming Flaws And How To Fix Them by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc

Wrapping up

There are several other things from the conference on my list that I plan to look more into, so I guess in all it was 200 dkr well spent. The food there was also much better than expected, but I was disappointed that we didn’t get a t-shirt.

To zoom out a bit, the conference reminded me what great community exists around the open source idea. Once again I’m really motivated to contribute.

Finally, all talks were video recorded, so they should become available online together with slides etc. at some point. The talks from last year’s conference are available at http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/blivklogere/foss_aalborg/2008/.

For now, I’ve moved my primary online activity to Twitter which means that I’m currently not updating this site. So, follow me on twitter.com/tornvig. Longer tweets / rants / anything else really I’ll put on anderstornvig.tumblr.com. But posts on Tumblr are automatically referred to on Twitter anyway. Nifty feature, hah? It’s one of many.
See you!

I bought a new old LaCie monitor today.

I used to have two LCD monitors here at home, a 22\” and a 24\” but for some months now my 22\” has been at the university. I spend a lot of time there after all, and a 14 inch laptop monitor just won\’t do it for me.

So, I was left at home with my 24\”. It\’s a great monitor and it may sound priviledged but it just isn\’t enough. I need, really need a second monitor. I once stated that the same effect could be achieved with multiple desktops/workspaces, but I was wrong. Once you get used to a multiple monitor setup, it becomes hard to live without.

For instance, no matter what I do on my computer, I want a browser within sight. Easily accessible for googling, mailing, news reading, whatever. The same goes for IM, IRC and various status windows. If possible, I want to them within sight.

Now, if I also want to write something, code something, draw something or really just do anything else than browsing and messaging, space becomes a problem on one monitor. And every time (which is more often than you\’d probably think) it\’s a terrible annoyance.

Another example I\’ll just briefly mention is coding. You\’ll need one screen for a browser and documentation, and a second for writing, debugging and compiling the code. Often even a third screen is preferable!

Back to my monitor. It\’s a LaCie Electron Blue 22\” CRT monitor, goes up to 2048×1536, has an USB hub and double VGA connectors in the back. Great. About the picture, I won\’t say that it\’s good or bad but it\’s definitely entirely different than on my 24\” LCD monitor which is right next to it. Not so great. I\’m also a little concerned about its power consumption.

But it does the job and it only cost me 250dkr so I can\’t complain.

Back in my Arch Linux exclusive days I got really happy with the window manager Awesome. It’s lightweight, tiling and actually arranging your windows as opposed to metacity/compiz (default WMs on Gnome).

Tonight, I decided to install Awesome on Ubuntu (my current distro). If you’re interested in doing this too, please read on.

I found a great walk-through for doing it. The links, however, were broken so now, I want to share the right ones with you here.

Getting Awesome

1. Right now, the current release of Awesome is not in the official Ubuntu repos, so we have to pay a visit to Debian’s packagefinder. The Awesome packages can be found at http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=awesome.
2. Choose the package from unstable to get the latest release.
3. Choose your architecture at the bottom of the page. It’s probably i386.
4. Finally, choose a mirror and download the deb package.

Getting dependencies

The Awesome package won’t just install, at least if you have a regular Ubuntu setup similar to mine. It will however complain about some dependencies which are not installed or just not up-to-date. Luckily, this is easy to fix. What I did was the following:

1. Go to http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/xcb-util/.
2. Download and install the packages with filenames similar to those on the picture from my desktop below.

UPDATE: On another computer I had to fire up Synaptic and also install libev3 with it’s dependencies.

Prepare for Awesome

1. Run “gconf-editor” and go to

   desktop > gnome > session > required_components

2. Delete the value for “panel” and change the value of windowmanager from “gnome-wm” or “compiz” to “awesome”.

Install Awesome

1. Well, just run the Awesome package you downloaded before. If it still complains about dependencies, my quess is that they’re also in the directory you got the other ones from. So really, just download the ones you need.
2. Also, remember to run the two commands below to get a configuration file.

   mkdir ~/.config/awesomecp /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua

3. Finally, do the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart X and a fine, fine and Awesome desktop will hopefully greet you.

Wrapping up

I haven’t had the time to tweak Awesome yet but my fresh install looks like this screenshot.

Be sure to check out Dave’s post which this post is entirely based on.

Enjoy!