The world's most reluctant Linux advocate

In the fall of 1995, I had successfully brought to completion the project to comply with new federal and state reporting standards for school discipline for the consortium of school districts that our consulting firm served, and was busy cleaning up the master student demographics suite to properly incorporate the new discipline screens rather than have it be a stand-alone subsystem reaching into the student database. It was a hard slog -- the code was a mess. The guy who had written it, who I had replaced, was a math guy, not a computer guy, and he had no inkling of simple things like comments or code reuse, the product life cycle was a mystery to him. His notion of code reuse was to cut and paste the same code multiple places, and there were some significant bugs that I was cleaning up. The only good news was that the code was heavily componetized -- it was basically a hundred small programs tied together by a menu system and a common database, though some of the programs seemed to be bigger programs because they forked out to other programs to provide more screens to school secretaries. All of this was running on SCO Xenix or Unix, depending upon the school and when it had bought our software suite.

So during all this my boss calls me into his office and says, "one of our districts has asked if we're investigating Linux as a possible way to bring down costs for school districts. What do you think?" Now, one thing to remember is that my boss was a big old ex-IBM bull, a no-BS kind of guy, and we got on about like you'd expect from two people with strong opinions but mutual respect. "Linux is freeware downloaded off the Internet," I replied. "Don't we have enough trouble maintaining our own code right now without having to maintain some freeware downloaded off the Internet too?" And that was pretty much that. Still, I thought, "hmm, I have that new Windows 95 machine at home, I bet it'd run Linux." I'm a geek, and what geek wouldn't want to play with a free operating system?

So, after work I headed off to the local Barnes & Noble to grab a book about Linux. The one I bought had something called "Slackware 95" on CD in the back. I took it home with me that night and installed it on a partition on my home computer. So I installed it and figured out how to get "X" running and... well, it worked okay. fvwm was ugly and crude and limited, and there wasn't much desktop software, no real word processor, but I knew LaTex and it had LaTex, so that was good. It drove my laser printer fine too. So the next day at work, I went ahead and installed it on our eval machine at work, where we'd also installed Windows 95 to see what we could do about porting our UI to it. I compiled our source tree on Linux and... hmm, it just compiles, just like it compiles on SCO Unix? And it actually ran!

So I started developing on Linux instead of on SCO Unix, mostly because it was much easier to get Emacs up and going and I prefer Emacs to 'vi' (let the flame wars begin!), not to mention that the GNU tool suite is a lot nicer than the old-school Unix tools. When I finished a module and did initial smoke testing I'd then copy the code over to SCO Unix and compile again there. From time to time I'd also go into the menu system and create a Linux version of one of the SCO Unix system administration programs that we'd accumulated over the years to allow school technology coordinators to manage the system. But I still hadn't considered actually deploying Linux at schools. While it seemed the technology held up okay -- our software actually ran faster on Linux than on SCO Unix -- the business objections were formidable. "We don't want to trust our critical student data to some hackerware downloaded off the Internet!" was the least of it.

That changed in the Spring of 1996, however, when Red Hat Software came out with their 3.0.3 version of Red Hat Linux, which they marketed as "Linux for business". It came in a box! With a manual! From a real company! Complete with a shadow businessman logo wearing a red hat marching off to do business with his briefcase! For the first time, the possibility of actually using Linux as part of our business was not ridiculous. The only thing I really didn't like about 3.0.3 was that all of the system administration tools were TCL/TK GUI scripts, but given that I'd already written a number of menu-based system administration scripts, that didn't seem a fatal objection. I switched from Slackware to Red Hat 3.0.3, and kept on developing under Linux rather than SCO Unix.

So, early June 2006 came along, and we got another school district as a customer. My boss called me into his office again. "What would it take to port our software to Linux?" he asked. "I pretty much already have it ported," I said. "Maybe two weeks to do a thorough job of testing and filling in any system administration scripts that aren't yet rewritten, and it would be ready." "We have this new customer. With our winning bid we could make more money selling Linux rather than SCO Unix, the OS isn't specified in the bid, should we do SCO Unix or Linux?" "Well, Linux has some risks involved in it," I replied. "We still haven't tested it with real data, it should work, but there's no guarantee." He then said that we hadn't won the hardware bid, and there was no guarantee that it would work with SCO. I then suggested a dual-OS strategy -- plan on using *either* of the operating systems, depending upon which one worked with the hardware when the hardware came to us for us to install the OS and administrative software. Given the wholesale pricing I'd gotten from Red Hat Software, we could purchase an official copy of Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 for each school to counter the "hackerware downloaded from the Internet!" objection and basically it was lost in the noise compared to the significant cost of SCO Unix.

So the hardware came in, and the tape drive was supported by Linux, while it was not supported by SCO Unix. We had two options at that point -- delay the deployment until tape drives supported by SCO Unix could be procured, or deploy with Linux. We were scheduled in two weeks to have the machines at a high school gymnasium at the school district to train the school secretaries on how to use the software. It would take at least two weeks to argue with the school district and the hardware vendor about tape drives.

"We go Linux," I told my boss. And we did. I spent the next two weeks sweating the details, making sure everything worked, using real data from a real school district (with the student ID information masked out) to validate that all functions of the software itself did what they were supposed to do, going through all the management screens to make sure they worked properly with the hardware on the systems, and so forth. On the appointed day I drove the main Linux development machine to the school district myself, and stayed on hand while the secretaries all booted their machines, just in case something broke, and... it didn't. Everything Just Worked, without a hitch, all the demos went off as planned, and my inservice training on the discipline system went on as usual, the secretaries were quite attentive, laughed at the right points (i.e., when I produced an official state discipline form with a ridiculous discipline infraction for them to punch into their computers and made an offhand humorous comment about it), and... phew!

That's always the moment of truth: when the product hits the customer's hands. You either pass or fail at that point. I'm proud to say that we passed, and became one of the first of what eventually became a thundering storm of people migrating away from proprietary Unix systems to Linux. Over the next three years we transitioned all of our schools to Linux -- it simply made things easier only having to maintain one set of administrative tools, and it wasn't as if it cost any money, we usually did it when they were upgrading old hardware so we were getting paid for that service and Linux came along for the ride, and it Just Worked. And what more can you say?

I suppose there's a couple of lessons there. First, don't dismiss Open Source software just because it's "some hackerware downloaded off the Internet." Secondly: don't use Open Source software just because it's Open Source if you can't make a business case for it in terms of risks vs. benefits. We couldn't make a business case for it in the fall of 1995, we simply did not have the engineering cycles to handle a transition to Linux given the state of Linux at that time, the risks outweighed the possible benefits. By the summer of 1996, when the code base issues had been resolved, the primary objection of customers about using Linux had been resolved, and the issues of hardware compatibility and profit became key, Linux simply Made Sense. It still wasn't the safe choice. But the risks were limited enough at that time compared to the benefits to justify taking the risk.

-ELG

The value of an education

For some reason Americans seem to believe education is something people receive. People go to college to "receive an education". This implies that students are simply receptacles. The professor opens up their heads and drops knowledge in, then sews them back up. This worries me when I'm looking at the quality of the young people entering the computer science field today, because while they've had exposure to a lot of technology, by and large it's been as users, not as participants. The actual technology is something they don't even think about -- it's transparent, just a part of their world, not something they actually see and think about.

The problem is that education isn't something you receive. Education is something you do. I graduated from a middle-tier university. Which means nothing at all, actually, because I knew my **** when I left there, I'd actually designed bit-slice CPU's and microcode for them and built hardware and written programs in microprocessor assembly language *for fun* while the guy across the street with the 4.0 GPA knew nothing except what was on the test, I mean, he'd been writing software on Unix minicomputers for four years and he didn't even know what 'nroff' was or that he was using Unix! So yeah, it's all about what use you make of the experience. I spent as much time in professor's offices talking about my latest projects as I spent studying, which hurt my GPA, but (shrug). I'm still employed in the computer field today. The guy across the street? Nope.

That is one reason why Open Source is exciting to me, and why people who have a background in the Open Source community interest me far more than people who have a 4.0 average from Big Name University. I'm looking for doers, not regurgitators. What gets software shoved over the transom isn't the ability to memorize what's going to be on tests, it's what, for lack of a better term, I call "get'r'done". The problem I see is that the technology has become so capable, so complex, so difficult to grasp, that the number of people who could learn the basics of some simple technology like a Commodore 64 then build up to writing significant Linux kernel subsystems has basically slowed to a dribble. Simple and relatively open technology like the Commodore 64 where you could grasp the entire design all by your lonesome (the programming manual came with a schematic of the computer in it!) simply doesn't exist anymore. For good reason in most cases, today's computers have far better functionality, but how are we going to get the people with the "big picture" today when there's no "little picture" like a Commodore 64 to build up from?

So anyhow: That's a problem. It's a problem I find with a lot of the younger software engineers. I've managed some very bright youngsters, but that lack of what I'll call big picture thinking hinders them greatly. They simply don't understand why a busy loop waiting for input is not acceptable unless there is no alternative and why it should have a timer to put the process to sleep between samples, or what the hardware looks like and how to program the front panel that's driven by a PIC processor. They're like ferrets, it's all "oooh, shiney!" to them, with no rhyme or reason or understanding of what's actually happening under the surface. And I have no idea at all what's going to happen when all us older farts get put out to pasture either via corporate executives calling us "too old and expensive" or simply getting too tired and retired... there just isn't enough of the young folks who have the slightest clue. Not that we were the majority even when I was 21, but at least there was a sizable number who *did* have a clue then... and you can find a lot of their names looking at the early Linux kernel patch sets. But even the Linux kernel crowd is graying today... and what happens when we're no longer around, given that the number of young people today who understand technology at the same comprehensive level we do -- or that we did at age 21 -- is essentially zero?

-ELG

That XKCD 619 feeling

A Linux advocate says:

The case for using Apple software of Microsoft Windows for something is so slim it tends to sound like the techno lust (sooo shiny ...) or the machinations of a mad man (I HAVE TO HAVE IE!!!!!).

Ah yes, I'm getting that XKCD 619 feeling again, where Linux advocates say about usable user interfaces, "why would anybody want that?!". I've been using and developing for Linux since 1995, so I'm not exactly a newbie. I have the latest Ubuntu on my big Linux development machine (the latest Fedora is similar in my experience) and you know the latest Ubuntu desktop with a high-end graphics card reminds me of? It's as if someone had described MacOS and Windows 7 to engineers in the old Soviet Union, and they sat down and wrote their own clunky half-a** clone based upon nothing but those descriptions. You can practically hear the clunks of heavy metal and whirring of primitive gyroscopes as you operate it. I'm sorry, but anybody who says that Linux has the usability of MacOS or Windows 7 on the desktop is drinkin' some mighty strong kool-aid.

KDE is a bloated incoherent resource-hogging mess (consider it the Windows Vista of Linux desktops), and Gnome's primitive old-school Windows 95 Meets Motif style desktop is usable compared to the competition only if you have a high-end graphics card and can enable 3D Effects and their CCCP-style Expose' and Spaces clones (I say CCCP-style because they have significant usability issues compared to the real thing). And both are limited by "X" which has significant problems dealing with the modern world and hot-pluggable monitors. As in, it doesn't do it. On the day when you can plug an external monitor into your Linux laptop and have the desktop automagically just extend onto the new monitor, with no "dead spaces" and no problems dragging and dropping things between monitors, let me know. Right now, due to Xinerama basically being abandonware, the only multiple-monitor setup that works properly is nVidia's, and only with two same-sized monitors (otherwise there are created "dead spaces" that can eat your windows so you can't get at them), and only if you manually set it up using nVidia's own setup program. Wow, how competitive with MacBooks (where it Just Works) or Windows 7 (one right-click to get Display Settings, then select "extends desktop" rather than "mirrors desktop" from the Displays options) is that? Err... not!

I use Linux where it is appropriate -- my web and email server is running Linux, and I'm developing on Linux for embedded servers that run Linux. But to say there's no reason to use anything other than Linux is just koolaid-drinking ... and, uhm, for the guy who says his HTC Evo 4G proves FOSS rocks, I might point out that the EVO 4G is running a proprietary closed-source "skin" (HTC's "Sense" UI). Yeah, that's "proof" alright... but maybe not of what the original commenter claimed :).

--ELG

The new alternative to VMware: KVM

Both the latest Ubuntu and the latest Red Hat are shipping with a new alternative to VMware Server called QEMU-KVM. I've been playing with it, and it is much faster and lighter weight than VMware Server, as well as being more flexible and easier to use.

To get started with QEMU-KVM on Ubuntu 10.04, first install kvm and qemu-kvm from aptitude. Then install virt-manager. After that, System Tools->Virtual Machine Manager will bring up your virtual machine management console.

You'll see two entries when you do this:

• localhost (QEMU Usermode) - Not Connected
• localhost (QEMU)

Double-click on localhost (QEMU) and it'll connect to the local root virtual machine manager. You could also connect to other machine's managers, if you're wanting to, say, manage the virtual machines on a host in your data center, by using File->Add Connection. Now you'll probably want to set up a data pool for use by your new virtual machines. Most of us put the virtual machines on their own partition, not on the root partition, but the default data pool is in /var/lib/libvirt/images -- which is on the root partition. Ick. Never fear, right-click on the localhost(QEMU) and select 'Details', then click on the 'Storage' tab when you get the details. Click "+" to add your new storage pool, once you define its location click the green 'play' button to make it active, then hit the red delete button to get rid of the 'default' pool. You now have a new default storage pool at the location you desire.

Okay, so you have your data pool, now what about creating a virtual machine? Easiest way to do that is to use an ISO image of your favorite distribution. Just right-click on the localhost(QEMU) entry again, and select 'New'. The resulting wizard is ridiculously easy to navigate as long as you remember that it's going to create it in whatever your enabled data pool is when you tell it to 'create a disk image on the computer's hard drive'.

So, after this you should be able to run the virtual machine and install your ISO on it. Remember that ctrl-alt gets you out of the QEMU console back into the regular Linux desktop environment, and you'll be fine. To open a console, just right-click and select 'open'. Or once you have a VM set up and installed, you can shut it

Okay, so what's the limits of QEMU/KVM right now? First of all, don't expect to run graphical environments via the normal console with any kind of responsiveness. It emulates a very slow/old display card which is then screen-scraped by a vnc server. KVM is mostly useful for running non-GUI setups, such as Asterisk servers or hosted virtual web servers. Secondly, some operating systems might not install at all into KVM due to driver support issues. Finally, there is no equivalent of "VMware tools" to integrate with your host environment so you can move your mouse freely between the virtual machine terminal and the host OS. Your best bet there, if you want a graphical console inside a virtual machine, is to install VNC in the virtual machine and then use VNC to view your graphical console.

But aside from those limitations, KVM appears to be working quite well. It is definitely better on Linux than VMware Server, and if you need to create a vmdk to import into VMware on some other non-Linux host, it's easy enough to just 'qemu-img convert -O vmdk VbAst32.img VbAst32.vmdk' and voila, the new virtual machine will import cleanly into VMware. And of course VPEP runs inside a KVM virtual machine just fine... :).

-ELG

Doing an installer right: Microsoft Office 2010

So out of curiousity I downloaded and installed Microsoft Office 2010 today (don't freak out about piracy, folks -- I'm a Microsoft TechNet subscriber and this copy is a quite legit eval copy). I haven't had a chance to use the software yet, but one thing I have to say is about the installer: Microsoft did it right.

A good installer must do the following things:

1. It must be SIMPLE. People don't want to select lots of stuff, they just want to click one button and have it happen. With the Office 2010 installer you click the 'Install' button (or 'Upgrade' button if Office 2007 is installed on your system), it prompts you for the license key, validates it right then and there, you click 'Next', accept the license, and then it just does it. It's basically four clicks (assuming you can cut-and-paste the license key from the TechNet site of course, if you have to type it in then there's a few keystrokes too). If your geeks or marketroids insist on all sorts of additional functionality, hide it behind a little "+" sign or something where people won't get freaked out about it, users just want it to Just Work, they don't care about all that stuff.
2. It must handle both upgrades and fresh installs in a clean manner. So if a prior version is already installed, it should give you the option of upgrading it and keeping your configuration settings as much as possible.
3. If possible, it should offer to import settings from a prior program, or from a competing program, much as the latest IE will import settings from an install of Firefox or Safari.
4. It must handle aborted installs gracefully. The installer should be idempotent -- you should be able to run it regardless of what state the system got left in, and it will just Do The Right Thing. If the process fails halfway through removing the old version of the software due to something out of your control -- like the moron behind the keyboard accidentally hitting the shutdown button when he was trying for another button -- you should be able to run the installer again and have it Do The Right Thing, knowing what part of the process was last successfully finished and continuing from there, or unwinding back to the original conditions and starting from scratch again, but either way it should Just Work.
5. Once it starts actually installing, it should just do it, not bother you anymore, until the end of the process where, if a reboot is required, it can prompt you for that.

Microsoft has accomplished all of these things with the Office 2010 installer. And you should do the same when you write yours.

So let's state that principle one more time: End users want it to Just Work. Geeking out with oodles of settings and such might make marketroids drool with all the checkboxes they can fill in on the inevitable "competitive comparison checklist", and might make geeks drool over all the cool widgets they can play with, but for 99% of the people out there all you're doing is a) confusing them, and b) making your technical support people pull their hair out trying to deal with end users who want it to Just Work rather than have all these options to select. Especially now, with 2 terabyte hard drives selling for $130 at Fry's and most computers shipping with a minimum of 4 gigabytes of RAM, it doesn't make sense to do anything other than install the whole tamale in the default place. For 99.9% of your users, that's going to be all they want. For the other 0.1% of your users, put that little "+" if you want... just put it somewhere out of the way so someone has to *want* to click on it. And realize that in reality, nobody cares other than a few fellow geeks.

Thinking like an end user. That's what it takes to make a program that Just Works. That's something I've had to pound into my team's head over and over and over again over the years, think like an end user, not like a geek... and Microsoft, at least, appears to have finally learned that lesson in at least this one instance. At which point I must congratulate them, because it's *hard* for geeks to think like end users, but in this one instance, at least, they managed it.

--ELG

Configuring Compiz to emulate Spaces and Expose

If you have an OpenGL-capable video card and driver for Linux, like the GeForce 7900 GS in my big box, you can run Compiz on Ubuntu 10.04 and emulate Spaces and Expose'. So here's how to do it in Gnome (I do not recommend KDE on Ubuntu 10.04 due to some serious bugs I found):

1. Install the latest proprietary driver via System->Administration->Hardware Drivers. Without this installed, my GeForce 7900 simply would not do 3D, and Compiz wouldn't run.
2. Install the Compiz settings manager:
   • # apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager simple-ccsm
3. Identify the X11 mouse buttons you wish to use. Sorry, I identified those via trial and error. On my Logitech Anywhere MX mouse, here is the map from mouse action to X11 mouse button:
   • Button 1: Left click
   • Button 2: Right click
   • Button 3: The 'menu' button
   • Button 4: scroll wheel forward
   • Button 5: scroll wheel back
   • Button 6: scroll wheel left
   • Button 7: scroll wheel right
   • Button 8: backmost-arrow button (on left side of mouse)
   • Button 9: forwardmost-arrow button (on left side of mouse)
4. Select Preferences->Appearances and select your theme that you want, then click the Visual Effects tab. Select 'Normal' unless you want the wobble-on-window-move effect (which I hate because it makes it hard to accurately place the window). It should do some work, then ask you if you want to keep it. Say yes :). Then exit out of that.
5. Select Preferences->CompizConfig Settings Manager
6. Under Desktop, choose "Expo". This is half of the Spaces look-alike, though it doesn't *quite* work like Spaces. Under Expo Key, set it to whatever key you wish to use to enable Expo, either Windows-E (the usual setting, note that the Windows key is called 'Super' in this UI because the Compiz folks apparently hate Windows ;), or a function key of your choice. Note that I recommend using the 'Super' prefix for that function key, because otherwise you end up conflicting with applications, since normal keyboards don't have a 'fn' key like Mac keyboards that can be used to access regular function key codes of function keys assigned functions in the GUI.
7. Expo won't work with four workspaces all in a row, so right-click on the four workspaces in a row at the bottom right of your screen, select 'Preferences' from the resulting pop-up menu, and set it to a 2x2 grid.
8. Now you need to set your arrow keys left/right/up/down to move you between the workspaces. Click 'Back' in the Compiz Settings UI, and select 'Desktop Wall'. Click the 'Bindings' tab. Expand the 'Move within wall' collection, and set the Move Left/Right/Up/Down keyboard shortcuts. I suggest Super-left, Super-right, Super-up, Super-down.
9. Okay, click Back, and now let's set our Expose'-lookalike. This is under 'Windows' and is called 'Scale'
10. The question is, which one of these do you want to use? "Initiate Window Picker" allows "Expose" on all windows on the current workspace. Unfortunately, if you have a multi-monitor system, it puts all those windows onto the monitor where your mouse is currently residing. This gets very cluttered if you have two large monitors (I'm running a pair of 1050p monitors). In that case, I suggest using 'Initiate Window Picker for Windows on Current Output', which does it just on the monitor your mouse pointer is hovering over. I selected Mouse Button 9, the forward-arrow button on the left side of my mouse, to do this.

The end result: Something that approximates what Expose' and Spaces would have looked like if implemented by someone in the Communist-era USSR who'd approximately heard descriptions of how they worked, but had never actually seen them. You can practically hear the clunks of heavy metal and whirring of primitive gyroscopes as you activate them. The Expose-clone doesn't work well with multiple displays because of its bad habit of trying to collect all the windows onto the current display, thus requiring the 'on Current Output' kludge to avoid getting window overload. The Spaces clone requires more mouse clicks to move windows between "Spaces" (it doesn't simply exit to the workspace you just moved the window to, it stays activated until you double-click on a workspace), and doesn't have a handy icon to get to it quickly in case you're using a laptop that lacks a 9-button mouse (!). And like virtually all things dealing with Linux user interfaces, it takes a jillion-step process to get it configured and set up, with oodles of trial and error to figure out which X11 "mouse button" corresponds to which actual button on a mouse.

In short, Linux programmers still haven't figured out that users just want things to work. I've had to whack my own teams on the hands a few times when they brought back a design prototype that had oodles of screens, buttons and widgets to tweak -- "No, I want one input box here, one submit button there, that's all the user cares about, he just wants to do the job, he doesn't want to adjust all the internal stuff you're exposing here." Complexity is the enemy of user interface usability and consistency -- something which geeks seem to not understand, I've had to do this (shoot down too-complex user interfaces) repeatedly over the past ten years. Sadly, there is nobody to do this for Linux (well, except what Nokia did for Maemo, which works really well at giving a consistent user interface to all Maemo apps, but Maemo is pretty specific to its particular environment) -- and thus Linux continues being an incoherent mess for the average end-user.

Still, for my purposes, it works fine at keeping my workflow working while I run a bunch of KVM virtual machines with VNC viewers into them. So I'm a bit less grumpy today. But I sure wish there was a benevolent dictator for the Linux user interface the way there is for the Linux kernel itself... it's frustrating, the technology is there, but nobody has actually turned it into a coherent whole, and the distribution vendors seem either overwhelmed by the situation or just don't care. Oh well, back to work...

-ELG

Attack of the Linux Penguins

Recently I've been using Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx as my desktop development system. This is the first time in a long time that I've used Linux on the desktop -- for the past three years I've been using MacOS on the desktop, sharing the source code tree via NFS to a Linux VMware client to do compiles and testing. Since what I've been principally doing during this time is appliance and distribution design, the fact that VMware is not the speediest of environments did not make much difference.

However, I needed more virtual machines to look at potential client configurations than I could easily fit on a Macbook Pro, even the very well endowed Macbook Pro that I own (which has 8 gigabytes of memory), so clearly I needed to throw more hardware at the problem (heh! Typical software engineer answer!). So I installed 10.04 on a well-endowed desktop/server system complete with RAID5 array and 8GB of RAM, and set out to configure clients using the KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) system that comes with Ubuntu 10.04.

So, the Good:

1. KVM rocks. The performance I get out of KVM is far superior to anything I've ever experienced with VMware even on faster hardware. I am currently running a load on my system that would have both cores maxed out under VMware due to VMware's per-VM overhead. Under KVM, I'm at around 30% on both cores.
2. The Virtual Machine Manager that ships with Ubuntu for managing KVM is far easier to use than the latest editions of VMware Server's management UI, but not as good as the VMware Fusion management UI on MacOS in that it doesn't have any equivalent, as far as I can tell, of the VMware Tools module that allows transparent window pointer moves between the KVM virtual screen window and the host OS screen.
3. Gibber is a really cool Twitter/Facebook/etc. client, easily as good as anything on MacOS. I especially like its multi-pane capabilities for viewing multiple streams in parallel.
4. Performance in general rocks. It feels snappy and things happen quickly, even though it's running software RAID5 so you'd expect significant overhead from the disk driver. But there isn't -- Linux's cache-block elevator does very well at optimizing RAID access.

Now for the bad:

1. The user interface in general is reminiscent of mid-1990's Windows. It looks and feels dated and obsolete, and lacks many of the modern navigational aids of Windows 7 or MacOS 10.5.
2. While I got multi-screen support working for two displays attached to my nVidia 7900 video card (which has two outputs), the dated UI gives no easy way to navigate between the various applications open on the two screens. The window boxes clustered at the bottom of the leftmost screen are not easily accessible from the rightmost screen, and there's no equivalent of Apple's Expose' or Windows 7's similar application-picker function that can be bound to a mouse button so selecting an application is a mouse button away.
3. Neither the KDE nor Gnome filesystem browser allowed providing a user name/password to a CIFS server whose shares you wished to list. As a result, I could not use the CIFS browser to browse to shares on my Mac or on our Windows servers here on the office, neither of which will provide you with a share list unless you authenticate first. On the Mac, this Just Works -- the initial attempt to get the share list fails, but then you click the "Connect As" button, put in the user name and password, voila.
4. In general, integration with Apple and Windows networks was pathetic. I was reduced to doing manual mounts via the CLI mount.cifs command, which I should never have to do on a supposedly modern desktop operating system.

And finally, the ugly:

1. KDE on Ubuntu 10.04 is atrocious. There is an important directory service under KDE that sucks up gigabytes of RAM. I had to switch back to the unsatisfactory, but at least functional and efficient, Gnome UI to get work done. KDE used to be fast and clean, but it has become as bloated and dysfunctional as Windows.
2. Multi-screen support on 10.04 has taken several steps backwards. Window managers crashed when I used the standard X11 Xinerama extension. So I used the proprietary TwinView nVidia driver for my nVidia 7900 video card (a high end card from two generations back, somewhat obsolete today but I use it for Linux because its support is mature) and now multi-screen support is back... but only for the displays attached to this single video card.

My conclusion: Ubuntu 10.04 is thus far the closest that Linux has gotten to a usable desktop operating system. It is a state of the art desktop environment -- if you have been locked in a server room with pizza slid under the door for the past 15 years and still think Windows 95 is the be-all and end-all of user interface design. Both Windows 7 and MacOS 10.5/10.6 put it to shame on all measures of appearance and usability.

I can appreciate the effort that has been put into Ubuntu 10.04, and the difficulties involved in trying to turn a mass of random software from miscellaneous strangers into a coherent operating environment. But that does not change the fact that Linux on the desktop remains stuck in a time warp, fighting the battles of two decades previous in an era where time has moved on. It is especially sad that KDE today is no more usable than KDE 2.0 was ten years ago -- indeed, is *less* usable because of the bloat that has been put on top of what was a clean fast simple and well-integrated user interface. KDE has become a 1959 Cadillac, with fins the size of a aircraft tailfin and a thousand pounds of chrome weighting it down as it staggers down the highway like a bloated whale. Windows 7 suffers from some similar user interface bloat, but it has an excuse -- it's Windows. KDE has no such excuse.

So for the meantime, here's what I say: If you want a coherent, usable user environment, buy a Mac. If you want a fast server environment, use Linux. And if you want something that's neither as coherent as a Mac or as good as a server as Linux, then run Windows 7, which gives you a mediocre implementation of both worlds. As for me, I'm going to stick with my Mac on the desktop, and continue using Linux on my server. That gives me the best user environment *AND* the best server environment... but not, alas, in the same box. So it goes.

-ELG

SaaS and the Dot-com Set

One of the hilarious things that has come about with cloud computing and the advent of large scale SaaS is that I'm seeing the same kinds of arguments I saw back in the dot-com days, that this is a fundamentally different business model that doesn't obey the same rules as traditional software development. Which, of course, is utter nonsense. The method of delivery to customers has changed, but customers remain customers.

My response to all this:

1. Our primary requirement is to meet the needs of the customer. Some customers have legal requirements which preclude SaaS in the sense of SaaS in the cloud, but still wish to have the advantages of SaaS. Think doctors, schools, etc. -- it is actually illegal for them to host patient / student data outside of their own facilities on shared servers. But if we can give them the benefits of SaaS inside their facility using the same software that we have deployed into the cloud -- i.e., *not* a separate version of the software -- then we've fulfilled their needs without any (zero) additional development overhead. And BTW, just to counter one of Marko's points, anybody who structures their sales commissions structure to reward selling private rather than SaaS in the cloud is an idiot and deserves to fail, cloud is generally *much* less support on our part, it just doesn't meet the needs of certain customers.

2. I have not encountered any customers who want rapid updates of critical applications, ever. My boss once ordered me to deploy a new update to a school scheduling program in the middle of a school year. I pointed out that a) school secretaries and counsellors were currently doing mid-term schedule changes, b) school secretaries and counsellors had not been trained on the changes, which were significant (I had re-written the entire scheduling system from scratch going back to first principles, because the old system was incapable of handling some of the new scheduling paradigms that had come out, such as multi-shift scheduling and quarter-system scheduling), and thus c) it would be a fiasco. He said the old system was broken, so deploy the new one anyhow. I did. And got to say "I told you so" to my boss when it turned into the fiasco I'd predicted. My point: Users are fond of *saying* they want the latest, greatest features, but what they actually want is to get their job done. Paying attention to what users say, as vs. what they actually want, can be a huge mistake costing you a lot of money in additional support costs and losing a lot of customer goodwill. Not only were our support lines clogged solid for a week, my boss had to eat a lot of crow at the next user group meeting to get some of that lost goodwill back.

3. I am on Twitter. Yes, customers will Tweet stuff. 140 characters doesn't exactly get you in-depth commentary though. If you let Twitter guide your product development, what you get is a product designed by tweets, which is indistinguishable from a product designed by twits. I have only met one customer in my entire life who actually knew what he wanted (a school discipline coordinator who said, "I want a computerized version of these three state-mandated forms, and reports that fulfill the requirements of these four legally-required forms that I must submit at the end of the school year"). The rest have some vague idea, but you must get with them and engage them in a lengthy discussion complete with design proposals that include sample screen displays of what the application might look like. For one clustered storage product I actually spent more time talking to potential customers, writing proposals, and getting feedback than I spent implementing the actual product. Needless to say, that is *not* a process that occurs in 140 characters.

4. Anybody who goes into a business where there is an entrenched incumbent expecting to compete on features is an idiot in the first place. The incumbent has basically infinite resources at his disposal compared to you and is capable of implementing far more features than any newcomer. He will simply steal any features you innovate in order to stay out ahead. In the old days incumbents like IBM weren't capable of innovating rapidly. But this is the Internet era, and the successful giants have become much more nimble. If there's a feature you have that the incumbent doesn't have, expect him to have it soon. The way to win today is to change the game -- to do something so novel, so different in a fundamental way, that the incumbent could not match you without re-writing his entire product from scratch and ditching his entire current customer base. In short, competing based on features is a fool's game in today's era unless you're the incumbent. The way to win is to change the paradigm, not attempt to compete on features within an existing one.

5. Yes, selling "private SaaS" means we basically end up having to support multiple versions. But that is true regardless, unless we want to force customers into a death march to new versions. Some customers are comfortable with that, the majority, however, arrive at a version they like and just want to stick with that, much as the majority of Windows users are still using Windows XP, or the majority of Linux users are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (basically a three-year-old version of Linux) rather than the latest and greatest Fedora or Ubuntu. They'll accept security fixes, but that's it -- if you attempt to death march them, they'll go to a competitor who won't.

I've been dealing with satisfying customer requirements for around 15 years now, and my actual experience of those 15 years is that customers are ornery folks where what they say and what they actually want are two different things, and your job as an architect and designer is to try to suss out what they actually want, which is often *not* the same as what they say. Young engineers tend to take customers at face value, then not understand why the customer rejects the result as not meeting his needs. I get called conservative sometimes because I call for slowing down release cycles, maintaining backward compatibility wherever feasible, extensive trials with customers prior to product release, etc., but my experience is that this is what customers want -- as vs. what they say they want, which is something else entirely.

For the record - my phone is an iPhone, and the only paper maps in my car are detailed 1:24000 USGS topographical maps not available on current GPS units with reasonable screen sizes. Just sayin' ;).

-EG

Cryptography engineering

A new post at the VPEP blog.

I'm currently reading Bruce Schneier's new book Cryptography Engineering (actually the second edition of Applied Cryptography), and the above was just me riffing on some thoughts I had while reading the first chapter.

-EG

About work...

One thing you'll notice, reading this blog, is that I haven't blogged about anything happening at work. There's a reason for that: It is, in general, a bad idea. If an employer believes a post puts the company in a bad light or simply decides that you have leaked proprietary information without permission, it's a great way to get fired -- dozens of bloggers have been fired over the past decade for posting about things that happened at work.

So anyhow, who I work for is no secret -- you can click on my LinkedIn profile and see -- but now I will be blogging about things I'm doing at work on my employer's own group blog. My first posts are up. You might recognize one of them as a revised version of one of the posts on this blog, except now I can say what I could only hint at then :).

-ELG