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Ever since 1995 I hear the same phrase, and ever since 2000 I stopped listening. It was already the year of Linux in 95 for me, so why bother?

But this year is different, and Linux is not the only revolution in town… By the end of last year, the first tera-electronvolt collisions were recorded in the LHC, getting closer to see (or not) the infamous Higgs boson. Now, the NIF reports a massive 700 kilojoules in a 10 billionth of a second laser, that, if it continues on schedule, could lead us to cold fusion!!

The human race is about to finally put the full stop on the standard model and achieve cold fusion by the end of this year, who cares about Linux?!

Well, for one thing, Linux is running all the clusters being used to compute and maintain all those facilities. So, if it were for Microsoft, we’d still be in the stone age…

UPDATE: More news on cold fusion…

Normally the Linux Magazine has great articles. Impartial, informative and highly technical. Unfortunately, not always. In a recent article, some perfectionist zealot stated that Ubuntu makes Linux looks bad. I couldn’t disagree more.

Ubuntu is a fast-paced, fast-adapted Linux. I was one of the early adopters and I have to say that most of the problems I had with the previous release were fixed. Some bugs went through, of course, but they were reported and quickly fixed. Moreover, Ubuntu has the support from hardware manufacturers, such as Dell, and that makes a big difference.

Linux is everything

Linux is excellent for embedded systems, great for network appliances, wonderful for desktops, irreplaceable as a development platform, marvellous on servers and the only choice for real clusters. It also sucks when you have to find the configuration manually, it’s horrible to newbies, it breaks whenever a new release is out, it takes longer to get new software (such as Firefox) but also helps a lot with package dependencies. Something that neiter Mac nor Windows managed to do properly over the past decades.

Linux is great as any piece of software could be but horrible as every operating system that was release since the beginning of times. Some Linux distributions are stable, others not so. Debian takes 10 years to release and when it does, the software it contains is already 10 years old. Ubuntu tries to be a bit faster but that obviously breaks a few things. If you’re fast enough fixing, the early adopters will be pleased that they helped the community.

“Unfortunately what most often comes is a system full of bugs, pain, anguish, wailing and gnashing of teeth – as many “early” adopters of Karmic Koala have discovered.”

As any piece of software, open or closed, free or paid, free or non-free. It takes time to mature. A real software engineer should know better, that a system is only fully tested when it reaches the community, the user base. Google uses their own users (your granny too!) as beta testers for years and everyone seem to understand it.

Debian zealots hate Red Hat zealots and both hate Ubuntu zealots that probably hate other zealots anywhere else. It’s funny to see how opinions vary greatly from a zealot clan to the other about what Linux really is. All of them have a great knowledge on what Linux is comprised of, but few seems to understand what Linux really is. Linux, or better, GNU/Linux is a big bunch of software tied together with so many different points of view that it’s impossible to state in less than a thousand words what it really is.

“Linux is meant to be stable, secure, reliable.”

NO, IT’S NOT! Linux is meant to be whatever you make of it, that’s the real beauty. If Canonical thought it was ready to launch is because they thought that, whatever bug pased the safety net was safe enough for the users to grab and report, which we did! If you’re not an expert, wait for the system to cool down. A non-expert will not be an “early adopter” anyway, that’s for sure.

Idiosyncrasies

Each Linux has its own idiosyncrasies, that’s what makes it powerful, and painful. The way Ubuntu updates/upgrades itself is particular to Ubuntu. Debian, Red Hat, Suse, all of them do it differently, and that’s life. Get over it.

“As usual, some things which were broken in the previous release are now fixed, but things which were working are now broken.”

One pleonasm after another. There is no new software without new bugs. There is no software without bugs. What was broken was known, what is new is unknown. How can someone fix something they don’t know? When eventually the user tested it, found it broken, reported, they fixed! Isn’t it simple?

“There’s gotta be a better way to do this.”

No, there isn’t. Ubuntu is like any other Linux: Like it? Use it. Don’t like it? Get another one. If you don’t like the way Ubuntu works, get over it, use another Linux and stop ranting.

Red Hat charges money, Debian has ubber-stable-decade-old releases, Gentoo is for those that have a lot of time in their hands, etc. Each has its own particularities, each is good for a different set of people.

Why Ubuntu?

I use Ubuntu because it’s easy to install, use and update. The rate of bugs is lower than on most other distros I’ve used and the rate of updates is much faster and stable than some other distros. It’s a good balance for me. Is it perfect? Of course not! There are lots of things I don’t like about Ubuntu, but that won’t make me use Windows 7, that’s for sure!

I have friends that use Suse, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and they’re all as happy as I am, not too much, but not too few. Each has problems and solutions, you just have to choose the ones that are best for you.

Gtk, the graphical interface behind Gnome, is very simple to use. It doesn’t have an all-in-one IDE such as KDevelop, which is very powerful and complete, but it features a simple and functional interface designer called Glade. Once you have the widgets and signals done, filling the blanks is easy.

As an example, I wrote a simple dice throwing application, which took me about an hour from install Glade to publish it on the website. Basically, my route was to apt-get install glade, open it and create a few widgets, assign some callbacks (signals) and generate the C source code.

After that, the file src/callbacks.c contain all the signal handlers to which you have to implement. Adding just a bit of code and browsing this tutorial to get the function names was enough to get it running.

Glade generates all autoconf/automake files, so it was extremely easy to compile and run the mock window right at the beginning. The rest of the code I’ve added was even less code than I would add if doing a console based application to do just the same. Also, because of the code generation, I was afraid it’d replace my already changed callbacks.c when I changed the layout. Luckily, I was really pleased to see that Glade was smart enough not to mess up with my changes.

My example is not particularly good looking (I’m terrible with design), but that wasn’t the intention anyway. It’s been 7 years since the last time I’ve built graphical interfaces myself and I’ve never did anything with Gtk before, so it shows how easy it is to use the library.

Just bear in mind a few concepts of GUI design and you’ll have very little problems:

1. Widget arrangement is not normally fixed by default (to allow window resize). So workout how tables, frames, boxes and panes work (which is a pain) or use fixed position and disallow window resize (as I did),
2. Widgets don’t do anything by themselves, you need to assign them callbacks. Most signals have meaningful names (resize, toggle, set focus, etc), so it’s not difficult to find them and create callbacks for them,
3. Side effects (numbers appearing at the press of a button, for instance) are not easily done without global variables, so don’t be picky on that from start. Work your way towards a global context later on when the interface is stable and working (I didn’t even bother)

If you’re looking for a much better dice rolling program for Linux, consider using rolldice, probably available via your package manager.

My pet compiler is now sufficiently stable for me to advertise it as a product. It should deal well with the most common cases if you follow the syntax, as there are some tests to assure minimum functionality.

The language is very simple, called “State Language“. This language has only global variables and static states. The first state is executed first, all the rest only if you call goto state;. If you exit a state without branching, the program quits. This behaviour is consistent with the State Pattern and that’s why implemented this way. You can solve any computer problem using state machines, therefore this new language should be able to tackle them all.

The expressions are very simple, only binary operations, no precedence. Grouping is done with brackets and only the four basic arithmetic operations can be used. This is intentional, as I don’t want the expression evaluator to be so complex that the code will be difficult to understand.

As every code I write on my spare time, this one has an educational purpose. I learn by writing and hopefully teach by providing the source, comments and posts, and by letting it available on the internet so people can find it through search engines.

It should work on any platform you can compile to (currently only Linux and Mac binaries provided), but the binary is still huge (several megabytes) because they contain all LLVM libraries statically linked to it.

I’m still working on it and will update the status here at every .0 release. I hope to have binary operations for if statements, print string and all PHI calculated for the next release.

Unix is turning 40 and BBC folks wrote a small article about it. What a joy to remember when I started using Unix (AIX on an IBM machine) around 1994 and was overwhelmed by it.

By that time, the only Unix that ran well on a PC was SCO and that was a fortune, but there were some others, not as mature, that would have the same concepts. FreeBSD and Linux were the two that came into my sight, but I have chosen Linux for it was a bit more popular (therefore could get more help).

The first versions I’ve installed didn’t even had a X server and I have to say that I was happier than using Windows. Partially because of all the open-source-free-software-good-for-mankind thing, but mostly because Unix has a power that is utterly ignored by other operating systems. It’s so, that Microsoft used good bits from FreeBSD (that allows it via their license) and Apple re-wrote its graphical environment to FreeBSD and made the OS X. The GNU folks certainly helped my mood, as I could find all power tools on Linux that I had on AIX, most of the time even more powerful.

The graphical interface was lame, I have to say. But in a way it was good, it reminded me of the same interface I used on the Irix (SGI’s Unix) and that was ok. With time, it got better and better and in 1999 I was working with and using it at home full time.

The funny thing is that now, I can’t use other operating systems for too long, as I start missing some functionalities and will eventually get locked, or at least, extremely limited. The Mac OS is said to be nice and tidy, and with a full FreeBSD inside, but I still lacked agility on it, mainly due to search and installation of packages and configuration of the system.

I suppose each OS is for a different type of person… Unix is for the ones that like to fine-tune their machines or those that need the power of it (servers as well) and Mac OS is for those that need something simple, with the biggest change as the background colour. As for the rest, I fail to see a point, really.

The long dispute with Cisco has finally come to an agreement. For me, that means two things: first, they’re not trolls sucking money from the big corps for stupid patent infringement, as some might fear. Second, they’re very patient, understanding and sometimes a bit too naive.

Why the fear?

When building embedded systems or when you’re too close to the hardware (such as Cisco) you may take a wise decision to use open source software, as it’s quite likely to be stable and taken care by a good bunch of good people. Even though there are several ways of doing it independently, so your software is not virally infected by the GPL, it’s not always possible and you may have to re-invent the wheel because of that.

It’s not only GPL, patents can also cause a whole lot of damage, and it seems that TomTom has decided to go head first with the Linux community.

So, although the fear is understandable, it’s more of a hysteria than based on actual facts. The FSF hasn’t had much to show on court, and that adds up to the uncertainty of the lawyers, but it’s in cases like the Cisco that they show a much higher maturity that most companies have shown recently, even mature companies like Microsoft.

Richard Stallman

The FSF is not only Stallman. Even though he’s the boss, the organization is a large list of people, sponsors, advisers (and now interns). One thing is to fear what RMS will do when he finds you using GPL in your kitchen scale, but a completely different matter is what the FSF (as an organization) does.

The Cisco case has been going for several years. They offered help, they’ve asked politely, they’ve warned about the potential dangers and so on. A lot has been made before they have actually filled the suit, and they’ve settled it nicely. This shows that they’re not just waiting the next infringement to get you down, they actually care about their (and your) freedom.

The day the FSF starts acting stupid is the day people will drive away. It’s not like Microsoft that you have no option, there’s plenty of options out there, software, licences, partners, advisers, programmers, etc. GNU/Linux is not the decent open source operating system, the BSDs are as good, sometimes better, especially in the embedded case.

The year of Linux

Every year since 1995 is the year of Linux. For me it always was, but I can’t say the same for the rest of the world. Recently, Linux (and other open source software) has played an important role in defining the future of mankind and more and more the Linux community feels that it’s their sweat and blood.

There is a great chance it’ll become the platform of all things in a very short time-frame. Cars, mobile phones, PDAs, netbooks, laptops, desktops, servers, clusters, spaceships. One platform to rule them all and in the darkness bind them, but if they play dumb, their glory might never see daylight.

Lots of people disagree with the new revisions of the GPL license, they feel it bites the hand that feeds it. Many companies feed back open source regularly and that kinda broke the synergy. I personally think that it’s excellent for some cases, but not for all. For instance, development tools should not be restricted, especially when it comes to platforms they can’t reach. Opening the platform is an obvious way around it, but not everything can be exposed and they can’t figure out every implementation detail.

Drivers might also have trouble with GPLv3 for the same reason. Again, there are ways around it, the FSF recently opened a backdoor to develop proprietary plug-ins if they’re blessed, but that might not be suitable for every case.

Solution?

Sorry, not today. Stick to FreeBSD if you can’t cope with GPLv3, find a way to co-exist with the GCC exception and provide the source code of what you have to. If it’s not your core business, you could donate your code to the community and make it GPL too and treat your program as enabling technology, of course, providing your code doesn’t expose any patent or trade secret.

So, well, yeah. Each case is a different case, that’s the problem of being in the long tail.

Almost 10 years ago, MySQL became a great open source database, part of the LAMP platform (Perl, not PHP) and had everything to compete with the big players in the next few years.

It was then that they have done major releases, with a huge set of new features each, almost once a year. The community was happy using, developing and integrating with other products. But it was around 2005 that the things started going bad…

Back in 2005, when I was still in the loop, I have to say that I wasn’t impressed with the progress that the database had. I wasn’t also impressed with the new view the board gave to big companies (such as Yahoo!) on what was a good bet and what wasn’t.

After release 5.0 (still the production release, irrespective of what Sun says) there wasn’t a major development until Sun acquired MySQL and only then they’ve released 5.1 which they better shouldn’t.

In the old days, MySQL became famous by not implementing foreign keys and transactions, something that every other database had, because of speed issues. That decision became the core of the company and allowed other storage engines (such as InnoDB and BerkeleyDB which had those features) to be integrated, making it very easy to plan your database, using only the features you needed where you needed.

Who’s to blame?

I’m not sure it has something to do with Oracle buying InnoDB and Sleepycat (and now buying Sun, which owns MySQL). Even with all the politics of Oracle slowly buying MySQL in pieces, I don’t believe it’s the whole story. I see much more of an internal conflict and a lack of vision (probably for the lack of guts to keep taking weird decisions and succeeding) than anything else.

Now, MySQL is going down the same drain InnoDB and Sleepycat went, but with a twist: the source code is still GPL. Sun screwed up MySQL in a way I thought it wasn’t possible, Oracle will do it much more efficiently, even if they still play as good guys, it is definitely the end.

Don’t take my word only, my good friend and MySQL guru Jeremy Cole is taking himself out of the loop to avoid the useless politics. Steven (Computerworld) also cannot see how any of the involved companies will get anything in return of this deal.

Is there a light at the end?

Could Monty’s fork become a new MySQL without all the fuss? Could he, the odd guy with odd ideas, put MySQL on the map again? I do hope so, but that will cost MySQL the hall of fame. They’ll need to start over again and eventually fail once they’re there again and restart…

It’ll be fun to watch, at least MySQL had a GPL license which always ease forks and future development. Long live the open source revolution!

UPDATE:

Two excellent articles about the same issue from The Register and Ars Technica.

Hydrogenated, unsaturated fat and cholesterol are long enemies of the public, but recently a new type of fat has been added: FAT.

Microsoft has filed a patent suit against TomTom about its FAT implementation on their Linux satnavs. This is a bit of a long story and Microsoft is not tired yet. Probably because of the recent losses with patents, they’re trying to get some profit for themselves.

Luckily, there is hope. The guys at End Software Patents can see some light at the end of the tunnel. Looks like the Bilski case can give precedence for rejecting the lawsuit of that (and many other stupid patents they’re claiming) based on the tangibility of mathematical algorithms (software) when they’re not particularly tied to any concrete implementation (hardware).

This was how it was done before in the US until the first case passed through that wasn’t attached to any particular hardware and then with the final revision in 1998 that they could patent even cake recipes.

Why not ditch it for good?

So, FAT is rubbish, 30 years old and close to zero evolution since then, why keep it? It’s true that there are many other filesystems around, much faster, safer, optimized and well designed, but FAT still has its market: on embedded devices. Because it’s simple and stupid, it’s quite easy to support it on very small machines with reduced RAM and CPU power. It’s also light-weight and fits well for small flash cards and USB storage. But the biggest reason to keep it is another: Microsoft supports it since its birth.

Would you buy an SD card that needs to install a driver to make it work? What’d be the point?

Yet again, because of the market domination (and not technical merits), Microsoft forced rubbish down everyone’s throats live for longer that it was expected. And now, they’re trying to get the profits by suing everyone that followed them for decades. What a nice way to say thank you!

Speaking of which, not only they’re happy by suing companies by using Linux (TomTom in this case and many others during the FAT fight), they’re also asking for the open-source community’s help to make Visual Studio 2010 a better product, isn’t that nice? How lovely is the American way of life, I guess the world will never be able to thank them enough.

Quality is fundamental in any job, and software is no exception. Although fairly good software is relatively easy to do, really good software is an art that few can truly reach.

While in some places you see a complete lack of understanding about the minimal standards of software development, in others you see it in excess. It’s no good either. In the end, as we all know, the only thing that prevails is common sense. Quality management, all sorts of tests and refactoring is fundamental to the agile development, but being agile doesn’t mean being time-proof.

One might argue that, if you keep on refactoring your code, one day it’ll be perfect. That if you have unit tests, regression tests, usability test (and they’re also being constantly refactored), you won’t be able to revive old bugs. That if you have a team always testing your programs, building a huge infrastructure to assure everything is user proof, users will never get a product they can’t handle. It won’t happen.

It’s like general relativity, the more speed you get, the heavier you become and it gets more difficult to get more speed. Unlike physics, though, there is a clear ceiling to your growth curve, from where you fall rather than stabilize. It’s the moment when you have to let go, take out what you’ve learned and start all over again, probably making the same mistakes and certainly making new ones.

Cost

It’s all about cost analysis. It’s not just money, it’s also about time, passion, hobbies. It’s about what you’re going to show your children when they grow up. You don’t have much time (they grow pretty fast!), so you need to be efficient.

Being efficient is quite different on achieving the best quality possible, and being efficient locally can also be very deceiving. Hacking your way through every problem, unworried about the near future is one way of screwing up things pretty badly, but being agile can lead you to the same places, just over prettier roads.

When the team is bigger than one person, you can’t possibly know everything that is going on. You trust other peoples judgements, you understand things differently and you end up assuming too much about some of the things. Those little things add up to the amount of tests and refactoring you have to run for each and every little change and your system will indubitably cripple up to a halt.

Time

For some, time is money. For me, it’s much more than that. I won’t have time to do everything I want, so I better choose wisely putting all correct weights on the things I love or must do. We’re not alone, nor is all we do for ourselves, so it’s pretty clear that we all want our things to last.

Time, for software, is not a trivial concept. Some good software don’t even get the chance while some really bad things are still being massively used. Take the OS/2 vs. Windows case. But also some good software (or algorithms or protocols) have proven to be much more valuable and stable than anyone ever predicted. Take the IPv4 networking and the Unix operating system (with new clothes nowadays) as examples.

We desperately need to move to IPv6 but there’s a big fear. Some people are advocating for decades now that Unix is already decades deprecated and still it’s by far the best operating system we have available today. Is it really necessary to deprecate Unix? Is hardware really ready to take the best out of micro-kernel written in functional programming languages?

For how long does a software lives, then?

It depends on so many things that it’s impossible to answer that question, but there are some general rules:

• Is it well written enough to be easy to enhance to users’ request? AND
• Is it stable enough that won’t drive people away due to constant errors? AND
• Does it really makes the difference to people’s lives? AND
• Are people constantly being reminded that your software exists (both intentionally and unintentionally)? AND
• Isn’t there something else much better? AND
• Is the community big enough to make migration difficult?

If you answered no to two or more questions, be sure to review your strategy, you might already be loosing users.

There is another path you might find your answers:

• Is the code so bad that no one (not even its creator) understand it anymore? OR
• The dependency chain is so unbearably complicated, recursive and fails (or works) sporadically? OR
• The creator left the company/group and won’t give a blimp to answer your emails? OR
• You’re relying on closed-source/proprietary libraries/programs/operating systems, or they have no support anymore? OR
• Your library or operating system has no support anymore?

If you answered yes to two or more questions, be sure to review your strategy, you might already be on a one-way dead-end.

Ad infinitum

One thing is for sure, the only thing that is really unlimited is stupidity. There are some things that are infinite, but limited. Take a sphere, you can walk on a great circle until the end of all universes and you won’t reach the end, but the sphere is limited in radius, thus, size. Things are, ultimately, limited in the number of dimensions they’re unlimited.

Stupidity in unlimitedly unlimited. If the universe really has 10 dimensions, stupidity has 11. Or more. The only thing that will endure, when the last creature of the last planet of the last galaxy is alive is his/her own stupidity. It’ll probably have the chance to propagate itself and the universe for another age, but it won’t.

In software, then, bugs are bound to happen. Bad design has to take part and there will be a time when you have to leave your software rest in peace. Use your time in a more creative way because for you, there is no infinite time or resources. Your children (and other people’s children too) will grow quick and deprecate you.

While closed source development has its niche (and a very important one), it does feel a bit weird.

I’m now working on low-level development (debuggers) at ARM, one of the things I like most but also a rare thing to find good quality open source development (with the exception of the gnu tools, of course). Of course there is a portion of your work that goes back to the community (via open standards, limited support for the open tools) but it’s not easy to find a job to write code exclusively to the gdb or gcc.

What I’m finding weirder is the fact that the documentation you need is seldom on the Internet (Google or usenet). The good side is that the guys that created the standards and tools are at your doorstep, so it’s quite easy to get hold of them in case you need something off the charts. But that’s normally true with open source as well.

The other weird thing is knowing what you can tell and what you can’t. I have no idea of what part of my current project is public so I just don’t talk about anything of it. But I think that’s just a matter of getting used to, just like I did before. Besides, albeit at EBI I could even show my (or anybody else’s) source code, I don’t think that anybody ever cared that much.

At last, licences. It’s so easy when you develop GPL or LGPL (or similar). Just write whatever you want, use whatever library you need and put a GPL3 tag on your code. That’s it. Simple as that. Now I have to think what would be the impact of that library on the license of what I write, and that’s something I didn’t want to care…

Also, if a document is GPL-ed, you have to GPL it too. If it’s version 3, everything you write (including company’s previous ideas) become GPLv3 as well. That’s a big nuisance. I do understand GPLv3 for code, even apply that to my own source code, but it does annoy a lot when applied to documents.

Although weird for some reasons, it’s not bad at all. I have many more reasons to love my new job. Excellent team, great environment and an impressive code quality, which for me, is a must.

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