I am tired of IRC flamewars

 Diary  1 Response »
Dec 092008
 
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Let me be the first to admit that some of my opinions are controversial. Some people don’t agree with them – hell sometimes those people may be right so I love debating the points. In such debates I find enlightenment, if my opinions stand up their arguments they are strengthened and refined, if they fail to stand up – then I learn and improve or even radically alter them – I have completely changed my mind about many things more than once.

But I am sick of having those debates on IRC because it’s the worst possible place to have a debate. My opinions as they stand have been developed over years, with many debates with others and consistent questioning by myself. Everytime I read something new on a topic I hold one on – I test my ideas against the ideas expressed and see if my ideas need to be refined. So my long held believe in the value of diversity to the FOSS world has been greatly improved when I read Stuart Kaufmann’s work, although it was unrelated, I could see a clear parallel.

All this works for me – because I always consider the possibility that I may be dead wrong. The irony is that exactly because I do so – on IRC I am perceived as arrogant. Because people raise counterarguments I had long ago considered in detail by comparison with the sources they got their ideas from (we’re talking books, not one-liners) and found wanting. If I hadn’t – I would not have continued to hold my opinion. On IRC though, it looks arrogant to say “I know that argument and I don’t buy it” – when my reasons for not buying it is long, complex and thought out over years, and on IRC you have to sum it up in one line.

Then try explaining: if you want to convince me (and if you don’t – why are you arguing ?) then you’ll need to come up with something original, or at least if you are supporting an argument I’ve discounted come up with a piece of evidence for it that I wasn’t already aware of. In other words, I feel my ideas are constantly tested – and the chances that you will successful challenge them with a one-liner on IRC is exactly the same as that I can convince you of them with a one-liner on IRC – a simple matter of no chance whatsoever.

I’m sick of being painted as something I’m not. Heck I got accused of being arrogant and convinced of being always right in a post where I was questioning whether my opinion still applies ! While being agnostic and testing my previous opinion in light of new developments, I’m accused of holding on to that opinion too harshly – that is the problem with IRC as a forum for debate.

Now I do provide a comments section on this blog. In future, if you wish to debate a post with me – do it there, where you can cite your sources, link me to evidence and back up your argument, and I will reply – with similarly researched and backed up arguments. If your argument is better than mine, I promise I will agree with you, if it’s equal to mine I will cease to hold my opinion and make it and yours two parts of a set of possibilities I think might be true. If it’s less than mine, then I expect the same courtesy.

If you wish to discuss something on my blog with me on IRC – in future, well it’s fine if you just want to ask something simple like “What’s the title of the book you cited” – but if you disagree with my conclusions, post your reply on my blog, or I will summarily ignore you, even – in fact especially – if you are somebody I like and respect (Vhata, I’m kind of thinking of you here :p ).

I am not able to express my views on the kind of things I write about here in one-liners, and any attempt to do so will by nature be very oversimplified and not really express what I feel. My experience on IRC is that the result ends up getting me attacked for strawmen.

I had a few paragraphs below where I pointed out examples of arguments where on IRC I had struggled to explain my position – and then carefully shown what was behind it, I stripped them out because they are not relevant to this post. I will rather do a follow-up post in a few days where I handle them exclusively. This post is a statement of position. I am happy to debate, I love it, it’s a learning experience – but there are appropriate and inappropriate forums for any kind of debate. The things I write about on this blog – are not things that can be adequately debated on IRC and every attempt to do so has turned into a disaster so I will no longer attempt to do so, I will ask you politely to comment here if you disagree. Where we can look at your idea in detail and completely and determine to what extent it casts genuine doubt on mine.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 4:12 am  Tagged with:

I am almost considdering voting this time.

 Diary  No Responses »
Dec 082008
 
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Now as some of you may know, I haven’t voted since the 2000 election. Generally the first reaction I hear upon telling people that is that I am apathetic and not fullfilling my responsibilities as a South African citizen. Actually that is far from true, my refusal to vote is not a matter of apathy but a carefully thought out and well discussed decision based on a matter of principle.

That principle is that before I will indicate my support for a party, I must believe that (1) they represent my views (2) they are honest in their promises and will in actual fact rule according to the principles they espouse.

So why don’t I vote – firstly because one major disillusionment of my life has been learning that nobody worth voting for would ever become a politician. By the mere virtue of wanting power, you make yourself the worst possible type of person to give it to. Politicians want power, they want to pursue their careers and they don’t actually give a damn about the things they say they stand for – all that matters to them is that voters give a damn about those, enough to vote for them.

Whether they will actually do anything about it is a whole other kettle of fish – and worldwide the experience has been they won’t – unless the balance of power is so narrow that failure to fulfill even one promise is a guarantee of not being reelected. Keep in mind – I don’t think the government is in charge, this is a republic – not a monarchy, they do not rule us, we rule them – they’re job is supposed to be representing OUR values, OUR ideas and OUR interests.

This does not conflict with my Christianity at all (despite the views of my Theologian brother in law) – quite the contrary, I still believe in honoring the law and the rulers – I just disagree about who God’s appointed rulers ARE. They are US – the citizens and taxpayers – every single one of us. And when you think like that, breaking the law is far worse – because now it’s not somebody else’s laws you are breaking, it’s your own – our own and the people you harm through it is every single other person in the country, up to and including your own family.

The government is supposed to work for us. Their job is not to tell us how to live, it’s to make sure we are able to live the way we tell them we want to.

So that’s one reason – politicians are liars, cheats and thiefs without exception (if you weren’t at least two out of three, you wouldn’t want to BE a politician so the only exceptions that exist are those who got thrust into politics against their will – which is when you get leaders like Ghandi) – and I refuse to tacitly accept this or endorse any politician who is well… like a politician as a matter of moral principle.
The other reason is that before I vote for a party, before I endorse them – I must feel the represent my views and beliefs about how the country should work.

Sorry, voting for the opposition just because it’s important to limit the party in power’s strength is just not good enough for me. I have to be voting for an opposition I at least mostly agree with – thus far, none of South Africa’s parties have even remotely resembled my views.

They go for popular appeal with that side of the population which is most vocal – the religious right and push their agendas without concern for what is good for society as a whole. When all you care about is the vocal ones, you are bound to ignore the whispered cries of the voiceless suffering – and I cannot endorse or promote that.

Some have told me that if I feel this way, I should spoil my ballot on purpose… but what does that do ? There is no distinguishing count for obviously spoilt ballots – there is nothing to tell my ballot apart from people who just cannot read it or whose pen spilled in. If the ballot had a “none-of-the-above” option – I would be voting on that though. Instead, I still believe I am doing my duties as a citizen despite my refusal to vote by participating in the democratic process in other ways. I write letters to newspapers, I write articles on this blog, I read the papers and comment on them – I call into chat shows and point out stupidities.

One of my recent favorites was the reaction to the Julius Malema debacle – I must have been the only person who called in and didn’t say either “Julius is right” or “The ANC should order him to shut up”. Neither of those points have anything to do with the discussion. The important thing as far as I’m concerned is that Julius Malema is a citizen of South Africa and thus has a constitutionally protected right to free speech. If you don’t like what he says speak out – LOUDLY – complain and state why it’s wrong. But do not call for censorship.

The answer to bad speech is more good speech. It is never to demand less speech of any kind. I completely despise what he said, and I said it out loud – but I will also defend to the death his right to say it – because if that right goes away, our country is doomed to the worst things that can happen to countries, every single one of them.

So then why the title of this post ? Because, for the first time in eight years I’m considering voting again. If I vote, it will be for COPE. Jonathan Endersby’s post about COPE quite neatly sums up a lot of why I might vote for them.

Their stated policies make sense, they inspire people – and their criticisms are based on things that really are wrong, not emotional responses to appeal to some or other groups moral beliefs. Now unlike Jonathan, I don’t think this has anything to do with them being good people – they are politicians, as scummy as the rest of them – but it comes out of need. The very existence of COPE has finally created a true democracy in South Africa – a democracy where real issues need to be addressed and debated and people’s actual needs have to matter -because one vote lost could be one too many.

Finally we have a system that can work – because finally, if a politician screws up – we the people (his boss) can fire him. So will I vote ? And will I vote for COPE ? I don’t know yet, but I’m watching with interest, we still have some time to register – before the time runs out I will decide and register if I believe that the hope expressed in this post has been justified.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 6:33 am  Tagged with:

Why we need more, not less, GNU/Linux distributions.

 Diary  4 Responses »
Dec 042008
 
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When I announced Kongoni about two months ago – there were three basic responses. The first group of people didn’t care, the second group were excited and wanted to be part of it, the third were denigrating and saying it’s a bad idea.

Some of that third group was attacking my technical decisions – some of their points were valid and led me to change those decisions, others were irrelevant or so far removed from the vision I am trying to achieve that myself and the other contributors wholeheartedly rejected those criticisms. But there was another section of those critiques that focused on something else. I had expected one or two of them, but the amount I got was staggering… and to me as a old time GNU/Linux user scary.
The argument was simply this: “Why do we need yet another Linux distro ?”

Often paraphrased in forms like: “Wouldn’t it be easier to just make a custom ubuntu respin and change the things that annoy you about it ?” or even worse: “What are you planning to offer that Ubuntu/Gnewsense doesn’t already ?”

I was honestly shocked by the numbers of these questions – and since I hadn’t really expected them, I didn’t really have a well formulated answer ready. Oh I knew the answers, but I hadn’t had them well prepared. Today I came across a blog post that actually answers a lot of it.

I don’t agree with every single statement but the differences are minor matters of wording, the core concept is right. The very strength of GNU/Linux is it’s diversity. The fact that it allows people to explore new ideas, some ideas thrive, some die a quiet death – it’s the software version of natural ecology. Some ideas only survived in certain specialized cases (like some bacteria that can only survive around volcanic vents… but then again nothing else does survive there), some become useful and much beloved tools of large sections of the community and some just become memories of an idea that nobody else liked.

Survival of the fittest – or at least – the fittest for some purpose is core to the very reason GNU/Linux is actually good. It’s more than the many eyeballs effect. The freedom may be the most important reason to use it, but the most important technical reason it became good is that there are hundreds of thousands of programs that do similar jobs in different ways, and thousands of distro’s that approach the concept of putting together an OS from different angles. Some very similar, some clusters of related species (has Ubuntu-likes become the primates of FOSS ?) and some radically different.

Some develop niche’s where they thrive and grow, and some don’t survive. FOSS like species evolution, according to Stuart Kaufman, is exploring the realm of the adjacent possible. This makes it an emergent phenomenon (math-geek speak for – “it’s impossible to predict what will happen next but it will make perfect sense when it’s happened”) that will try absolutely everything – where that which works is kept and passed on to future generations and that which doesn’t is thrown away.

Natural evolution is a powerful system that has allowed life to survive enormous tragedies. Several comets, ice-ages and even the human race so far hasn’t been able (and probably cannot) wipe out life. Species come and go, but life goes on – there is always something else ready to fill the gap left or newly opened up.

And FOSS has brought that power to software development – with a bonus. Software can do things genes cannot. Genes have to follow generations – but ideas can jump from place to place without barrier.

RPM for example went from redhat to Suze to Mandrake – there very different distro’s with completely different origins. Dependency resolution went from apt for debian to rpm based systems, and even to others that have even less in common with deb as a packaging format.

Very often, even if a distro does not survive, it’s best ideas are already incorporated into other distro’s. Some of the best ideas I came up with when I did OpenLab are now common in most live-cd based distro’s. My distro didn’t make it, but the ideas I put in there survived (at least, the good ones did), a few others copied them (or came up with similar ideas on their own) and others copied from them. Very few people know that OpenLab was the first distro to have an installable LiveCD as it’s primary means of existence, I saw a gap between livecd’s used for demoing, and installable CD’s used for creating permanent systems (as it was at the time) and filled it. OpenLab’s greatest contribution to FOSS is that this method is now the standard for almost all distributions because it worked so well.
And to return to my point – this ability to cross-pollinate and the fact that generations are so fast makes FOSS able to grow at a rate unprecedented in nature. New ideas in natural ecology take milions of years to develop, in FOSS it takes a few months.

So why do Kongoni ? Why do we need another distro ? Because exploring the realm of the adjacent possible, discovering new ideas, finding other ways of doing it is how GNU/Linux gets better and better as a whole. Maybe none of the ideas in Kongoni will become mainstream, maybe several will – maybe Kongoni itself will – there is no way of predicting that (emergent phenomenon remember) but the important thing is to try them and give them a chance. Every idea that doesn’t get explored because somebody said “we already have too many text editors” (replace with any thing you can think of up to and including distributions) is a massive loss for the evolutionary ecology that is Free Software.
And like the ecology of nature, our ecology is under threat from forces that wish to see it destroyed for greed.

The ecology of nature has a resilience that will likely see it survive the threats (but if we don’t watch out, it will do so by getting rid of the threat – e.g. humans) but FOSS is young and the very speed of it’s adaptation which makes it such a wonderous way to create software can also be it’s curse. The biggest threat to us isn’t Windows 7 or MacOSX or any other proprietary program, it’s people trying to stifle the process of expansion and idea-exploration that drives us forward. It’s a threat that has become far worse than I ever imagined in recent years – and it’s one I agree with the cited blogposter about – we have to fight all-out.

We have to make people understand that the diversity they see is a good thing. Just like a piece of land with nothing on it but zebra’s will very soon have nothing on it at all – a FOSS world with only one distribution, will very soon not be there at all. Diversity of species drives nature forward, lets it survive whatever the universe throws at it. Diversity of ideas is what drives FOSS forward, and the one thing that could actually kill it would be to lose that diversity.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 2:44 am  Tagged with: ,

I love Cape Town in the first week of December,

 Diary  No Responses »
Dec 032008
 
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No tourist, no traffic and summer weather. It’s the only nice week we get between March and January. Most years we do get a nice month in February though.

Dear lazyweb, this post is too short.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 3:58 am  Tagged with: ,

Text dragging on (K)ubuntu considdered harmful now ?

 Diary  No Responses »
Dec 022008
 
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My home machine, as I’ve said before, runs Bluewhite64 with KDE4.1.3, it’s basically a bit of a preview of what Kongoni is being built from. My work laptop however runs Kubuntu Intrepid also with KDE4.1.3. Now overall I’m actually quite happy with this kubuntu release, it’s certainly the first one that shows polish even remotely comparable to it’s gnome counterpart so that’s a good thing.
Unfortunately, it has one seriously annoying bug. Selecting and dragging text in firefox is a CPU killer, I know this is neither a firefox nor a kubuntu bug since the problem doesn’t exist on my home machine. It’s something specific to this machine, or this release of Kubuntu.
What happens ? Well select some text and drag it – you don’t even need to drop it anywhere – just letting go of the mouse is enough, the system freezes while the CPU works incredibly hard for several minutes and then finally drops the text (if you didn’t drop it somewhere else, back where it was) before returning to normal.
During this time, the rest of the system is completely unresponsive, you can see the text moving incredibly slowly over the path the mouse followed before finally dropping and then the system recovers. Now just why exactly this is slow I haven’t been able to figure out conclusively – but I have a theory.
This machine, unlike the home machine, has full XRandR1.2 support and really good XRender support, and I think firefox is using XRender to draw the text when it’s being dragged – and I think it’s buggy with the way it does that. It doesn’t happen at home because nvidia’s xrender support sucks so bad that firefox doesn’t even try to use it. But if firefox is using it this badly – it would have been better not to use it at all.
So by my theory, the problem is with firefox on intel graphics cards that support full XRender. By that logic – the problem needs to be fixed either in firefox or in the i915 driver. Since both are FOSS code – this should be doable. Hence my decision to post it here. It would be good to know if anybody has similar problems, and on what video cards – if it’s happening for you on something that doesn’t support XRender then it suggests the problem is confined to firefox, if it happens for you in other apps – it means it’s something at library level in Kubuntu. The most likely combinations are similar hardware but other apps, same apps on different hardware or same apps on same hardware. Getting some feedback on which scenario’s are out there will help track down who to file a bug report with at least.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 2:54 am  Tagged with: ,
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