handyfloss

As I said 2 months ago, I made the switch to [[IMAP]] for handling my [[Gmail]] e-mail. I have to say that it’s a switch that I don’t regret at all: it gives me the convenience and comfort I want.

However I have to admit that my long-used and much loved [[KMail]] was not up to the task, for some unknown reason. My main gripe with it was that reading, moving and deleting messages took forever, and refreshing folders was a royal pain. I thought it was an unavoidable problem, related to the way IMAP works. However, I decided to give other [[e-mail client|e-mail clients]] a chance, and that I did.

I have installed and run [[Mozilla Thunderbird|Thunderbird]] (actually, Icedove, the Debian version of TB), and so far it’s given me good impressions. All the slowness I suffered with KMail is gone, and I have to say this fact alone is driving me from KM to TB.

As an additional piece of info, here’s how to set “plain text” as default for sending messages. Why would you want that? Read these tips. The reason why TB has no obvious button to set “all plain text” or “all HTML” escapes me, but that seems to be the case. However, there is an “advanced” mode of doing it: go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Config Editor. From the variable/value list there, you have to set (by double-clicking, for example) “mail.identity.default.compose_html” to “false”. I also set “mail.html_compose” to “false”, but the important variable seems to be the first of the two. From that point on, all the new messages you compose will be plain text.

Just when you thought that the world of proprietary software and silly “intellectual property” business couldn’t do it worse, they surprise you!

This weekend I learned about a message from a big boss at Creative Labs to an individual nicknamed daniel_k at some [[Creative Labs]] forum. Please follow the link to the message, because it is very interesting. And don’t forget to read some of the responses.

The short story is that Creative Labs produces some sound cards and their drivers. Apparently some of the drivers would not work for Windows Vista, and daniel_k managed to program drivers for Vista (and Linux, I think), and distributed them for free (asking only for voluntary donations). The result: an open message in a forum, asking daniel_k to [[cease and desist]].

The rationale for CL to do that seems to be that they didn’t release Vista drivers for the sound cards on purpose, so that customers would have to buy new cards if they switched to Vista. With daniel_k’s contributions, such customers are not forced to dump the old card for a new one, so this costs CL money!

Another example of absolutely vile acts from vendors of proprietary software (were the drivers [[free software]], this discussion would be moot), and one more reason to say fuck you all!

The good part is that the story is already being spread around the net, and a lot of customers and potential customers are becoming angry customers and potential customers. I wish CL the worst for their vileness and short sightedness on the issue. They should have supported daniel_k, and use the ensuing possitive feedback campaign… but they didn’t. Shame on you, Creative Labs!

Yesterday evening I boldly decided to upgrade [[WordPress]] (the software this blog runs on), to version 2.5. [[DreamHost]], my hosting service, provides easy click-through installation and upgrades of software, so I used it for the upgrade.

Sadly, and probably for some mistake I did, everything ended up screwed, and my blog experienced some problems like not showing any post at all! I proceeded to contact the support team, and the response was awesome: they answered incredibly fast, and the solution was concise and correct.

I have to say that DreamHost has surprised me very positively!

This post tries to sketch a rule of the thumb to quickly check whether an idea/theory/belief is utterly useless or not. I have admittedly adapted it from the [[Bertrand Russell|russellian]] definition of [[Science]]. Recall that utterly useless ideas are not necessarily wrong. They are just that: utterly useless.

There is a single basic question you have to ask yourself when you invent/encounter a flashy new theory or idea like [[Psychokinesis|telekinesis]] or [[homeopathy]]:

Can I imagine any conceivable way of refuting this theory?

If the answer is “no”, then the theory is bullshit.

If you accept this, you are bound to abandon the theory if someone comes up with a valid experiment at which your theory fails (if someone challenges your telekinetic powers and you can not shut her mouth, you must accept you don’t have telekinetic powers).

On the other hand, if you don’t accept the above premise, you must, without excuse, believe in any other theory that can not be proved wrong, such as the [[Invisible Pink Unicorn]] or the [[Flying Spaghetti Monster]]. Failing to do so will undoubtedly qualify you as an absolute hypocrite.

Now, the long explanation…

Proving something true is theoretically impossible, but proving something wrong is trivial: if I say that all swans are white, no matter how many white swans I see, I will never be sure that the theory is true. On the other hand, after the first black swan I see, I will conclude without doubt that the theory was wrong.

Thus, “proving” some theory is usually equaled to designing an experiment in controlled conditions, where a result is expected from the theory, and we get precisely that result in the experiment. Obviously, we could have obtained a different result, and our theory would have been proved wrong. It is precisely the fact that a different result could potentialy refute our theory what makes the desired result confirm it. It follows that, if there is no conceivable circumstance under which the experiment could have failed, our theory can not be disproved, and therefore can not be “proved” through absence of refutation.

Take for example a [[precognition|seer]] who claims to be able to see the future. Her theory is not necessarily bullshit: one can devise a test, failing which would mean that she is wrong. For example, one can ask her to “see” something that she can not access by normal means, and that she can not guess by chance, for example the next lottery winning number. If she guesses correctly, the theory is temporarily accepted. If she fails, the theory is dropped.

Not it comes the funny twist: any argument that tries to make the precognition theory above survive after a failure (e.g. “I do not control when I can see the future”, “I only see abstract visions that I have to interpret afterwards”, and so on… you know the thing), automatically turns it into bullshit. Directly. And that because of the little rule of the thumb I present above.

As outlined in some previous posts[1,2,3,4], I have been playing around with a piece of Python code to process some log files. The log files to process were actually host.gz files from some [[BOINC]] projects, and the data I want to extract from them is quite simple: the Windows, Linux and Mac shares in the number of computers contributing to them (and the [[BOINC Credit System|work they do]]). By logging this processed data myself, I can see the time evolution of this share, and hopefully show the slow but steady rise of GNU/Linux :^)

I figured out that the contribution to distributed computing projects could be a reasonable indicator of the Windows predominance status. There are many other indicators (for example the number of visits to a web site, e.g. this very one), and I don’t claim that this one is “better”. I just want to add it to the reference list for the reader.

There is a problem with “Windows vs. Linux” figures, and it is that they are not really “competing” products. When cars or soft drinks are the subject, one can figure out the [[market share]], looking at the number of items sold. Linux being [[free software]], one can hardly measure the amount of “sold copies”, and with Windows being pre-installed in most new computers, one can not really trust the “number of computers sold = number of Windows copies sold”, because some users even remove the Windows partition and install Linux on top of it.

Counting the visits to some sites is not without problems, either. Any web site will have a particular audience, and the result will be biased by that fact. When my blog was in WordPress.com, I had roughly as many visits from Windows users as from Linux users, and almost all of them used Firefox as a browser. Obviously this data is not an accurate reflection of the world at large. It so happened that free software users are more likely to surf to sites like mine, hence the bias.

So, without further ado, let me introduce the “BOINC Host Statistics” program (BHS). Here you are a link to its home page. You can find results I have harvested so far in the Screenshots section. For example, the SETI@home credit generation rate statistics follows:

What the plot tells us is that (at the time of writing this) 500 million [[BOINC Credit System|cobblestones]] are being granted to contributors each day. Of them, around 82% are being given to Windows computers, 9-10% to Mac, 8% to GNU/Linux, and the rest to computers running other OSs.

Another reason to love FLOSS: developers are close to the users, and they LISTEN.

I recently started using the Sociable WordPress plugin for this blog. This wonderful plugin by Joost de Valk, lets you put some links to social bookmarking/news/recommendation sites on the web at the bottom of each post, so a reader can send your post to such a site with a single click.

There are many WP plugins that do this, but I liked the looks of Joost’s, and the pleasant way of managing it. I chose Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, Technorati and Slashdot, but I felt that at least two sites that I liked were missing from the available sites list: Menéame and Barrapunto.

So I boldly decided to contact the developer, Joost de Valk, and ask for them:

Hi Joost,

I have just discovered your “Sociable” WordPress plugin, and I like it a lot.

However, there is always room for improvement, and as such I would like to suggest you to add links to the following sites:

Menéame (http://meneame.net/)
Barrapunto (http://barrapunto.com/)

Both are Spanish “versions” of popular sites: Digg and Slashdot, respectively.

I mainly write in English, but I think that blogs with a Spanish audience could benefit a lot from these links.

Now I realize I even forgot to say “thanks in advance” or anything… I was a bit unpolite, I fear. Anyway, his answer came a couple of days later:

I’ll add them in the next version, coming out… tonight I guess :)

Can I trust upon you to promote it a bit there? :)

Cheers,
Joost

It is actually true that a new version of Sociable has been released, and it includes Menéame and Barrapunto as available sites. So here it goes your promotion, Joost ;^)

Isn’t it great when people collaborate and are generally nice to each other? Isn’t everyone tired of a society where people don’t do anything unless they get money or power in return?

Thanks Joost and other bona fide developers for your great work.

Last week a new power failure affected the Campus. At least the PCs at the DIPC were reseted around midnight. So, here goes the updated list of blackouts I have been able to compile, with comments if any:

1. 2008-Mar-05
2. 2007-Dec-10 (I used the reboot of my computer to install kernel 2.6.22-3)
3. 2007-Oct-16
4. 2007-Aug-27 (at least three short power failures, 5-10 minutes apart)
5. 2007-May-19
6. 2006-Oct-21 (they warned beforehand)
7. 2006-Sep-14 (Orpheus fell, the DNSs fell, the DHCP servers fell)
8. 2006-Jul-04 (Orpheus didn’t fall)
9. 2006-Jun-16
10. 2006-Jun-13
11. 2006-Jun-08
12. 2006-Jun-04
13. 2006-May-26 (The card-based automated access to the Faculty broke down)
14. 2005-Dec-21
15. 2005-Dec-13

Summary: 15 blackouts in 813 days, or 54.2 dpb (days per blackout). 86 days since last blackout. Average dpb went up by 2.2.

First post in the series: here

I really like the idea behind OpenID, and I already have an account at Weblogs SL. Of course, my WordPress.com also was a valid OpenID provider. Moroever, my isilanes.org site (and before that my EHU page) was turned into an OpenID provider by adding the following lines (extra blank added before “link”, to make text visible):

< link rel="openid.server" href="http://openid.blogs.es/index.php/serve" />
< link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://openid.blogs.es/isilanes" />

But I was not completely happy with that. I when signing a comment in a blog (for example) with my WP blog URL, my nickname would appear as “handyfloss” (the name of the blog), not “isilanes” (my nick). If I used the Weblog URL (or that of www.ehu.es/isilanes), my nick would be “isilanes”, but clicking on my nick would take the reader to that URL, instead of to my blog.

With this WordPress.org blog these issues are gone. I have installed the Yadis plugin, and now I can sign with the “isilanes” nick, and give a link to this blog.

The configuration of the plugin is really simple: go to Options->Yadis->Add New Service, and select “Other…“. You will be asked for two data: “OpenID Server” and “OpenID Delegate” (both provided by your OpenID account, with Weblog or whoever). Fill in the requests, click “submit”, and you’re done!

The European Union decided last wednesday that they’d impose a 899M euro penalty on Microsoft for not providing the information they had been asked to release in 2004.

The short story goes like this: the EU decided that MS was to make public the specifications of some protocols and formats for allowing interoperability of Windows with other OSs. MS decided that this would be bad for their monopoly, so refused. Later, they pretended to comply, by sending the EU 30k pages of basically bullshit (for practical purposes, that documentation was useless). Now, the EU has decided that we should take none of it, and has fined MS for not complying.

Go, EU, go!

I just read, through a link provided by Julen, that apparently Gmail CAPTCHA has been broken (referred to at Slashdot).

This CAPTCHA in particular is the one Google asks a new user to identify correctly to create a new Gmail account. If a robot, or any other automated process, is able to make the correct guess and pretend is a legit user, this opens the doors for massive amounts of new Gmail accounts for spammers. We’ll see what comes out of that (more spam, probably).