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My Oracle Support download issues via wget.sh

2015-09-24T10:42:00.001-07:00

If you're having trouble downloading patches via wget.sh from My Oracle Support, change the line the line says:

WGET=/usr/bin/wget

WGET="/usr/bin/wget --no-check-certificate --secure-protocol=TLSv1"

This is a very insecure fix, but a very, very convenient one.

Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint: Screensaver password auth doesn't work but login and sudo work fine

2014-08-24T07:12:00.001-07:00

On Debian or Ubuntu if your screensaver (i.e., xscreensaver, gnome-screensaver or cinnamon-screensaver) doesn't seem to be working, but login is working fine for local users, it's a permissions problem.

This has to with the design of the PAM authentication stack. While easy to forget given the nature of what PAM does, it's important to remember that PAM isn't a daemon running with root privileges; it's a library that runs with with the same effective UID and GID as the calling program. Let me repeat that to make it clear: PAM is a library that runs with the same effective UID and GID as the calling program. So you don't forget, I want you to write this out, longhand, 100 times. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Okay, so where is this permissions problem? I'm getting to that. Both /bin/login and your display manager (mdm, gdm, kdm, lightdm, etc.) run as root; that means they can read and write anything. This is also true for /bin/su and /usr/bin/sudo, which are SUID root (meaning that they run as root no matter who executes them). Running as root always masks permissions problems. (New sysadmins need to write that out 100 times, the rest of you have already figured out what the problem is by now; if not, keep reading.)

However, xscreensaver (and its inferior cousins gnome-screensaver, kde-screensaver and cinnamon-screensaver) does not normally run as root. If it did, it would have problems writing to your X display. It runs as a normal user account.

When using pam_unix, the password is checked by running a helper program /sbin/unix_chkpwd. On traditional Linux and Unix systems, this program is SUID root. This unix_chkpwd program must have read access to the /etc/shadow fle. If unix_chkpwd is SUID root, it can authenticate anyone's password. On recent Debian-based distributions, this program is not SUID root, but is instead SGID to 'shadow.' Under this configuration, PAM will not allow a non-root user to check any password but his own.

The upshot of all of this is that unix_chkpwd must be able to read /etc/shadow. The only way it can do is if the GID of /etc/shadow is set to 'shadow' and the permissions on the file are 640. So if the permissions are, say, 600 or with GID of root, unix_chkpwd won't be able to read the file and will helpfully spit out the following diagnostic in /var/log/auth.log:

unix_chkpwd[6303]: check pass; user unknown

From here, just fix the file permissions, do a pkill -9 xscreensaver && xscreenaver -no-splash and try it again. You should be all set now.

Stupid shell script tricks!

2014-05-16T10:34:00.000-07:00

From here out, on Fridays, I will post a Stupid Shell Script Trick. What's a stupid shell script trick? It's something you can do with a Unix shell (typically bash or ksh or ash or csh), that's both A) almost (but not quite) completely useless and B) entirely instructive.

Today's installment: Fortune and Cowsay with Random Cows

Fortune and Cowsay with Random Cows

Firstly, fortune(6) is program that spits out random sayings, along the lines of a Chinese fortune cookie. You type "fortune" and it spits out a random quote or saying from a file that was historcially just called "fortunes",but is now typically a whole bunch of files containing various categories of fortunes.

OTOH, cowsay(6) is a program that takes the standard output of another command prints it out in cartoon balloon with a cartoon "cow", all in ASCII art, of course. You can specify a different cow with cowsay's -f switch, as in:

[me@hostname ~]$ uname -sr | cowsay -f tux
________________________
< Linux 3.5.0-46-generic >
------------------------
   \
    \
        .--.
       |o_o |
       |:_/ |
      //   \ \
     (|     | )
    /'\_   _/`\
    \___)=(___/

What if you'd like to randomize the cow? Well, cowsay has no built-in functionality for this (as yet). I've heard some distros used to come with a script that does just that, but fortunately for us, it's fairly trivial to write one using bash's built-in random-number generator accessible via $RANDOM. (Yes, yes, paranoid cryptonerds, I know bash's RNG is really probably a PRNG, but we're randomizing cows here, not securing super-secret data from the prying eyes of the military-industrial complex.)

First thing we need to do is find the cows. On Debian-based distros, these will typically be /usr/share/cowsay/cows, but maybe you put some custom cows somewhere else -- in which case, don't bother asking me where you put them! And, also, you knew that if you did "dpkg -L cowsay" or something similar. Let's set variable:

#!/bin/bash
COWS=/usr/share/cowsay/cows

Note that this script pretty much requires a recent bash(1) since it uses many bash-isms. (Sorry, +Peter da Silva.)

Now let's compile a list of cows!

cows=""
for cow in $(ls -1 $COWS/*); do
cows="$cows $(basename $cow | sed 's/.cow$//')"
done

If we look at the files in /usr/share/cowsay/cows, we can see that they all end in ".cow". cowsay won't take '-f /usr/share/cowsay/cows/tux.cow', it wants '-f tux', so we need to lop off the .cow and the directory name. Note that we could have just changed the current directory to /usr/share/cowsay/cows and did a 'ls -1', but we still needed to lop off the .cow file extension. And that's exactly what our little for loop above does. What we're building is a list space-separated cow names like "apt beavis bong", etc.

Now it just so happens that bash will interpret any string surrounded in parenthesis as a space-delimited array of strings. So, we need an array, and we need a count of the number of elements in that array. (We'll see why we need the count shortly):

cows=($cows)
num_cows=${#cows[*]}

Next, we need to select a cow at random. As any first-year computer science major knows, you can get a random number between 0 and n by taking the modulus of a random positive integer and n. Since bash gives us exactly that random positive integer in $RANDOM, then we can pick a random index into the array of $cows with something like:

$((RANDOM % num_cows))

Which allows us to pick a cow like so:

cow="${cows[$(( RANDOM % num_cows))]}

Finally, we just pipe the output of fortune into cowsay with a "-f $cow" argument:

fortune | cowsay -f $cow

The completed script follows.

#!/bin/bash
COWS=/usr/share/cowsay/cows
cows=""
for cow in $(ls -1 $COWS/*); do
cows="$cows $(basename $cow | sed 's/.cow$//')"
done
cows=($cows)
num_cows=${#cows[*]}
cow="${cows[$(( RANDOM % num_cows))]}"
fortune | cowsay -f $cow

CPAN 'glob' trapped by operation mask errors

2013-12-24T12:16:00.003-08:00

If you're getting something like:

Catching error: "'glob' trapped by operation mask at (eval 39) line 1.

from CPAN and you're behind a proxy, it's probably that the proxy is blocking the module lists. Check the files in .cpan/sources for error redirect pages.

You'll keep getting the error until you

rm -rf .cpan

On recent Debian-based distros, this is probably more like

rm -rf ~/.local/share/.cpan

That'll fix it for you.

SketchUp with Web Dialogs on 64-bit Linux Revisited

2013-09-08T09:11:00.001-07:00

Recent versions of Wine have added 64-bit Windows support. Unfortunately, not everything works on 64-bit Wine, particularly Internet Explorer.

Worse, +Dan Kegel's otherwise excellent winetricks added a Sketchup "trick" that's obviously based on my earlier post from a couple of years ago on this topic Unfortunately, it doesn't work. If you do a 'winetricks sketchup' what you're going to end up with is a version of SketchUp that doesn't work with web dialogs, and worse, you won't be able to install Internet Explorer to get them working. If you're reading this, you probably know that web dialogs are absolutely required for many plugins, Google Earth integration, and the Dynamic Components feature of SketchUp Pro.

So, here's what I did most recently to get SketchUp working complete with web dialogs.

First, you'll need to create a new 32-bit Wine prefix. Again, I will stress that it's important that you do all of these things in a brand-new clean Wine prefix; trying to do this in an existing Wine prefix is not likely to work. It seems these days the canonical place to stick them is in ~/.local/share/wineprefixes, so put them there.



export WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/sketchup

export WINEARCH=win32

wineboot

In the same terminal, then do:


winetricks ie7

Finally, you need to use winetricks to make sure the following are installed:

comctl32ocx
gdiplus
gdiplus_winxp
msls31
msxml3
pngfilt
wininet
wsh56vb
xmllite

Next, check to make sure ActiveX is working. You may need to ensure that IE's security settings are set to enable ActiveX in the Internet Zone.

Once you have IE and ActiveX working, you can then run the SketchUp installer. Follow my earlier posts to ensure that hardware acceleration is forced on in SketchUp. Again, I'll reiterate the importance of not installing Windows themes or msstyles; these are likely to break web dialogs.

Nearly free mobile tethering for your Android smartphone

2013-05-18T06:23:00.001-07:00

Oh, sure. There's PdaNet and EasyTether. There's also FoxFi, but it doesn't work with all phones and probably won't work for you if have an HTC phone unless it has Ice Cream Sandwich on it. (Full disclosure: I paid for and use EasyTether.) But if all you want is Web access, and you don't care about VPNs or anything else, there is a cheap ($1.50) solution if you're willing to go through a bit of work (free if you're willing to go through a lot more work.)

Download (and pay for) QuickSSHd. It's only a buck and a half. I didn't write it and I don't even know the author, so I get no monetary benefit for recommending it. QuickSSHd is based on the open source Dropbear SSH server.

Next, you need an SSH client on your PC. On Linux, you'll probably already have one installed. On Windows, you can use PuTTY.

Run it on your phone tap the "on" button. The screen will display your phone's IP address.

SSH to your the IP address on your phone and enable your ssh client's socks proxy tunnel on some port. You'll probably have to use a high-numbered port, above 10000.

Then just set your PC's web browser to use a socks proxy on that port.

That's it.

Getting the Sun Nimbus Gnome theme on Oracle LInux 6

2012-06-23T18:25:00.002-07:00

It seems like the Nimbus theme should have been included in Oracle Linux 6, but it wasn't. So, here's how to do it.

I found the Nimbus theme on GNOME-Look.org. This command will download it directly:

wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:\

/philip_petev/Fedora_15/src/nimbus-0.1.7-2.1.src.rpm

Next, install it, which will place it in the rpmbuild directory in your $HOME directory (which should create the structure for you if you don't already have one). You do not need to be root.

rpm -ivh nimbus-0.1.7-2.1.src.rpm

Now, you need to install all of the tools necessary to build it.

yum install rpm-build icon-naming-utils glib2-devel \

gtk2-devel gettext intltool automake autoconf libtool gnome-common

Finally, change into the directory where the .spec file is located.
cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS
You need to change a few things to get this to build correctly on Oracle Linux and give you the 'branding' logo for your Applications menu. Edit the file 'nimbus.spec'. Change 'redhat-artwork' to 'oracle-logos' on line 45. Change 'Bluecurve' to 'System' on line 89. Comment out these three lines, a line or two down from that:

%if 0%{?rhel}
NEWICON=$(echo $NEWICON|sed -e 's/places/mimetypes/')
%endif

Save the file then do:

rpmbuild -bb nimbus.spec

Then wait the RPMs to build.

Afterwards, you just need to install the RPMS:

cd ../RPMS/$(uname -m)
rpm -ivh
gtk-nimbus-engine-0.1.7-2.1.x86_64.rpm\
nimbus-icon-theme-0.1.7-2.1.x86_64.rpm

Upgrading Oracle VM 3.x XE database to SE or EE

2012-06-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

Oracle VM 3.x ships with Oracle XE 11gR2. However, according to Oracle Support Document 1352472.1, unlike previous versions of Oracle VM, Oracle will no longer support Oracle XE for production systems. The official recommendation, and the recommendation of blogger 'rogerovm', is to to setup an Oracle 11g SE or EE database instance prior to installing Oracle VM Manager.

But what if you have already installed Oracle VM Manager, against the advice of the installer, with Oracle XE and now want to use this database in production?

No problem. You can install Oracle Database 11gR2 11.2.0.3 by downloading patchset 10404530 from My Oracle Support. This patchset includes a complete install image, so there is no need to download any other version. See the Patch Set Notes for more information.

Install this on your Oracle VM Manager host (stop OVMM first, but leave the database running.). During install, specify that you are upgrading an existing database. During the post-install process, the Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA) will be launched and you will be able to upgrade your XE SID. Since the new SID absolutely cannot be named 'XE' (or at least the DBUA won't allow it), you will have to change your instance name. I suggest something like 'OVMM', but you can pick whatever valid Oracle SID name you like.

This means that you will have to modify your Oracle VM Manager installation to point to the new database instance. This is easily done, however. Just edit the file $ORACLE_BASE/ovm-manager-3/machine1/base_adf_domain/config/jdbc/OVMDS-6373-jdbc.xml. For a default install, this file will be located at /u01/app/oracle/ovm-manager-3/machine1/base_adf_domain/config/jdbc/OVMDS-6373-jdbc.xml.

Change the line that reads:

jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:XE

to

jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:OVMM

or whatever SID and port you specified during install.

After installation, make sure you stop the listener for XE and start the listener for SE or EE. Then you can restart Oracle VM Manager. If you get any OVMDS-related errors, you messed up your JDBC configuration; don't panic, just check the jdbc: line above and make sure it is correct.

Getting Oracle VM 3.0.3 VNC Console working correctly on Oracle LInux 6

2012-06-02T11:00:00.001-07:00

I've been working Oracle VM 3.0.3, lately, Oracle's server virtualization product aimed squarely at VMWare's vSphere (ESX/ESXi and vCenter). Oracle VM matches many of vSphere's features, including live migration of virtual machines, clustered storage, automatic load balancing of virtual machines across a server pool, VM templates, high availability failover, and a virtual networking infrastructure.

In our current environement, we have an Oracle Linux 6 terminal server environment serving up our Linux administration interfaces. One of the problems with this is that when logging to the Oracle VM Manager (OVMM), accessing the VNC consoles for the VMs doesn't work out of the box. The problem is with IcedTea/OpenJDK.

IcedTea includes a javaws binary that doesn't seem to like the ampersand ('&') that OVMM seems to like to stuff into the JNLP file. That in and of itself would be okay if we could just write a script that replaces the & with & or strips out everything from ampersand onward, or whatever and be on our merry way. Unfortunately, it doesn't work -- IcedTea won't retrieve anything from the resulting URL.

The javaws binary that comes with the corresponding version of the JRE or JDK doesn't have this problem. It parses the XML just fine with the ampersand in the URL -- in violation of the XML standard, of course.

So, you'd think you should just have to point your browser to launching the javaws in the JRE or JDK and you'd be all set. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work either as there seems to be some sort of compatibility issue between JRE's javaws binary and the classpath library in the OpenJDK.

So, you have to not only install the Oracle JRE, but you'll also have to make sure that the JAVA_HOME variable points to the JRE.

This is easily accomplished by creating a wrapper script that simply sets JAVA_HOME in the environment and then launches the JRE's javaws.

Something simple like:

#!/bin/bash
jnlp="$*"
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jre1.6.0_31
JAVA_WS=$JAVA_HOME/bin/javaws
$JAVA_WS $jnlp

should do the trick. Depending on the browser you are using, you may have to put in additional code to strip spaces or shell characters out of the JNLP filename. I leave that as an exercise to the reader. :)

Google Sketchup and Wine: Best Practices

2011-10-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

Having run Sketchup for quite a while under Wine, I highly recommend the following best practices:

Always install and run on a clean Wine prefix

You should use a separate Wine prefix just for SketchUp and never, ever install anything else. I really, really mean this. Installing other applications in your Sketchup wine prefix is likely to break it.

Backup your Sketchup Wine prefix

If you do, for some reason, get the urge to install something else other than Sketchup in your Sketchup Wine prefix, for the sake of the Goddess, back up your Sketchup Wine prefix. You can do this by simply making a backup copy of the directory that contains the Wine prefix. Keeping a backup is still a good idea, because if you encounter a problem, you can always restore from the backup.

Never run with Windows "skins" or "themes"

Do not run with any skins or themes, especially not the Windows XP theme. Themes tend to break dialog boxes, especially web dialogs. You can always tweak the color scheme to match your desktop theme. (Hint: Use something like GColor2 to grab the colors for your desktop and add them as custom colors in winefg)

Don't use your operating system's video drivers

Don't use 3D accelerated video card drivers from your distribution. I know it's a pain in the a**, but manually install the latest video driver from your video card manufacturer. This means you will have to manually re-install that driver after every kernel update. It's a pain, yes, but video card manufacturers fix bugs in their drivers all the time and you really, really need these fixes.

Use an Nvidia card

ATI/AMD cards other than the FireGL cards suck because they don't fully support OpenGL. OTOH, all Nvidia-based cards fully support OpenGL. Use Nvidia.

Load up on RAM

If SketchUp seems slow, throw more RAM at it. Load up your box with lots and lots of RAM. The more, the better. A faster CPU won't make as much difference as more memory will.

Use the latest Wine development versions

SketchUp generally will run better on newer Wine versions. I'm currently using Wine 1.3.29.

Install according to my instructions

Install SketchUp according to the instructions in Getting SketchUp 8 Working in Wine -- Even WebDialogs.

These instructions will eventually be out of date

These instructions will eventually be out of date. If you're reading this years from now, running Sketchup 9 or 10 on Ubuntu Zany Zebra and wondering why it's still not working, go look for newer information. :)

Fixing SketchUp "OpenGL cannot initialize" errors after an update

2011-07-03T09:38:00.000-07:00

If SketchUp starts issuing the "OpenGL cannot initialize" after an update, especially if you are using a manually-installed graphics driver, you probably just need to re-install the graphics driver. There is probably a way of keeping your package manager (APT or RPM) from overwriting files installed by the NVIDIA or AT/AMD driver installers, but you may not want to do that because you almost certainly need to re-install the NVIDIA driver after a kernel update anyway. Comments and other feedback from distro experts are welcome and encouraged. ;)

The 64-bit Saga: WTF are IA64 and AMD64?

2011-06-28T18:53:00.000-07:00

A question I get asked a lot: WTF are IA64 and AMD64 and WTF is the difference? Here's the answer:

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (okay, well, maybe it was this galaxy), Intel produced only 32-bit CPUs and they were looking for a 64-bit upgrade to their much aging “Pentium” line of processors.

At this time, another company, HP, was looking to commoditize their HP 9000 line of Unix machines running HP-UX, which at the time were running processors made by HP called the “PA-RISC” line of processors.

HP and Intel decided to get together and for many years they hyped up something they called "Merced" which would supported 64-bit instructions. Their baby, released 3 years later, was a Frankenstein-esque processor with Intel 32-bit x86 compatibility and a 64-bit instruction set based on PA-RISC. Intel called its new processor “Itanium,” and almost everyone else called it “Itanic”. It was called this because it bombed in the market due to its inability to execute 32-bit x86 code at the same speed as it executed 64-bit code, mostly because the x86 code was executed through an emulation mode on the CPU. OTOH, Itanium did do remarkably well amongst HP-UX shops -- all 3 of them -- mostly because HP-UX machines never need to execute 32-bit x86 code.

Meanwhile, a small microprocessor firm called Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) -- who, at the time, were producing cheaper, faster and hotter(!) CPUs compatible with Intel’s chips because, many moons prior, they had received a perpetual license to Intel’s processor technology due to a little-known agreement between Intel and AMD to produce 8086 knock-offs – looked at their agreement and said “Hey, our license doesn’t cover third-party technology like PA-RISC!” and opted to produce a simple 64-bit extension to the x86 instruction set instead. The upshot was that the processor was able to execute 32-bit and 64-bit code almost equally well.

While all this is going down, a tiny band of rebel kernel hackers were hacking on an operating system began by a Finnish hacker with a strange penguin fetish named Linus Torvalds. Linus always names his software projects after himself, and since his operating system kernel was designed as a Unix clone, he called it Linux -- or Linus' Unix. Linux began as an OS for 32-bit Intel x86 processors, but someone said "Hey, wouldn't it be cool this thing ran on other architectures?" Thusly, this tiny band of kernel hackers rewrote most of the kernel in portable C, which had previously had large sections of 386 assembler code and throughly modularized the hardware support. The upshot was that this operating system kernel was portable to nearly any processor architecture and hardware platform on the planet with a few coding additions.

Thus, very quietly, among the platforms that Linux was able to support from some of Itanium's earliest days was the Itanic -- called by Intel "IA64" for "Intel Architecture, 64-bit." This didn't sit well with various companies that also happened to produce operating systems, so, in time, they also produced operating systems that ran on the IA64 platform. Unfortunately, writing operating systems for the ungainly beast that is Itanic turned out to be more difficult than anyone imagined, so 3 of those operating systems -- Tru64 Unix, Solaris IA64, and Project Moneterey's IA64 port of SCO Unix -- promptly cancelled their plans to support the platform.

Jumping back to AMD for a moment, 2 years after Itanic is introduced, AMD releases their x86_64 technology. Later, they rebranded this technology as "AMD64". Within a year of release, Intel licensed this technology back from AMD and began releasing processors based upon it, initially as "EM64T" and later simply as Intel64.

Well, since IA64 is hard to optimize for, the only operating systems to support IA64 are:

Several GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Gentoo, CentOS, Fedora, SuSE, and Oracle's Unbreakable Linux
FreeBSD on IA64
HP-UX 11i on Integrity
~~Tandem's~~ ~~Compaq's~~ HP's NonStop OS -- a fault tolerant operating system for high-availability computing
~~Digital's~~ ~~Compaq's~~ HP's OpenVMS
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008

So, none of Microsoft's client OSes -- Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 -- support IA64. If you're running a 64-bit Windows client OS, you are running an AMD64 processor -- even if it's a chip from Intel.

Rob's World of Tech now readable on your smartphone

2011-06-10T20:47:00.000-07:00

This blog should now be readable on your smartphone thanks to Blogger's new mobile templates. It looks nice on my Android 2.3 powered phone anyway.

Why CAD professionals don't take SketchUp seriously.

2011-05-29T15:58:00.000-07:00

And, more importantly, why they should!

Market Case Study: Quickbooks

In 1983, Scott Cook, a manager at Proctor and Gamble, had an epiphany while watching his wife take on the much-hated monthly chore of paying the bills. He went to the campus of Stanford University in search of something Stanford has always had plenty of -- programmers. There he met a young programmer named Tom Proulx. (Intuit, 2006). Together, they would product that set both the personal finance and the business accounting software markets on their ears.

The company they founded was called Intuit, and the product they introduced back in 1984 was Quicken. At that point there were forty-six other personal finance applications on the market; none of them were particularly easy to use. (Intuit, 2006). Our discussion beging with a feature that was, at the time, called “@categories”.

What make Quicken unique among personal finance software is that it used the familiar metaphor of a checkbook. You put your information into Quicken, just like a checkbook, except that you could categorize by typing in the memo field and prefixing the memo with the @ sign. By doing that, you created an @category, which allowed you to do all kinds of things, including printing reports -- even custom reports -- based on this data.

It was this feature, coupled with the familiar checkbook interface, that made it popular with small business owners. Rather than using complicated systems involving confusing terms and concepts like credits, debits and trial balances, small business owners could, for the first time, produce their own accounting reports without the need to hire a CPA, and without the need to learn formal accounting practices.

Sure, Quicken didn’t really support the use of formal accounting practices, standardized reporting. It didn’t even have the features necessary to do payroll. But, according to Intuit, in 1997, “it was discovered that almost a third of customers were using Quicken to track their business finances,” which resulted in Intuit creating a special Home and Business version of Quicken (Intuit, 2006) A year later, Intuit released a new product called QuickBooks, which was originally patterned after Quicken, to exploit the small business market that Intuit had been essentially ignoring for more than 10 years.

Again, as with the personal finance category, there were plenty of small business accounting packaes at the time, everything from Peachtree Accounting to the popular Great Plains small business ERP system. However, as with the personal finance category, none of them were ever particularly easy to learn and use.

Despite the ease of use, accountants hated QuickBooks, feeling that it lacked “the security, audit trail and robustness really needed.” (Loter, 2009). Despite these defects, and the fact that here many other, more capable products on the market, “Quickbooks...quickly established an 80% market share.” (Loter, 2009).

The Low-End Disruption

How could this be? How could a low-end product, with seemingly fewer capabilities than its competition? In The Innovator’s Dilemma, author Clayton Christensen defined the concept of the low-end disruption. It basically goes like this:

A market is established and the established players take their positions.
Customer demand for performance falls within a normal (“bell curve”) distribution, with relatively few customers demanding absolute high-end performance at the high-end, and relatively few customers demanding very low-end performance at the low-end, and most customers falling somewhere in the middle.
Over time, customers at the higher end demand increasing performance, and all customers either demand or absorb the higher performance.
Eventually, external market pressures, or executives falling “in love” with a technology, direct performance vectors in various directions, pushing performance beyond what the mainstream of the market will demand. This results in a market where there the technology performs better -- has more features, etc. -- than what the mainstream market is demanding.
The result is a lower-performance vaccuum where customers begin seeking simpler solutions, but none are available because all the established players -- the sustaining technologies -- have pushed ever harder at the higher edges of the market, meanwhile ignoring emerging markets.
A new player emerges -- a disruptive technology. This technology will be simpler, cheaper, and, most importantly, it will have some new innovation that increases customer convenience.
Companies offering sustainging technologies ignore the disruptive technology because it doesn’t offer the performance of their technologies, it is seen as not being competitve -- until their customers start jumping ship, that is.
Eventually the disruptive technology exceeds the performance median and customers jump ship from the established players to the new, simpler disruptive technology.

The Quicken and Quickbooks story is a classic case of a disruption from the low-end. It offered increased customer convenience, while being “good enough” to cover the mainstream performance demand. Quicken/Quickbooks failed to satisfy the high-end of the market, but over time, it became more than sufficient to cover the middle and lower ends of the market. As Intuit's product mainstreamed, they began offering serious features that higher-end customers -- and accounting professionals -- were able to take make seriously.

SketchUp as a Low-End Disruption

SketchUp is to the CAD market exactly what Quicken and QuickBooks were to small business accounting: a disruption from the low-end. The added convenience, smaller learning curve, and lower price tag today are exactly what QuickBooks was 1998. SketchUp’s smarter snapping features and simpified approach to 3D are to CAD what the checkbook model was to accounting. Higher-end customers and CAD professionals aren’t taking it seriously because they’re still stuck on the sustaining technologies curve. Gradually, customers will and are shifting to the SketchUp bandwagon as higher performance levels are achieved -- in SketchUp’s case, mostly by add-ins.

To know which CAD customers will jump ship, one merely needs to look at the numbers and popularity of the add-ins that are taking it in various directions. It seems that rendering and animation plugins are very popular, along with add-ins that enhance SketchUp’s ability to do architectural work and even mechanical simulations.

So what markets are SketchUp disruptiing? Time will tell, but clearly it is the same types of markets that Autodesk aims at with 3D Studio Viz and AutoCAD, or that PTC aims at with Pro-Engineer. Basically, the middle and lower tiers of the 3D CAD market spectrum, both in the architectural space and in the mechanical space . These companies, and their customers, are those that need to keep an eye on SketchUp, because if Google and their add-in developer community plays their cards right, these are the markets SketchUp will continue to disrupt, now and in the future.

References

Intuit (2006). Virtual Press Kit: The History of Quicken [Internet] http://http-download.intuit.com/http.intuit/CMO/intuit/press_room/vpk_quicken_win/History_of_Quicken.doc
Loter, Denise (2009). History of Quickbooks [Internet] http://business.intuit.com/directory/article-history-of-quickbooks

Finally the jetpack is here

2011-05-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

Now where are the flying cars?

Cygwin: Significant delay for a bash prompt

2011-04-13T06:19:00.000-07:00

If there is a significant delay before displaying a bash prompt when starting Cygwin, either via mintty or via a command prompt, check for network drives in your PATH variable. A quick and dirty way to fix this without modifying the global PATH variable (which you may not be able to do on a corporate Windows machine due to system policies in place) is to add a line like this to the top of your /etc/profile:

PATH=$(echo $PATH | /usr/bin/sed 's/\/cygdrive\/p.*://g')

In this case, all paths referencing a network "P:" drive are removed. For PATH elements on other network drives, lather, rinse and repeat the sed pipe.

Compiling mtr on Solaris: missing symbols wattr_on and wattr_off

2011-03-24T12:44:00.000-07:00

Despite the README file for Matt's traceroute claiming that:

On Solaris, linking usually fails to find "wattr" or something like that. Somehow, I can't seem to be able to automate "configure" finding the right libs on Solaris. So, the solution is that you cut-and-paste the line doing the linking into a terminal window, and add "-lcurses" by hand. Then it will link. Help on how to catch this in autoconf appreciated.

The truth is that adding -lcurses doesn't work and isn't going to. The problem is also not Matt's lack of knowledge about autoconf, it's Matt's lack of knowledge about Solaris and perhaps SysV-derived Unixes in general.

The problem on OpenSolaris is that autoconf picks up curses.h /usr/include/ncurses and then links against libcurses.so in /usr/lib. This is wrong, of courses, because libcurses is actually AT&T's curses, and the curses.h found in /usr/include/ncurses belongs to the open source replacement, ncurses.

So, Matt, the answer is that your autoconf configure script should make sure, at least on Solaris, that only curses gets picked, rather than ncurses. The main reason I'm recommending this approach, rather than detecting if curses or ncurses got picked up and linking appropriately, is that on Solaris the location of libncurses.so varies widely and it's usually not found in /lib or /usr/lib, and there is no way you can guarantee that the filesystem it is on is even mounted. For example, a Solaris admin may be using mtr to determine why an NFS server is down. Furthermore, compiling against ncurses can sometimes cause problems with libtermcap on Solaris.

The quickest and easiest workaround, my fellow intrepid Solaris admins, is to temporarily rename ncurses' curses.h to curses.h.off and recompile after doing a 'make clean'.

Myths, misinformation and disinformation about open source operating systems

2011-01-23T17:21:00.000-08:00

A recent Slashdot submission about a letter written by a reader to Amazon.com's customer
service department regarding their Kindle for PC book reader was very reminiscent of
the silly response I got from Kodak about their ESP printers. The reader asks Amazon why there is no Linux version of Kindle for PC when every other major operating system is supported.

Amazon's response is comical: apparently they are unable to get some sort of "rights" from "Linux" to develop their Kindle application for the Linux platform.

Really? What sort of rights are you expecting to get from an operating system kernel? Do they expect that they need permission from the Linux kernel hackers or a Linux operating system distributor to release an application for the platform?

Amazon is hardly a stranger to the Linux platform, since a number of their
webservers are obviously running it.

There seems to still be a number of misconceptions about licensing and such on Linux, nearly 20 years after development began.

Let me make this clear: no one needs any rights from the Linux kernel developers or any Linux distributor to write Linux applications. There is even a note in the license accompanying the kernel written by Linus Torvalds himself, the kernel's lead developer:

NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it. Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.

Perhaps the confusion comes the fact that the kernel uses the GPL license. I wonder if anyone bothered to ask them why there isn't a version for FreeBSD? I suppose they might have gotten the same response, amusingly enough.

Applications on Linux do not need to be offered under any sort of open source license. Adobe seems to have no trouble understanding that; neither does Google. Why should Amazon?

Appnor does the Right Thing(tm) -- WinMTR is GPLed (again)

2011-01-11T07:53:00.000-08:00

Hosting company Appnor has done the Right Thing (tm) and has released its new version of WinMTR v0.91 as open source software under the terms of the GPL v2, thanks, in part, to the demands of the Slashdot community and the actions by me to fork v0.8.

Now the only question remains: what to do with the all the cool Qt stuff I started working on in the last couple of days? Do I keep going with my fork? Is the original WinMTR project interested in my new UI prototype?

BTW--here is the souce for Appnor's WinMTR v0.91. They've evidently opted not to update their CVS repository.

Appnor violating the GPL with WinMTR, so fork them

2011-01-10T07:17:00.000-08:00

In response to Web hosting company Appnor pulling WinMTR from SourceForge and closing up the source in violation of the GPL, I've forked the project and created a new Google Code project for winmtr, complete with a Mercurial repository.

Anyone wishing to contribute code or resources to the project knows what to do.

Is Sandy Bridge's "Intel Insider" DRM?

2011-01-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

Intel has recently claimed that Intel Insider is not DRM.

All I can say is this: Intel's spokespeople are obviously the biggest bunch of very bad liars ever.

What is DRM? DRM is Digital Rights Management. We all know that it's a fancy-sounding euphemism for the older term 'copy protection'. Here's an acid test for you:

Does it prevent you from making a copy of content or software on your machine? Is that the main reason it exists?

If the answer to those 2 questions is "yes" then it's DRM.

A third grader could have figured that out, Intel. Bad Intel! Bad Intel!

SketchUp and OpenGL on Linux + Wine

2011-01-06T20:16:00.000-08:00

This stuff should be obvious to most people familiar with running Linux on the desktop, but in case it's not, here's a little information for you.

First off, yes, you need a video card with decent OpenGL support to use SketchUp on Linux. And no, not all video cards with 3D acceleration are created equal. You really need a video card with on-board memory; the built in 3D-capable graphics cards tend to use system memory, which is generally going to be much, much slower; this means that Intel chipset 3D accelerators, S3/VIA, and even some of the on-board video adapters from NVidia and ATI (the ones without dedicated memory) will tend to suck. The Google SketchUp team seems to recommend NVidia cards on Windows. because the drivers tend to have better OpenGL support than AMD/ATI cards. YMMV on Linux, but I use NVidia chipset cards myself because the Linux drivers appear to be more stable in general. Flames >/dev/null 2>&1

Checking for hardware acceleration

One thing that people supporting SketchUp on the Web will recommend is to check that you are running hardware acceleration. Less helpfully to the Linux+Wine user is that they'll often give you instructions that are Windows or Mac-specific. Here's a little guide that'll help you out.

The easiest way to check if hardware acceleration is working on Linux is to launch a terminal and type:

    glxinfo | grep rendering

If you don't get back "direct rendering: Yes", it's not working. You'll need to install the appropriate graphics driver for your video card. See "Install video drivers" below.

Installing video drivers

There are generally two methods of installing 3D video drivers on Linux. If you're running a distro like Ubuntu that includes the ability to download them through the package manager, you can let the package manager handle it. The other method is a manual installation.

In general, the drivers in your distro are going to be stale. Ubuntu long-term-support releases are every 3 years; the cutting-edge stuff is about every 6 months. Whether the latest and greatest drivers get included upstream is a matter of politics; and sometimes you might want to use an older driver.

There are two major classes of cards that will work: NVidia and AMD/ATI. I really, really recommend an NVidia card, because AMD/ATI cards have some known performance and stability problems on Linux and with SketchUp as well.

NVidia Cards

For automatic installation, see your distro’s documentation. Again, I don't recommend this method because the drivers are likely to be stale or otherwise not the version you want.

For manual installation, you’re going to need the Linux headers, the GNU C compiler (gcc), and the GNU toolchain; for Ubuntu, these packages can be installed with:

    sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-header-$(uname -r)

To do this on other distributions, check your distro’sdocumentation.

Next, you'll need to grab the NVidia Linux drivers from the NVidia download page.

You'll need to uninstall all other NVidia accelerated drivers, such as the nvidia-* packages in Ubuntu or the nouveau drivers, if you have those installed. Use the --purge option to apt-get. Blacklisting vga16fb, nouvaeu, rivafb, nvidiafb and rivatv in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf is recommended, but may not be necessary with all cards.

You need to install this thing without X running. It sucks, but that's how it goes. You might want to print out these instructions, because once you are not in X, you won't be able to see this page. :)

Hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch to the first text console and then login. If you're not directly logging in as root, you can chage to root by doing a:

    sudo -s --

Enter your user password at the prompt. Stop the X server by doing a 'service gdm stop'. Next, you need to run the installer with sh "/path/to/NVIDIA-Linux-[...]" (substituting [...] for whatever the file you downloaded was named)

The installer will walk you through everything. When it's done, it'll ask you to modify your X.org configuration; yes, you want that.

Reboot or simply restart GDM with 'service gdm start'.

ATI/AMD Cards

There are two different acclerated drivers ATI cards: the closed source fglrx driver and the open source driver. The fglrx driver is reported to be faster with some cards while the open source driver supports more older cards and has better dual head support.

For the open source driver, follow the instructions for your distro. The instructions for Ubuntu are here.

For either driver there is good doucumentation that covers most of the major distributions here

Getting SketchUp 8 Working in Wine -- Even WebDialogs!

2010-12-17T19:02:00.000-08:00

Updated 2010/12/22: Updates are shown in red below:
Some SketchUp enthusiasts have created an excellent resource on getting SketchUp working on Linux and Wine. There are a few details they seem to be missing, so I'll cover them here.
To begin with, they mention installing Wine 1.2. However, if you want everything to work, including WebDialogs, the Collada importer and exporter and the Ruby Console, you will need to install the latest and greatest Wine, which, at the time of this writing, is 1.3.8. On Ubuntu, you can just add the Wine PPA Just installing the latest stable Wine won't do.

Before you install - READ THIS NOW

Next, before you install SketchUp, make you sure you are installing in a clean $WINEPREFIX (usually $HOME/.wine). In particular, you do not want any Microsoft native .NET runtime as this is guaranteed to break WebDialogs. I mean it. Don't do it. And if you find later that any WebDialogs don't work, go back and read this paragraph again. If you have other applications that need Microsoft native .NET, then you will need to use multiple $WINEPREFIXes. See this Wine forum thread on using multiple wineprefixes. You may also find 'man wine' helpful.

Installing SketchUp

Now download the SketchUp installer and run it under Wine using your favorite method. If the installer fails (it shouldn't), disconnect from the Internet before running it. (In a typical broadband environment where you are running a cable/DSL router, you can simply do 'sudo route del default' rather than disconnecting your Ethernet card. Disable any network managers first.)
Launch SketchUp. If installing Pro, register or add your licensing information at this point. You should uncheck the little box on the "Welcome to SketchUp" screen that says "[ ] Always Show" as this dialog box can cause problems later.

Turn off the Instructor. Once WebDialogs are running, the Instructor will actually work properly, but for now turn it off.

If you have trouble launching SketchUp, check out my SketchUp on Wine Resources page, which contains several registry settings files for forcing on OpenGL hardware acceleration and forcing off the Welcome and Instructor dialogs.

Making WebDialogs Work

Once you have SketchUp launching, it's time to make WebDialogs work. If you haven't read the section called "Before You Install" above, go do it. Now. Really. I mean it. If you don't, do not e-mail me with questions because I will just tell you to read that section. Really.
Copy "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/Internet Explorer" somewhere else. For example:

    export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine
    cd "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files"
    cp -r "Internet Explorer" iebackup

Make sure you have the latest Winetricks installed. As of this writing, the latest version is 20101106. You can find out what version you have by typing 'winetricks -V'.
Now do 'winetricks ie8'. Install IE8 and close the browser after it runs. Next, you need wine-gecko, so do 'winetricks gecko'.
Now uninstall Internet Explorer 8 by doing a 'wine uninstaller'. Don't ask, just do it. When the uninstallation is complete, you need to remove "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/Internet Explorer" and replace it with the backup you created above. For example:

    export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine
    cd "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files"
    rm -rf "Internet Explorer"
    mv -f iebackup "Internet Explorer"

Launch 'winecfg', go to the 'Libraries' tab and add an override of (native, builtin) for ctl3d32. This will make the "Component Attributes" and "Component Options" dialogs work correctly.
Launch SketchUp and make sure that "3D Warehouse" loads and operates.

Setting .skp files to open in SketchUp

Create a mimetype for the SketchUp models (*.skp) and associate with this launch script, which you can also use to launch SketchUp from the command line. Creating mimetypes will be specific to your desktop environment, so check your desktop environment's documentation.

Some things SketchUp Sage gets wrong

Under Make SketchUp Beautiful, they mention installing '.msstyles' or '.theme' files to make SketchUp blend into the desktop better. DO NOT DO THIS! In my experience, Windows skins tend to break WebDialogs, to the point of crashing SketchUp, especially those from Ruby plugins.
Instead, you can tweak the colors and fonts on the "Desktop Integration" tab of winecfg. Making your pulldown menu font Bitstream Vera Sans 10pt and changing the controls background to match your current GTK or QT theme will go a long way towards making SketchUp blend in. For extra credit, also tweak 'Menu Background', 'Selection Background', 'Selection Text', 'Gray Text', 'Hot Tracked Item', 'Controls Highlight', 'Controls Shadow', 'Controls Dark Shadow', 'Active Title Bar', 'Active Title Bar Gradient', and 'Active Title Text', not necessarily in that order.

It's a good idea to install corefonts via Winetricks. In addition, you can enable font smoothing with 'winetricks fontsmooth-rgb' or 'winetricks fontsmooth-bgr' (depending on what kind of monitor you have.)

In the Make Plugins work in Wine section, the author seems to think that because you're running SketchUp on Linux, you need Unix format Ruby scripts. Well, no. You don't. The Ruby interpreter, which is embedded in SketchUp, doesn't give a rat's ass about the line endings (cr/lf vs bare lf). You can entirely ignore this section. (Yes, I did test this)

Finally, they miss the 'ctl3d32.dll' assignment, of course.

Performance

SketchUp performance on Wine should be on-par or better compared with SketchUp on native Windows. Really! If it's not, read the relevant section below:

Lots of disk access or swapping: You need more RAM. A practical miniumum is probably about 4 GB. You can also free up memory by running in a light desktop environment or desktop environmentless window manager such as LXDE, XFCE, or OpenBox.
Gittery or stuttering while rotating/moving 3D objects: You may need a faster video card or more video memory. Also, try disabling compiz or other programs that use up GL texture memory. However, try updating your video driver to latest vendor-supplied driver. (fglrx for ATI, nvidia-glx for NVidia). The drivers in your distribution's repositories are often stale.
UI seems sluggish: Use a video card that has good 2D acceleration on X. (i.e., not an ATI/AMD card :-P). Also, close programs using up graphics or X server memory. Also, don't use Windows themes in Wine (but you actually read the "Before You Install" section, so you aren't doing that, right???)

Functionality Issues: Stuff that Doesn't Work (and possible workarounds)

(For Pro users) LayOut doesn't work and won't even launch. You can get drawings printed/plotted by using the DXF exorter to create a 2D DXF and then import the resulting DXF into QCad. Even if you install the native .NET runtime (don't), it'll launch but will still be non-functional.
(For Pro users) Ditto for Style Builder. (see last point). All Style Builder lets you do is create renderings with squiggly lines anyway. You probably want a real rendering package.
Depending on your video driver, the 3D viewer may occassionally become garbled or fail to update. ~~If that happens, just zoom in an out with your mouse wheel, which will force the window to refresh~~. This turns out to not be Wine problem, rather an indication that you should update to latest video drivers for your card. After updating my video drivers, the occasional garbledness in the 3D viewer went away.
The dialog windows tend to "stick" to the mouse cursor and follow it around. Pushing the dialogs to the right edge of the window seems to alleviate some of this if you keep the mouse cursor away from the title bar.
Wine can launch external Linux programs from within Win32 applications like SketchUp. You just need to make a shell script that translates the Windows paths to Unix paths. See my last post about this.
Building Maker. Follow the instructions on SketchUp Sage's Linux Issues page. These are accurate.
Google Earth stuff. Follow the instructions on SketchUp Sage's Linux Issues page. These are accurate.
PNG, JPEG, TIFF and BMP export will show all white or all black. ~~Printing, which exports a BMP image (this is how Windows printing works), will result in the printer printing black pages~~ Instead, you can export EPS (which works) or Piranesi EPX, which actually contains a TIFF file. The EPX TIFF images can be opened in the GIMP and converted.
Curiously, updating my video driver made printing work, but did not fix the image export problem. :-/ They must be using imaging routines for printing and for file export.
SketchyPhysics. ~~I couldn't make animations play -- they just caused SketchUp to crash. Still working on that.~~ Updating to the latest video driver, once again, fixed this. Animations now play without crashing. Actually, updating the video driver didn't totally fix it. Sometimes SketchyPhysics simulations still crash, but I suspect that this a bug in SketchyPhysics itself and not a Wine or video driver problem.
Some images in WebDialogs fail to load. I'm investigating this.

Check back for updates

I'm heavily using SketchUp now, so watch this blog for more updates. All SketchUp posts will be tagged "SketchUp".

Mounting any VirtualBox-supported VDI disk on an Ubuntu or Debian host

2010-11-19T11:56:00.000-08:00

There's a tool circulating in the VirtualBox forums since last year called vdfuse, which is a FUSE-based filesystem package that can mount any VirtualBox VDI image. Unfortunately, there's much confusion surrounding getting this thing installed and compiled.

To get this working, make sure you have build-essential and libfuse-dev installed:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libfuse-dev

Next, create a directory in your $HOME directory or whatever usual directory you use for development workspace and call it "vdfuse" Okay, here's where our instructions are going to differ: If you were to follow the instructions at the link, they'll have do a Subversion checkout, which means you end up with a missing VboxHDD.h. Not sure how or why, and I'm not going to look into it right now, but the easiest way to get this going is to get OSE source from APT:

$ cd vdfuse
$ apt-get source virtualbox-ose

Remember: anytime you need to install the source for a package on your system, apt-get source is your friend. Don't bother trying to hunt around the Net for a tarball when it's sitting right there in the APT repository the whole time! Okay. Now symlink from virtualbox-ose-3.x.x/include to the current directory:

$ ln -s virtualbox[TAB]/include .

(where it says {TAB] hit the TAB key. This assumes you're using bash with the standard completion keys. If you're using something else, figure out how to autocomplete yourself!)

Now simply download the linked files. To make it easier for you, copy and paste this into your current shell:

wget http://forums.virtualbox.org/download/file.php?id=2866&sid=d1b8a277642c7ba43302307cbedaf8f9 -O vdfuse.c
wget http://forums.virtualbox.org/download/file.php?id=2864&sid=d1b8a277642c7ba43302307cbedaf8f9 -O vdbuild.sh
wget http://forums.virtualbox.org/download/file.php?id=2865&sid=d1b8a277642c7ba43302307cbedaf8f9 -O vdautomount.py

Now just run the vdbuild.sh script like this:

$ sh vdbuild.sh include vdfuse.c

If you encounter no errors, you'll find a binary executable called 'vdfuse'. Copy vdfuse somewhere in your $PATH ('/usr/local/sbin' is a good idea). You can now mount the VDI file like this:

$ sudo vdfuse -f /path/to/file.vdi /path/to/mountpoint

/path/to/mountpoint will now contain files like 'EntireDisk', 'Partition1', etc. If there's only one partition showing, you probably want that one. So to mount the filesystem, just type:

mount /path/to/mountpoint/Partition1 /path/to/someother/mountpoint

The filesystem should now be mounted on /path/to/someother/mountpoint. And yes, you should now be able to use this instead of the boot CD method for installing or uninstalling WineD3D.