Random Musings

I’ve picked up some web browsing via “planet” sites recently. Most notably, Planet Arslinux, but also Planet Debian and Planet Kernel. On Planet Arslinux today, I saw Jay Wren’s post about products being noticed.. This got me to thinking - and especially, his points about iTunes and Google made me think about why I’m a user of those two things, and also, other things.

As I ponder this, I realize that the products I’m passionate about, all share a common trait. Mostly, I hate their competition because it sucks. I think this is just another way of saying the “10 times” rule Jay postulates.

With Google, I switched because it worked, and found me the information I needed. This was a rather remarkable feature at the time. Mostly because search engines just sucked. With iTunes, I started using it because I bought an iPod. On the other hand, it’s actually a really good mp3 player. And CD ripper. ID3 tag editor….. etc. It does a good job at all these things. None of the other players I’ve used provided all these features in one spot and got more than one of them right. In fact, most failed to get even one right. So, it’s not that iTunes is great. It’s just that the rest suck. (My mp3 player of choice before I stumbled on iTunes was a hand-written Perl script that I called “weightedplay”, that automatically noticed new mp3s and played more recently added stuff slightly more often than older things. It was really quite simple, and other than it’s lack of GUI, it was better than anything else I’d found for just playing songs.)

So those are the things that come to mind immediately, and why I switched away from their competitors. I’ll bring up another one, that’s occurred to me as I write this. A long, long time ago, I switched from using RedHat as my Linux distro of choice, to using Debian. In this case, it wasn’t because Debian was great. I had done some customizations to my RedHat installation in strange places (/etc/inetd.conf, IIRC), and doing an upgrade wiped out those changes without warning. In retrospect, after years of being away, I realize that my customizations *might* have been saved in .rpmsave files. But I was angry, so I found another distro that I was promised would tell me before it nuked my customizations. In the meantime, I’ve realized that apt actually works, and that I don’t really mind my packages being a little bit old if they work, so I’m happy with Debian. But I think this proves that it’s not how good the new choice is, but how much you dislike the old choice that sets these patterns in our minds.

This is the thing MicroSoft doesn’t get on search. For a very long time they thought that it was OK to fool their users by sneaking in paid-for results in their search listings. That’s bad, and hurts the accuracy of their results, in the user’s minds. This is why they will be struggling to recover influence in search for a very long time. (Oddly, I’ve noticed that Google’s advertisements are usually well targetted at my searches, which is pretty nice. I’ve even occassionally clicked on one. The beauty of relevance.)

So, I guess that’s my take on the thought. It’s not how good you are, but how bad you make your competitor look.

Meme of the week - what OS are you?

Which OS are You?

Humourously, the only computers I have at home that aren’t running Debian at the moment are my WRT54G and my Tivo.

That makes 7 others that are running Debian. I need a local mirror.

I’ve been spending my free time hacking away on “Git”, the source code management tool created by Linus Torvalds. It’s rather absorbing now that I’m really starting to grok how the command line tools all work, and I’m adding my own into the mix to fill the gaps. I guess the trick to everything is to just start using it so you figure out what is missing, either in the tool, or in your own knowledge.

I wish I felt up to trying to convert work to this tool - maybe I’ll do that next year when our BK licenses come up for renewal again. I suppose I should get around to figuring out how to pull all the data out of BK and reimport all of it into Git then.

Ugh, to say the least.

Friday at OLS seems to be almost entirely “Xen” focused. Since I’m rather intrigued by all this stuff - I’ll be sitting in these talks.

Xen is, basically, mainframe quality virtualization on x86.

It’s incredibly cool stuff. In fact, I’m so intrigued by it that I’m going to try rebooting my laptop into Xen in a few minutes and having a virtualized system running on my laptop full-time.

If this works, I think I’ll start converting my user mode linux setups at work into full-time xen systems, and I’ll just limit them to running in 64 meg of ram each, and that should give me much much better performance than I got with uml doing the same thing.

Listening to a talk about Ext3 is going to be improved in the future - it seems that we’ve reached a plateau of the easy and obvious big fixes having occurred, and the next-gen Ext3 changes will hurt.

Extent based allocations (use logical block, physical block, length as a single 64-bit record, instead of older, more granular formats) require file system layout changes, so they will not happen right away. Other changes related to on-disk format changes will most likely sneak in when the extent based allocations happen.

These changes will probably not cause a rename to Ext4 - the system of capability flags means that you will just pick the features your filesystem needs and create it. Older kernel that understand the right flags or that have all the features that are flagged as “incompatible” for backwards functionality, will be able to mount the filesystem and use it (perhaps read-ony), but the compatibility will be rather complicated.

My tentative plans for talks today (after I sleep) are:
nfsim: untested code is buggy code (Netfilter test suite)
Trusted Computing and Linux (Sorry, overslept)
State of Ext3 — see the next entry.

eCryptFS - encrypted filesystem
This is something akin to “unionfs” - it overlays an already mounted directory and provides automatic encryption of the files in it, based upon a set of policies. This is kind of neat, but not really quite ready yet.

Clusterproc (clusterwide process management) or kdump/kexec

Then, BOF sessions:
NFSv4
iSCSI or Security
Spamikaze

I’ll try to update this as I go over the day.

Wednesday - 11:30
Sat in on the BlueTooth talk (BlueZ). Interesting, got a rough overview of hardware and what is going on with the stack - and since I’ve only recently started trying to use this, I have high hopes that it will work as easily as it should - i.e, pair with the my mouse once and never worry about it again.

Wednesday - 13:30
Next up was the ACPI talk - plagued by 30 minutes of projector and laptop problems.
Turns out that most of the ACPI problems were not bad BIOSes, but bugs in the ACPI implementation in Linux. A couple people asked for an independent ACPI tester - to use in manufacturing, and/or when shopping for a laptop. Random other things - the basic theme being “It’s getting better than it was before - we think we’re past the worst point of getting compatibility and support working.” Lots of interesting new features in ACPI 3.0 - most of them haven’t shown up in machines yet so there really isn’t much (any) support for them, either. Support in the OS will happen after features start showing up in the BIOS and machines themselves. Some possible new devices, “operator present detector” (Is there a human in front of the machine?), “ambient light” (automatically dim the backlight in a low-light situation). Various physical connection, dependency, architecture things for CPUs.

Wednesday - 15:00
I went to the wrong room next, and sat in on the summary of how page cache performance was analyzed. (The page cache is the cache of things taht are file-backed, IIRC). Interesting, but hard to write about it without just repeating things - so go to http://linuxsymposium.org/ and download the papers yourself.

Wednesday - 18:00
Last up was the Keysigning - where we were, sadly, forced to implement a human merge-sort since the keysigning sheets were sorted by key-id and not by last name. Oh well. Next up to handle the actual signing, which always sucks. Gotta answer so many questions as part of the process.

Well, it’s 12:20am, on the day I fly to OLS.

I suppose I should pack, but I’m busy goofing off instead.

I’ll be at the Ottawa Linux Symposium for the rest of the week, attending conferences where a bunch of really smart people talk about the impressive (and sometimes crazy) things they’ve done to Linux. I imagine there will be some conversations about Git, too. (Git is the SCM tool that replaced BitKeeper for kernel development.)

So, I’m looking forward to going tomorrow, and I think I’m going to go get packed and crash now.