handyfloss

Probably just a reminder to myself (things to test that a DE or WM I consider using has).

In no particular order:

Panel

I want the posibility to have a panel that looks like Engage, or the modubar desklet of adesklets.

All of them are, yes, clons of the Mac “Dock”.

Volume control

Yes sounds stupid, but I want something like the convenient applet in the Xfce panel, which turns volume up and down when scrolling the mouse wheel over it.

There are workarounds, like having a mixer (e.g. kmix) icon in the system tray, which fulfill the same task (you can hover and scroll), or configuring a keybinding for it.

Maybe both, specially the latter, are even better than what I originally wanted, so… nevermind.

Alt+Tab cycling for ALL windows

I have tried Enlightenment DR16, and the default is to cycle only raised windows (that is, the minimized ones don’t appear in the cycle). How stupid is that? And I am sad to say that I haven’t been able to change this default behavior. I have given Enlightenment DR17 a try, and it does cycle through all windows…

Iconbox with all windows

I absolutely love the Xfce iconbox, which is a replacement for a “normal” taskbar, i.e., a place where iconified windows “go”. The only thing I think is less than perfect is its looks. The Enlightenment iconbox looks better, specially since you can make it 100% invisible, so that only the icons are visible.

Problem with Enlightenment iconbox: only minimized windows appear there. Again (second time with a window issue in E.), how silly is that? In Xfce you can configure the iconbox to show all windows, or just minimized ones. Having all windows appear in the iconbox is very handy. When you minimize a window, it goes to the iconbox. You can then maximize it clicking in its iconbox icon. Now, without moving the mouse, you can change your mind and minimize it back, clicking the icon again. But in E. you can’t, because the icon is no more there!

Themeability

I like some Enlightenment themes but I prefer the Xfce way of having a theme for the window manager, and another one for the “general look and feel”. The latter includes font types and sizes, scrollbar styles, button styles and so on. In E., it’s all-in-one, so one theme might have a very nice window decoration, but awful scrollbar or button style…

Easy and powerful keybindings

Most WMs have customizable keyboard shortcuts. The ones of Xfce are not espectacular, but can be accepted.

Shading with mouse

This is a very small detail, but very usefull. 99% of WMs shade the window (“roll it up”, showing only the topbar) when scrolling up with the mouse over its topbar. No need to say, scrolling down unshades the window back. In some WMs (e.g., KDE), you can even configure what you want to have done when scrolling with the mouse over the topbar of a window.

Well, there are WMs where you can not do that trick! Sad.

Today the power supply has failed again twice: first for some 15min; 10min later, for some other 5min.

Here goes the updated list of blackouts I have been able to compile, with comments if any:

1. 2005-Dec-13
2. 2005-Dec-21
3. 2006-May-26 (The card-based automated access to the Faculty broke down)
4. 2006-Jun-04
5. 2006-Jun-08
6. 2006-Jun-13
7. 2006-Jun-16
8. 2006-Jul-04 (Orpheus didn’t fall)

Summary: 8 blackouts in 204 days, or 25.5 dpb (days per blackout). 19 days since last blackout. Average dpb went down by 0.8.

First post in the series: here

I have discovered this interesting web site called last.fm, via the amazing amaroK music player.

Basically, info about all songs I play (with amaroK, or another last.fm-enabled player) is uploaded to my last.fm profile, where anyone can see it.

If you want to find people with similar musical tastes, or find out what other groups people who likes a group listens to, or how many people listen to some song or group… all that can be found at last.fm.

And if you are just curious what music I listen to, just follow this link.

I have come to know that Microsoft has planned to add to MS Office a plug-in for licensing the documents thus produced under one of the Creative Commons licenses (if the author so wishes, of course).

You can read about it in Slashdot, C|Net and Lawrence Lessig’s blog.

Now, a lot of people see it as something possitive (including Enrique Dans[es]), but I don’t see it completely clear. It seems to be a big boost to the popularity of CC licenses, no doubt about it.

But, is it good news to the freedom of the culture?. It would seem so, since more people will license their works under a CC (many even unwillingly, because they hit the incorrect button in their toolbar, or have the defaults of their Office wrongly configurated), but it is not. They key point is twofold:

1) What the hell is this plug-in good for? What can the author achieve with it that is not promptly achieved just adding a “This work is licensed under blah-blah-blah” manually (keyboard-lly)? It is implied that someone will write a 500-page book, but is too lazy to manually add a statement that could be inserted clicking the ultra-mega-kewl MS Offiz plug-in button…

2) What good is it to free one’s artistic (or otherwise) work under a permisive copyright, if it is burdened by a proprietary format such as those MS Office saves under?

These two facts (doesn’t benefit the author, doesn’t benefit the freedom) make it clear that (as all the steps MS takes) it mainly benefits MS. It effectively helps the author refrain from controling her work too tightly, but moves this “control” into its (MS’s) own hands. Free distribution of important, interesting, popular CC documents will make it even more important to have MS Office if these documents are DOC or similar. More so, MS could threat to cut support for the readers of such documents, increase their price, tighten the piracy controls for MS Office, and/or legally prosecute the compatible readers (OpenOffice.org)… all that supported by a more tight grip in the freedom of choice of the public.

And remember: all the aforementioned attacks to the users’ freedom can only be done from a power position… power given to them in first place by the users. Don’t fall for it!

Terrific movie! My weekly dose of cinema consisted this week on American Dreamz, a wild satire of some aspects of the western society (specially USA), but not forgetting to poke some fun at muslim fanatics, and everything in between.

The whole movie is a compilation of surrealist realism, incredibly believeable. The plot is a brutal parody of the reality shows like the Idol series, Popstars series, and Star Academy series (“our” pitiful Operación Triunfo is the Spanish branch of the latter), and also of the North-American government.

The president is played by Dennis Quaid, being portrayed as quite stupid a man, with an alcoholic past, a puppet of his Chief of Staff (Willem Dafoe), knowing little of international affairs, with verbal communication problems and a childish attitude with rapidly changing moods (rings a bell?).

The Chief of Staff (Willem Dafoe), is a 99% clon (or was it “clown”) of vice-president Cheney (who also was Chief of Staff under Ford, in the 75-77 period): egomaniac, manipulative, tyranical with this supposed boss, with bad temper and a foul vocabulary, and up to anything to stay in a power position. On top of that, he was also physically similar to our beloved friend-shooter (see Wikipedia).

The portrait of the acute hypocrisy of the show biz is not new, but this movie has it spot on. Specially interesting is Hugh Grant‘s character, the conductor of the American Dreamz show: selfish, shallow, slave to his job, which at the same time he hates and as hypocritical as famous.

Very funny, highly parodical, enjoyable but with a message of brutal criticism… watch it, have fun, and then make your considerations.

I just found the following quotation as the signature of a guy in a Dillo browser mailing list:

Naturally the common people don’t want war… but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

— Hermann Goering, Nazi and war criminal, 1883-1946

This morning I had breakfast watching some journalists on TV, discussing the morning news in a kind of informal debate. They were speaking about judge Grande-Marlaska’s latest decissions, and about the Justice being independent from the Political power (as it should be in a democracy).

Now, one of them uttered the following phrase:

I don’t think the judges are driven by what the politicians ask them to decide, because if it were so, I’d be very afraid.

Yeah, just like that! Not only once. She repeated the same motto, slightly changed to “[…], because if it were so, we would not be able to say we live in a democracy”

And no one corrected her in any way! No one had the guts to tell her: “Silly you! That is an argumentum ad consequentiam, and therefore a logical fallacy“.

What kind of idiots are feeding us with news, if they forget any kind of rigor in their argumentations? Their public display of broken logic will end up idiotizing the spectators, who will assume any non sequitur is a valid argument.

Just a week after Stallman’s talk, I read at Kriptopolis (Spanish) about a (alleged) malware piece, hidden into some freeware by the name Browsezilla. This is a perfect example of something free of cost not being half as good as a free/libre thing. This Browsezilla might be zero-cost to the user (freeware), but a piece of shit all the same, which stresses the fact that it is the FREEDOM of the Free Software that makes it great, not the PRICE.

It seems that the computer security company Panda Software warned about the freeware internet browser Browsezilla “visiting” porn sites in the background, fact unknown to the unsuspecting user. Its aim would be to increase the number of hits for those pages (and thus have them obtain higher revenues from advertising).

The lame idiots at browsezilla.org seem to be defending themselves, in such a bad english that makes it hard to take them seriously.

Now, both sides can be flaming each other until the end of times. Maybe in this case the issue is clear. Panda is not expected to spread FUD for the sake of it, whereas Browsezilla’s credibility is thin at best. However, imagine a security company not being completely honest, a freeware producer being apparently serious, and a bug/malware being veeery subtle to spot… endless debate, never fully establishing the complete truth.

On the other hand, were this Browsezilla free software, inspection of the code would settle the matter within minutes.

Stuff malware, stuff freeware, and stuff all non-free software.

This week I am late with my chronicle of the movie I have watched, as every week, on wednesday. Real life sucks. Or at least, sucks one’s attention into it, which is similar.

The movie I will comment is Kurt Wimmer’s Ultraviolet (Ultravioleta), starring Milla Jovovich.

Now, we have a bad ass female main character, delivering a fair amount of pain and death into unsuspecting dummies, who just happen to pass by, or (idiots!) put themselves in her way. It reminds one of movies like Aeon Flux, Underworld, and Resident Evil (in which Jovovich also starred), and, like the three of them, it is a smelly piece of crap. And I am sorry to say so, because I am quite a fan of Jovovich.

I would like to say that these movies pack some action that saves them from oblivion… but that would be too kind a thing to say. Really good action is more than senseless special effects, pretty bullet-time scenes, or people shooting and kicking each other.

The heroine of this movie, like most others, is clearly inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer series character Molly Millions (by the way, Gibson’s books are very recommendable), as all modern cute-looking butt-kicking killing-machine girls are (think of Trinity in The Matrix). A kind of action heroine who is not like Molly Millions would be, for example, Lt. Ripley in Alien. She is also effective in her fight against the enemy, but she actually struggles and suffers, and doesn’t have ultra-fast reflexes, strenght and speed, with a weapon use that would make John Rambo go pale, and a martial art expertise akin to that of Bruce Lee on top of Tony Jaa, and then throw in some Neo skillz for good measure.

The movie Ultraviolet is too hard to follow, too little explained, too ilogical, and too silly. All in all, don’t expect much if you go to watch it. Or better still, save your money for another movie.

Este post está disponible en castellano aquí

Yeah, right, the president and founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, gave a speech at the Koldo Mitxelena culture center in Donostia, last monday 19th.

Stallman, introduced by Iratxe Esnaola

My friend Julen and I (Txema didn’t come along), therefore, went to the Koldo Mitxelena to attend his talk. I must admit we liked what we heard.

The first thing one notices hearing Stallman talk is that he’s a showman. The guy whas seated at a table, but stood up to give the talk, adducing that he was a little sleepy, and so standing up would help him not fall asleep. Subsequently, and owing to the fact that the microphone was a tabletop one, he proceeded to disassemble it and use it as hand microphone, dismissing the inalambric microphone he was promptly offered. Mind you, he did catch our attention.

Stallman, with the tabletop mic

The second thing one can realize is that he has a very clear vision of stuff, and that it is catchy, because he speaks in such a reasonable and gentle way. I should mention that he gave the whole talk in Spanish, and quite fluently, albeit with a heavy American accent.

He commenced his speech enumerating the four basic liberties the FSF proposes for a software piece to be free:

Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.

Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.

Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

He then explained why these freedoms are vital, and I will next repeat some of his arguments.

Moral dilemma

He said, for example, that Freedom 2 is necessary to avoid some kind of dilemmas towards which software with non-free licenses lead us. Let’s assume we have a legal copy of a certain program, and therefore, he have accepted its license. Let’s also assume that a friend asks us for a copy of it. In these circumstances we face a dilemma, because we have to chose the lesser bad from two bads. If we decide to give a copy to our friend, we’ll be breaching our license, and it is never good to break an agreement we previously accepted. On the other hand, if we don’t give her a copy, we will be depriving a friend of us of a potential benefit, which is not good, either.

Someone told me, after commenting her this issue, that there is not such a dilemma, because: “What if your friend asks you for 1000 euros?”. OK, I would probably consider it negatively, sure. But refusing to lend 1000 euros or our car to a friend is not like doing so with a piece of software. With the former, we lose a material good to share it, but with the latter we lose nothing. The software is like knowledge in general: if we share it it doesn’t get divided, but multiplied. We negate our friend a copy of the software piece just because an abusive license forces us to do so. We do not get any benefit from it.

According to Stallman, the lesser bat is to share with our friend, because we just break an abusive license. Anyway, breaking an agreement, however abusive, is not good. The correct thing is not to sign the agreement in first place. Then only way to avoid the dilemma, he said, would be either not having friends, or not aqquiring proprietary software. He supported the latter.

Problems of the Proprietary Software

He continued the talk speaking about some problems that the proprietary software has, and how the aforementioned freedoms can help alleviate them.

Bad functionalities

The programmers may have implemented into the program some functions that the user doesn’t want, namely:

1) A proprietary program may have occult functions, that the user doesn’t know of, let alone control.

An example of this are the spyware, which, without her knowing, send the user’s personal data to its manufacturer. Such programs include Windows XP, Windows Media Player and TiVo systems. The latter sends the manufacturing company information fo what TV shows the user records, and when she watches them. In the same manner, Windows Media Player sends Microsoft info about what the user plays in it.

2) A program may, directly, not work under some circunstances. Such a functionality the user won’t desire, for sure, but in many cases, this functionality is not only present, but publicly declared. This is the clase of the DRM systems, or “Digital Restriction Management”, as Stallman calls it. Basically, a DRM-ed media (say, a DVD or a CD) tells its owner when and how access its content, and some OSs, like Windows and Mac OS, have the technicall characteristic that they do abide by this DRM rules. The iPod, for example, is “equiped” with the abusive DRM FairPlay. You can read further opinions on DRM by Stallman here. You can also read about a Sony DRM called XCP in my blog.

3) A proprietary program may have a backdoor, introduced by the programer to, potentially, gain access to any machine in which her program is installed. There’s people saying that, for example, the recent WMF vulnerability in Windows is actually a backdoor, intentionally put by Microsoft. I have also found news like this one (2002), speaking about backdoors installed in Windows for allowing NSA control.

It is apparent that governments all around the world (China being the most prominent case) are increasingly having second thoughts on Windows use in their computers, the reason being the danger of it having backdoors to give Microsoft or the government of the USA access to them. As long back as in 2000, the CNN published some reasons why China was changing its mind over proprietary OSs:

Those concerns have risen up recently in the form of stated policies favoring the use of the Linux operating system in government agencies, as well as a recent flurry of government commentaries warning of a U.S. “back door” to Windows operating systems. Officials have said China must develop its own OS to prevent an electronic military attack.

Stallman cited a 2001 case in India. It looks like a couple of Al-Qaeda members infiltrated de Indian division of Microsoft, and tried to introduce a backdoor into de Windows code. I have found some info at noticias.com[es], merit.edu, or Security Awareness Incorporated.

It was originally NewsBytes who aired the news, but the original news is no more accessible, and its address redirects one to the home page of the online Washington Post. Some Microsoft-friendly media tried to understate the case, without many arguments. They didn’t deny these people worked for MS, only that “they didn’t find any backdoor trace”. With their stupidity record, it doesn’t look like much of a guaranty to me…

This foul attempt was (we believe) stopped, but… what if there have been another successful ones? The quid of the matter is that we can not know. Only MS programmers can verify the presence of backdoors introduced by rogue employees. Do you really trust them to do it? Hadn’t you better have right to verify it yourself, or any other user?

The tree harmful functionalities Stallman mentions are a direct consequence of the fact that proprietary software does not have any of the four aforementioned freedoms. Free software will never be subject to these “functionalities”.

Errors

Any software piece, free or not, can have bugs. The difference is that the free software, by means of the Freedom 1, permits the users fix the bugs they find, and, by means of Freedom 3, share with others their corrections. In fact, Freedom 1 is not enough to handle the programing errors. Not all the users are programmers, and even if they were, there are too many programs to keep track of. That’s why Freedom 3 is fundamental. With this liberty, even the users who can’t program benefit. The Freedoms 1 and 2 are aimed at the users, and the 1 and 3 at programmers, but in the end everyone gets the benefit.

Various subjects

Among other things, Stallman commented that the development of the free software is democratic, because it develops following the user criteria, even if anyone can pay someone to program what she needs (but no one develops, because it’s not popular). He compared this to the autocratic development of the proprietary software, where the user ends up accepting whatever the programmer wants, instead of the other way around.

He also wondered about the hability to choose and the liberty. He said that being able to choose between different proprietary softwares (e.g. Windows and Macintosh) equals being able to choose our master, because once the election is made, we will fall in a dependency routine. The actual freedom is not having any master. Being able to choose is not necessarily freedom.

He talked on about freedom, and said that we have to fight for freedom when it is possible to win (no one asks to fight if it is useless), not when it is sure that we’ll win. If we all wait until the victory is assured, no one will take the first step, until it’s too late. We have to fight, and we have to expect the fight to be hard, even facing the eventuality of losing.

Near the end of the talk, he made a summary of the history fo the GNU software, and free software.

He also spoke about Trusted Computing, a system backed by some lobbies to make sure the computer does what the maker, and not the user, wants. In short, what it makes is pass some of the power the user has over her computer into the hands of the maker, so that the computer obeys the latter, not the former. That’s why Stallman proposes the term Treacherous Computing, because it makes the computer betray its user. According to him, using the term “trusted” or “treacherous” is a matter of what side of the fence we are. Stallman said this is a “conspiracy against the users, but not even secret nor ilegal!”.

Free Software and Education

He ended the talk saying that public education should use free software exclusively, for 3 reasons:

1) Economic savings. This is the most frivolous reason, but no less valid. There are no license fees, so you save money. This would be most advantageous in a public resource (education) that is deficitary in most countries. However, this advantage can be eliminated by the proprietary software companies giving away the licenses to schools and universities. In fact, that they do.

This, obviously, is not done out of generosity. The companies that give away their licenses do it to lock-in future users. They take advantage of the education system to train kids in the use of their products, and do it for free. When the student leaves the academic resources, he will have no more free licenses, and the company she works for won’t, either. But she will do have the need to use that software, because it is what she knows how to use. I consider that public education should not fall for it, and play their game so sheepishly.

2) When a student is puzzled by something, she asks the teacher. If the teacher can not answer, the student can try to find the answer by herself. Both options are impossible with the proprietary software. If a student wants to know the innards of her Windows computer, not only the teacher will not be able to dispel her doubts, but she will be forced to tell her that it is forbidden to even look for the answers. This is not what an educative system should encourage.

3) Moral education. The school must give a moral education, making the students see what is right and what is wrong. Sharing with others is right.Producing something for the common good is right. Looking for errors in one’s and others’ work, and working to fix them is right. Asking and answering freely is right.

Final details

Being the showman he is, and after a round of questions, Stallman delighted us with his Saint IGNUtius impersonation, given that many say he’s a Saint, and he doesn’t want to negate it.

Stallman, preaching

However, he made it clear that in the free software religion there is no god nor master, that anyone can be a saint, and that priesthood doesn’t imply celibacy.

It must be said that the sanctity aura he displays is NOT an old hard disk. In the past, it might have been, yes, but it transformed into his aura, for a major good :^)

At the end of the talk he signed some autographs, and took some pictures with his fans. He also gave away pro-GNU stickers, and sold (yes, sold!) some GNU keychains and pins, to raise funds for the FSF.

Stallman, signing for me a GPLv2 preamble I took there