Misc

I often find Richard Stallman annoying, or just plain wrong, sometimes hilariously so, as in his defence of the MySQL two-licence business model. But sometimes he's right, too. I think his criticism of Ubuntu's spyware is one such case.

I'm not backing out my blog or any other site in protest against SOPA/PIPA. But I have signed Google's petition, and shared stuff about it on Facebook. So should you. If you are a twitterer, then tweet about it too.

In a rant that's gone viral. Steve Yegge says:

"Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone."

No there isn't. I am on Facebook, but I spend virtually no time there, and wouldn't be sorry of it all went away tomorrow. The interface is terrible, and as a medium for conducting conversations it's not a patch on much older mechanisms like IRC or Jabber. So put me down as one who hasn't drunk this koolaid. He's right that G+ is also not good, but why set the bar so low anyway?

Sometimes there is a tendency in the PostgreSQL community to take small suggestions and expand the heck out of them. Sometimes this results in nothing being done. I'm often reminded of one of my favourite Calvin and Hobbes episodes:

Some businesses don't like to go to the bother and expense of installing and maintaining a VPN so that external consultants (or their own workers responding to emergencies in the middle of the night) can connect to machines inside their network. Instead, they like to use network meeting software to share the desktop of a machine inside their network which then talks to the server in question. Vendors of network meeting software actually promote this use as being superior to using a VPN. It isn't. It's slow as heck, horribly cumbersome, and ugly. You are dependent on the machine in question having the software you need. (They don't have pgadmin3 installed? Tough luck.) The price in lost productivity is massive.

Luckily, my most frequent clients don't go in for this nonsense. They use VPN software like OpenVPN, or products from vendors like Juniper or Cisco. When you combine that with things like sshfs, so you can use your favourite editor with your favourite settings, regardless of what rubbish the client might have available (I'm looking at you, pico), this can become a big win.

Working remotely can be hard. If you need external consultants you should plan for it, and expect to provide them with facilities that will enable them to give you the best service they can. I recently spent a week at a client site, and it wasn't until the last day that they approved network access for me, so I was totally disconnected, and reliant on the coffee shop several floors down for even Internet access. It's hard to do your best in such circumstances, and although I did manage to get some big wins for them, I think I could have done much better if getting to their production machines had not been so difficult.

I don't always agree with everything Linus Torvalds says, but he's spot on about Gnome 3 being an "unholy mess". I have struggled with it, but on my Fedora 15 installations now, like him I have switched to using Xfce.

This isn't about Postgres, but it is a bit about technology, which is why it's here.

I've been disturbed for some time by the prices being charged for digital content, especially for books. It seems to me that publishers and content sellers are massively increasing their profits and not passing along any savings to consumers. Let's take an example - that classic beloved of most geeks, the Lord of the Rings. Amazon will happily sell me a new one volume paperback edition for $12.19, and if I buy $25 worth of books in the order they will ship it to me free, too. But the electronic version for the Kindle will cost me $18.99. I don't know what the royalty arrangements are, but let's say for the sake of argument that in both cases the royalty involved will be $2. I suspect it will be less, but let's go with that. Let's also assume that the cost of the financial transaction and other administrative costs come to $1. Again, I suspect it's a high estimate. Out of the remainder, they must meet the marginal cost of providing me with my book. In the case of hardcopy, that involves printing, warehousing and shipping. In the case of an electronic copy, it involves shipping me a few megabytes across the internet. The cost of this is surely very close to zero. So their revenue has gone up, the price has gone up, and the costs have gone way down. The marginal profit on the hardcopy book is maybe $5, but on the electronic book more like $16.

In a perfect market, other producers would drive the price down. But there is no perfect market for books or other digital content, since each book has only one or a few digital providers.

You can do a similar analysis for other types of digital content, such as music.

It's really a pity. If digital books were on sale for close to their marginal cost, I would buy thousands of them. I would happily get rid of many hardcopy books and replace them with electronic copies. Many of my books are not available in electronic form, and there are some surprising omissions, such as the works of Patrick O'Brian, Emma Lathen and Margery Allingham. And this is my other complaint about digital content providers. They have been very slow in digitising their backlists.

So, while I have an e-reader, I won't be spending lots of money on digital books just yet. I have an iPod too, but I only buy something at the iTunes store when I can't find it elsewhere. This isn't being miserly, it's an attempt in a small way to send a price signal to the content providers.

I wish I could claim credit for this quote, but it comes from a Perishers comic strip from many years ago. Along with the word chutzpah, which Leo Rosten delightfully describes as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan", it was brought to mind by Microsoft's complaint to the EU that Google is abusing its position of market dominance in the search market. I assume that Microsoft and their lawyers are totally bereft of any sense of irony, or they could surely not have brought themselves to make such a complaint. My message to them (in the unllikely event they are remotely interested) is" Karma's a bitch, ain't it?"

Don't give up your day job....

I haven't even got to trying to build PostgreSQL yet.

So, now it looks like Oracle's new business model for actually making money out of their investment in Sun is to become a patent troll. They seem to be going out of their way to make themselves pariahs in the Open Source world, as hated as SCO. Personally, I was always sceptical of their ability or intention to act well. They are simply not an organization that is geared to operating in this milieu. And there are plenty of people who should be at least a bit scared by this development, as Steven J Vaughan-Nichols points out.

I spent a year or two writing Java, and I get a bit impatient with people who like to rag on it. Their information is often out of date and ill-informed, in my experience. But anyone who now bases a major application, especially one which they sell, on Java would need to be very careful about how they proceed. And that involves a world of trouble and disputation. Surely it would be much simpler for any new project simply to say "OK, we'll use other technology, where there is less risk of running foul of patent lawsuits." That would be my reaction.

Incidentally, this is similar to the reasoning that led me to get involved with Postgres years ago. The company I was working for looked at shipping MySQL as a reference database with their product, and we were not interested in paying for a commercial license. Some people said we could, some said we couldn't. Our take was that we didn't want the hassle. Unless it was beyond dispute, we'd look elsewhere, and the next place we looked, naturally, was Postgres. By the time we decided against using Postgres, because there was then no Windows port, it was too late - I was hooked

A couple of weeks ago, my old friend went into a supermarket in suburban Sydney, felt unwell, asked for an ambulance to be called, collapsed and died. He was a very sweet man, with a wicked sense of humor. He was a first class musician, with a wonderful voice, and also an excellent technologist - quite a renaissance man.

He was also one of my earliest contacts with the world of computing. I remember him taking me into the data centre of the Sydney Stock Exchange where he did some contract work in the middle 1970s, and explaining to me some of the physics of things such as fast tape drives and punched cards that I could see being used. It was to be another ten years or so before I got seriously involved with computing, but perhaps Clarke whetted my appetite a little.

Anyway, the world is a poorer and sadder place for his passing.

So the company that's all about "freedom to innovate" has a version of their flagship product called "Windows 7 Starter Edition" that is so restricted that you can't even change the desktop background with it. It's being sold on huge numbers of netbooks (see BestBuy's site, where they all seem to come with it.) For a version that's less braindead, you can pay another $70 or $100 on top of the $300 or so you paid for your netbook. Nice, eh? Members of my family, who mostly use nothing but Microsoft Operating Systems, and smile tolerantly at my use of Linux, are absolutely disgusted. Luckily for me, my netbook runs Linux (and because it doesn't have the usual restrictions Microsoft imposes on manufacturers, it has 2Gb of RAM rather than 1Gb, so I win both ways.)

Smart: the White House donating code to the Drupal project. Seeing governments starting to "get" Open Source is good news.

Dumb: the government of my native land, and moreover one which I am sad to say is formed from a party I was a member and activist in for thirty years, joining such freedom loving governments as China in futilely trying to censor the Internet.

• Conversation a few days ago: Me: "I'm so glad you referred me to these guys. It's a joy working with them, because they are smart. It's much more fun working with smart people than with idiots." Friend: "I know! that was one of the things I liked about being at Microsoft. There just weren't any idiots - they were all really really smart."


• A client today found that some of his scripts and configs weren't being backed up as they should. I recommended he try Bacula. It has a somewhat steep learning curve, but it has the great advantage that after you set up the agent on each machine, which is a pretty simple procedure, you can control what gets backed up and when all from a central spot. It's a terrific piece of software.


• The other day one of our laptops running Windows got itself in a mighty tizz. We managed to recover it, but we're now examining good offsite backup solutions for it. The most promising candidate looks like SugarSync. Both on price and features they look good.


• Keeping up the Letter "S" alliteration (brought to you by Sesame Street?), we have been trying out SilverStripe as the Content Management Software for a new web site. It's pretty lightweight, well featured and easy to set up. So far I'm reasonably impressed. And like Bacula it can run on Postgres.

Geeks can get very passionate about things which are, in the larger scheme of things, not very important. I suffer from this malady occasionally, but I do try to keep things in perspective. Humor helps a lot. Today I got help in keeping things in perspective by an email from a friend of nearly 40 years standing, with this wonderful disclaimer at the end:

IMPORTANT: This email is intended for the use of the
individual addressee(s) named above and may contain
information that is confidential privileged or
unsuitable for overly sensitive persons with low
self-esteem, no sense of humour or irrational religious
beliefs. If you are not the intended recipient, any
dissemination, distribution or copying of this email
is not authorised (either explicitly or implicitly)
and constitutes an irritating social faux pas.

Unless the word absquatulation has been used in its
correct context somewhere other than in this warning,
it does not have any legal or grammatical use and may
be ignored. No animals were harmed in the transmission
of this email, although the kelpie next door is living
on borrowed time, let me tell you. Those of you with an
overwhelming fear of the unknown will be gratified to
learn that there is no hidden message revealed by
reading this warning backwards, so just ignore that
Alert Notice from Microsoft.

However, by pouring a complete circle of salt around
yourself and your computer you can ensure that no harm
befalls you and your pets. If you have received this
email in error, please add some nutmeg and egg whites,
whisk and place in a warm oven for 40 minutes.