I’m worried and frankly I’ve been worried for a while. The disturbing trend in the last few years has turned the Internet into a police state. Oh sure we think countries like Iran and Malaysia are the bad guys. But, are they? The technology they use comes form European and American companies, and they are only following the practices set up by European and American governments.

In America we are suppose to have laws that say you can not spy on it’s citizens, well that’s out the door now with the patriot act, warrantless wiretaps, and a host of other laws have made the United Sates Constitution void.

It’s no better if not worst in Europe, just look at London, big brother is alive and well. Is there really a need to have each person in that city on camera an average of 300 times a day.

Now thanks, some how to laws that got passed in the last few years, your ISP is spying on you, and spying on you hard. They filter what protocols you can use, what files you download, and in many cases cut off your connection with no trial, no conviction, no proof. It goes against everything a free society stands for and in most cases it’s all about money. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the culprit on this one. It basically turns all ISP’s (in America) in to a police force. It leaves you with no recourse.  After all the notion of innocent until found guilty is a concept that is all but forgotten in America. The MPAA and RIAA have this tit for tat thing going on right now and to me enough is enough. Let’s face it movies are making millions, I still see all the current rap stars are keeping their Bentleys even in this current economic down turn. It’s about the money and not about Justice, that’s why even though copyright infringement is a criminal offense it’s only getting tried in civil courts. It’s wrong to have this going on and it needs to stop.

Now I can’t even trust my beloved Ubuntu, let me just state for us all. We don’t want our data tracked, traced, or manipulated. This is getting out of hand and I see no end in sight.

So what are we to do? I, a law abiding citizen (for the most part, hell for all I know writing this blog is against some law some where) have started using, ipblocking software, running anyomizers, and encrypting everything. What’s next getting a regular phone line and going back to the Bulletin Board Systems of the ’70’s and ’80’s, I feel that is where we are heading or something like small trusted interconnected darknets.

Yep, enough is enough time to donate to the EFF.

Oh and if you see bad spelling, wrong punctuation, or for god sakes the wrong sentence structure. I don’t give a shit.

July 15th I took part in my second ignite event and what an event it was. Standing room only and some of the best 5 minute presentations you will ever see. This time around I helped work the slides and gave others a chance to present. I was able to set up a table and handed out over 100 Ubuntu disk and about 40 fedora (would have handed out more but I ran out).

What a great time canlt wait for the next one.

Penumbra Collection is selling for $5 this weekend! Starting on Friday the 17th of July and ending on Monday morning the 20th of July! This is a deal you just can’t refuse. I’ve played the demos before and injoyed them, when I saw that I could get all 3 games in the series for jst $5.00 it made it a pretty simple choice.

Penumbra is a first person horror adventure focussing on story, immersion and puzzle solving. Violence and combat is hardly an option.

I’m running it on Ubuntu 9.04 with no issues at all on a Nvida graphics card.

So pick up your gnu/linux copy today and support this great  independent developer.

Thanks Frictional Games I predict a very unproductive weekend.

That’s kind of like the dentist telling you the root canal will just sting a little. To think all this because people want tomboy running on Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux’s out there. So basically it looks like they are saying we promise not to cause you any grief  if you use C#. Honestly all this Mono talk got little old Microsoft thinking and they had to do something. If they didn’t they ran the risk of turning more than a few developers off.  I still think trusting these guys is a bad idea and why give your self the development headache.

I mean really, how gulable do you have to be to trust something called a Microsoft community promise.

I love my little eee running Ubuntu Netbook remix, crap is it fast. I mean damn fast. Recently where I work we purchased 6 eee all running WindowsXP Home, people liked the portability so much 3 others purchased them in my department that’s a total of 10 eee running in two departments. Then we started comparing speed, ease of use, and resource management. Needless to say mine one. To make a long story short of the 10 eee’s 7 run Ubuntu 9.04 remix, the other 3 dual boot. So Really? Gnu/Linux is dead on the netbook. Sure I would of liked it better if we didn’t give Microsoft the illusion that they are selling more netbook’s with their operating system but I’m guessing this type of switch is going on all over corporate America.

Then, as we all suspected the whole death thing is all FUD and you guessed it Microsoft is behind all the FUD. Groklaw uncovers the smoking gun, and this quote discribes exactly what I do on almost a daily basis.

Let us customers choose what we prefer from a fair and even playing field, please. I’d like to buy the products that are being squashed. A lot of us would like to. And we are not being allowed to get the products that we desire. I don’t want Microsoft software. I’d like a choice. And I shouldn’t have to buy a netbook with Microsoft on it and install Linux myself. I will, but I should not have to.

It’s time someone take the modern day robber baron to task, I for one will do what I can to not purchase Microsoft products. FUD be damned.

I’m currently organizing the New Mexico GNU/LinuxFest. At first we had it listed as New Mexico LinuxFest. The LinuxFest  name was copied from many other festivals and I thought all was just fine. However, after a friend pointed out to me that he uses the term GNU/Linux I decided to look into the name. After all I of course had heard of GNU but like many others I had no idea what GNU was all about. A darn good place to start is this wiki article, you get both sides of the argument and plenty of reference matrial.

After doing some research and  reading a bunch of articles for and against the use of GNU/Linux or just plain ‘ol Linux I’ve decided that whenever I’m talking of the complete operating system I’ll use the term GNU/Linux and when I’m referring to the kernel I’ll use the term Linux. I feel I can’t get much fairer than that.

Yes I’m painfully aware of  how old this argument is and I’m sure I’ll get a comment or two of  how stupid I am and what a waste of time, or this just divides the people. The truth is as I started looking into the issue I realized that by referring to the whole system as just Linux I was wrong. I was one of the many “Linux users” that had no idea the contributions that GNU played (as well as many others) in making all that I do on a computer possible. So yes I think they deserve credit and it’s high time that I at the very least give credit where credit is due.

I’m also calling free software well, free software (as in freedom) and not open source. Funny thing is this has nothing to do with the Free Software Foundation and their views on the subject but everything to do with the business practices of these so called open source companies out there. Now don’t get me wrong I think everyone has a right to make money after all I run plenty of Ubuntu servers where I work and  my bosses would never let that happen if support where not available for that platform. Canonical makes money off the support contracts not selling me a better version of the server software. Canonical gets it right where many are getting it wrong.

Companies that are calling themselves open source while trying to convince you that they mean free are being dishonest. What we have here is just plan old fashioned bait-and-switch and the practice needs to be stopped. Giving me a watered down version of your software, (please stop calling it the community version your insulting those of us that work hard for the free software community) while keeping the good stuff for the paying customers is fine, just stop acting like you’re the savior of the free software movement, you’re not,  you’re a proprietary software company and you’re vision has nothing to do with the free software ideology.

The point I’m trying to make is that names do mean something and pretending that they don’t is unfair, dishonest, and in many cases wrong. Sure you can keep saying Linux I’ll still be your friend but for me now that I’ve done the research GNU/Linux just makes sense.

This sure does look like a good idea to me.

This project aims to improve user experience by:

1. Identifying 100 bugs that appear relatively easy to fix but that negatively impact user experience.
2. Channeling resources to fixing those bugs.
3. Measuring and celebrating progress towards fixing those bugs.
4. Tracking impact of the fixes in upstreams over successive versions.

Important! Please do file as papercuts:

- bugs that are system-wide (Nautilus, Gnome panel, etc), rather than app-specific (F-Spot, OOo, Terminal, etc.)
- bugs that impact standard workflows (like connecting to the network, copying files, browsing folders, etc.), rather than specialised or corner case workflows
- bugs that are easy to address, rather that ones that require significant design or development efforts
- issues with existing features, rather than requests for new features
- bugs that relate to usability and design (like size of the notification bubbles), rather than broken software (e.g. notifications flickering in fullscreen)

So go on tell them what you think, I sure know I will.

Each and every day I learn about something GNU/Linux can do that Windows or Apple just can’t. 64 bit Air from Adobe, my Ubuntu 9.04 system booting in 37 seconds (with 10 seconds a goal for (9.10), and now I here GNU/Linux will be the first to have USB 3.0 drivers. Sarah Sharp talks all about it on her blog, thanks Sarah this just rocks! It sure looks like it did come at the right time cause hardware is on the way too.

All of this is happening because the GBU/Linux user base is growing and growing. Looks like I picked the right Operating System after all.

Wow this is no netbook, 160gig hard drive, 2 gigs of ram, DVD burner and only offering Ubuntu very cool. Thanks Dell.

In this weeks (May 18th, 2009) Computerworld print edition’s opinion column “Desktop Linux: Why you Shouldn’t Care” Preston Gralla (who?) bashes Linux for no apparent reason other than to bash something he obviously knows nothing about. I’ve never heard of this guy before so I checked out the rest of his blog post, and to my surprise (note the sarcasm) yep he loves his Microsoft. It’s fine to love your operating system of choice but it’s another thing to spread out right lies about the operating system you choose not to use.

He tries to make the point that Linux use, as measured by Net Applications has crossed the 1% market share barrier as insignificant, really then why do you talk about it all the time. You mention it in your Computerworld article and in numerous blog post. Sounds like that 1% sure caught your attention.

Then there is the ever so quoted by Preston Gralla that Linux is dead on the netbook. Well the netbook market has changed and Microsoft is the culprit I’ll grant you that, but everyone fails to mention that for Microsoft to achieve this they had to drastically discount the licensing and in some cases actually give away Windows XP Home Edition to the OEMs. I’m guessing Microsoft might not be so generous with that shiny new Windows 7 even a crippled one that’s been talked about. You’ll also never here from these so call pundits that Linux maintains a healthy market share and some even predicting Linux to regain as much as 50% of the netbook market.

In his greatest showing of his utter lack of knowledge of the modern Linux Operating System his says that Linux will never make it on the desktop because it’s to hard to install software. Let’s make this very clear it is not 1995 installing software is so easy now my 87 year old grandmother has no issues at all on her Ubuntu 9.04 system. For those of you that don’t know (I’m taking to you Preston) click applications then Add/Remove programs….yep, that’s all you have to do to have thousands of applications at your finger tips. Works pretty much the same with fedora, OpenSUSE, or just about any other Linux Distribution. With .deb and .rpm packages (the two most common packaging methods) installing software really is not an issue. Sure you can run into issues with software that is still being developed, but not much of an issue for the average user.

I sure don’t want this to sound like a personal attack, however if you want to criticise Linux I welcome that, but make it constructive and don’t tell out right lies. The facts, Linux is gaining market share on the desktop. Linux is becoming very competitive and yes it’s 18 years old but is only been about the last 2 years that Linux has come in to it’s own.

Tell ya what Preston I got a nice new shiny Ubuntu 9.04 disk hot of the burner, I’ll send it to you (hey I can do that legally ya know) give it a shot, see how easy it is to install software, go ahead I’m not worried it will just work.

Oh I noticed you wrote a few books one of them called “How the Internet works” – pretty much on the shoulders of a lot of Linux Mr. Gralla a lot of Linux.