handyfloss

I read in Kriptópolis, via a Basque blog that the companies Coverity and Symantec, along with the Stanford University, have made a study regarding the number of bugs in both free and proprietary software. This study has been funded by the North-American Homeland Security agency.

The study has focused on comparing the number of bugs per line of code of similar free/non-free programs one-to-one. Many previous (non-independent, Microsoft-funded) studies before, simply counted the number of total reported bugs in, say, Windows XP and a given Linux distro. This method is clearly biased against the particular Linux distro studied, because there are many different programs in any Linux distro that perform the same task (being able to choose is important for the FLOSS hippies, you know), and adding up the bugs of all those programs seems unfair.

The results of the study give the FLOSS an appalling victory (surprised?). Firstly, of the 32 program pairs, the free partners showed an average of 0.43 bugs per 1000 lines of code. The non-free ones turned up to have a shameful average of 20 to 30 bugs per 1000 lines (45 times more).

Secondly, not only the number of bugs was lower in FLOSS programs, but also the speed to fix them was found to be much faster. As an example, Amanda (a FLOSS backup program), was found to have 1.22 bugs per 1000 lines of code (the highest of all the FLOSS programs in the study, still much lower than any non-free program in the study). Apparently, the Amanda developers read the study, got ashamed, and one week later they had fixed most of the aforementioned bugs, going from the most bug-ridden FLOSS program of the study to the less bug-ridden one! Apparently pointing out where the errors are is veeery healthy for any FLOSS project.

Heracles is the name of my computer at home. I have been “tuning” it this weekend, and I think the result is reasonably attractive. I am publishing a screenshot (see below) of the resulting desktop, partly to show off, and partly to keep a history of the evolution of the looks of my desktop.

The screenshot shows three different adesklets, namely Calendar 0.5.3, modubar 0.0.1 and SystemMonitor 0.1.3. The modubar is currently docking the icons for Konsole, Firefox (currently highlighted by the cursor), amaroK, OpenOffice, TVTime, Quake IV, and the Xfce settings. As I write these lines, I am considering getting new icons :^)

The icons of the bottom-right corner correspond to the Xfce Icon Box, a nifty program to show the icons of the currently open windows (in this case, amaroK, Konsole and Firefox).

The black texts correspond to two Conky instances. The top-left one gives general info, and the bottom-right one tells me how much Internet traffic I have had the last days and months. This is not trivial, since my ISP (Euskaltel) overcharges me if I download+upload more than 4GB/month.

The desktop environment is Xfce, and the Linux distro it is running on is Debian.

They are not my favourite, they are not the best of the best… But, what the hell!, their personal info (quoted below) caught my eye. You can find the music of this group from Madrid at Jamendo. They release their music (at least this album) under the Creative Commons.

Feel free to try, download, burn and share their songs, below. You can find more Creative Commons music I like at my site.

Dowload me!
MP3 192k Ogg 260k MP3 192k Ogg 260k
# Nombre

Desde la salvaje y peligrosa selva madrileña, cual canario entre leones, como un elefante entre roedores, como una abeja entre las flores,surgen TONTO… el grupo que todavia no sabias que estabas esperando. Tras 5 años mirandonos el ombligo hace pocos meses que TONTO empezó su andadura grabando sus temas en los prestigiosos estudios ZZ bajo la tutela sonora del afamado productor de la provincia el Dr Gustafsson que tambien se hace cargo de las labores bajísticas. A las 6 cuerdas el inefable y peligroso Jimi “Yimi” rodriguez , en la bateria Missis Marta acariciando bombos, platos y cajas y a la voz cantante el atractivo y afeminado hooligan Kaiser José!

Many newcomers to Linux are appalled by the apparent need of using the feared CLI (Command Line Interface) in this OS.

This is partly FUD, because most everything can be done in modern Linux desktops that come with major distros (e.g. Xfce under Debian), through a GUI (Graphical User Interface).

However, this post does not try to deny the need of the CLI, but rather stress that an experienced user (if I may call myself so) finds himself doing 99% of his tasks from the command line, just because it is more comfortable and efficient in the long run.

As an example, the data that prompted me to write this: my computer (called Bart) has been up for 63 days so far. I also work on four other computers, called Casandra, Amphiaraus, Orpheus and Arina (through OpenSSH, of course). Part of these 63 days, I have had terminals open in all of the other machines (except Arina, the connection to which is automatically closed after 48h of inactivity, a.k.a. weekends).

All right, so the number of command lines typed in by me during the “lifetime” of these terminals (less than 63 days) are as follows:

Bart: 5047+934+782 (3 simultaneous terminals)
Casandra: 159
Amphiaraus: 114
Orpheus: 6289+4067
Arina: 313+242 (last 3 days only).

This data is not taking into account other terminal windows I have opened and closed in the meantime, and the fact that Amphiaraus has been up only 3 days, and Casandra just 18 (Orpheus 136 days, Arina 194).

Counting only 45 of the 63 days as laborable (5/7), it means I type 400 lines of commands per day, on average! It also means that my computer is keeping track of the last 18000 commands I introduced (not really, because I have set each window to “remember” just the last 1000 commands entered).

A screenshot of an Orpheus terminal below.

There is a (Spanish) initiative to gather info from Windows users who are trying to migrate to Linux (e.g. Debian Linux), and are speciencing dificulties.

Their objective is to make a ranking of “most annoying” or difficult subjects, so that Linux developers can work on ironing them out.

You can read more about it, and contribute yourself, at their blog (Spanish).

It’s getting old already. Not Firefox, mind you. What upsets, bores, or downright outrages me, are those “impartial” vulnerability reports that newspapers, blogs and web sites publish, regarding both IE and Firefox bugs and exploits.

The last one, so far, I found at menéame. Their source of info is an article at Hispasec. In the name of “political correctness”, they reveal a bug in IE, and another one in Firefox. The reader gets the impression, not only that no browser is perfect (which is true), but that both have comparable vulnerabilities, which is a screaming lie.

The IE vulnerability they report is that a web page with specially crafted OBJECT tags can stop IE from working, and leave it in a state where arbitrary code could be injected into it and then executed. Pretty scary news, if the second part is true.

The Firefox vulnerability, on the other hand, consists on a JavaScript code piece than can crash Firefox. The code snippet can be found here, or directly tested visiting this page. Beware that the latter will cause your Firefox to crash.

Now, they are comparing apples to oranges again. The IE vulnerability can render it in a potentially dangerous state, whereas the Firefox bug merely crashes it. Yes, it is grave. Yes, it is annoying. But it is not risky for your computer. Secondly, I visited the link above, and… hey! nothing happens here! What is this bug they talk about? Well, as it happens, I have the NoScript extension installed, so the rogue page could not execute its malicious JavaScript code and make my browser crash. I had to manually accept the site in the list of sites that my Firefox accepts JavaScript to be executed from, in order to have it crash my browser.

Which bug would you prefear to bear with, even not taking into account that the Firefox bug will be fixed much faster?

Suposedly it is an old story, but I found out about it today (pages one visits when staying too late at work).

The “content makers”, like film studios, singers, writers and so on, are day and night stressing how important it is to respect the copyright holders and not to pirate, in order to have the authors get their fair pay for their hard work…

Now, how freaking hypocritical is this, coming from a company who made this! What the link shows is that the Disney company blatantly copied the story, characters and scenario of a previous (old) Japanese movie called Kimba The White Lion.

The story goes like this: Disney “thinks” they own the rights, and start saying they are going to make a remake. Later on, they find out they don’t own such rights, so they start saying their movie is completely original, and denying that any of them knew anything about that Japanese Kimba thing. Truly outrageous.

I have read in menéame and Barrapunto (both in Spanish) that some folks have developed some tricks to solve Sudokus. Feel free to find more about it here.

According to ITWire, (I read it in Linux Weekly News), the use of Linux in China is relentlessly growing. I can not interpret the data, and don’t know how “promising” or “good” this is, but it certainly is significant, because pirated copies of Windows are even more commonplace than in Europe, so the low cost of Linux is not such a big incentive. However, Linux is still gaining market share.

Yesterday I went to the cinema and watched Spike Lee’s Inside man (Plan oculto is the Spanish title). I have to say that I wholeheartedly recommend this movie. It’s very well directed (although I don’t like Lee’s other movies all that much), and the photography is superb.

The plot is very nicely written and tied up together. There are, as always are, some weak points and things more or less difficult to believe. However, many real situations that actually happen every day are more difficult to believe, so…

For me that movie is what a movie should be. It tells a story the way the cinema should tell it. A book is a book. A song is a song. A picture is a picture. And a movie should be a movie. Each one has its tools and procedures, and this movie puts the ones of the cinema to good use, IMHO.