LaRue's blog
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Mostly, this blog is a log of my fiddling around with Open Source computing. On occasion I throw in other stuff, but not often. Most of my larger musings are in my newspaper columns.
SPRING
listening to birds
this morning as I wake:
blast of big balloon
I was lying in my bed, thinking how pleasant it was to hear the birds again after winter. Then I heard the characteristic roar of a hot air balloon's torch. I looked out the window to see it soaring over my house.
SUMMER
before the apple
I was not ashamed but now
she makes me hungry
Prompted by hearing about a book of rhyming "Biblical haiku," I wrote this. In retrospect it feels like a summer poem, although clearly, it's after the Fall.
FALL
even young aspen --
tall, white, slender and trembling --
let go every leaf
This was a tree outside a restaurant in Jackson, Wyoming, just after a long and beautiful drive along the Flat Creek.
WINTER
afternoon shadows:
little stones on the sidewalk
seem to be racing
It's a quality of winter sunlight. By three or four in the afternoon, there is a hard, harsh light that cuts slantwise. A park maybe half a mile from my house has seen a lot of street construction nearby, spraying little stones all over. In the winter light, their long, trailing shadows made the stone look like meteors, swarming west.
http://robotgeek.org/blog/easybreezy/ -- this appears to be something that automates the installation of various Ubuntu multimedia options, as well as plugins and some hardware enhancements (turning on the number lock key at boot). I'll give it a try on Bob P's machine Monday.
I gave a presentation to the good folks at the Denison Health Sciences Library about Open Source in Libraries. While getting it ready (using Freemind, incidentally), I accidentally screwed up a URL by pasting something at the wrong spot. So when I clicked on what I thought was http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/, I was surprised to www.microsoft.com.
A little experimentation discovered that ANY URL that begins with "http://http...." will lead to Microsoft. I'd never heard of that before, and it does seem odd to me. But it seems true on multiple machines so far.
I wrote to Michal Rudolf, suggesting the need for utilities to edit end of line markers -- a problem I have when copying in text that might have too many line breaks. He responded with something different but good: a way to make these changes during import. Very slick.
The final version (after four brief test versions) of PCLinuxOS is out. I did my last synaptic update, and all is good. (I should note, if I never have before, that I always use the "stable" repositories for PCLOS. And stable it is.)
I do understand Ubuntu's decision not to bundle "non-free" applications, particularly for support. But that very lack of completeness makes it hard for Linux to compete with Windows at home, or at work.
I keep Ubuntu around because I think it makes me smarter to have things to compare and contrast -- and it is certainly stable. But PCLinuxOS is, at this point, the best I've seen.
Wow. The latest version is very fast, and includes all kinds of new functions (output to clickable map, the ability to draw graphic links between nodes). The application is now so full featured that I find myself casting about for a nail appropriate to this hammer. This might be an interesting thing to work up as a workshop for somebody. I have now downloaded and run this on the Mac OS X, too.
I mentioned below that I thought I'd enabled Ubuntu to watch Apple trailers by deselecting the automatic plugin through Firefox. Wrong. I still can't watch the new videos. I've spent a long time Googling and combing through Ubuntu fora. No joy. There seems to be no definitive answer yet published -- and yet these seems like the kind of thing Average Joes want to be able to do.
PCLinuxOS lost its ability to play Apple trailers a couple of weeks ago. It was reported on the fora, diagnosed as due to the Apple Quicktime upgrade, and today, without any fuss, a Synaptic update took care of it.
Now they play smoothly, with (it seems to me) greater reliability than ever.
So we have two models of handling changes in external protocols. (1) Hacker stuff -- make people dig around and tweak configurations and settings. (2) Have regular updates handle it.
Guess which one is better?
I upgraded from Hoary to Breezy, the latest Ubuntu version. At first, I have to say that I was not impressed. I could no longer watch trailers, and couldn't hear sound on CDs and system.
I did solve it several days later. Mostly, it was a matter of turning OFF the options I had previously configured. So I turned off mplayer as an plugin in Firefox -- allowing it to use the new Totem. That took care of trailers. I then went to the System>Preferences>Multimedia Systems Selector, and moved to ALSA as a sound output, and left OSS as input. Voila.
Before I figured that out, however, I downloaded Kubuntu, thinking I was just about to wipe the hard drive and start over with PCLinuxOS .92. And Kubuntu looked really good.
It did not, however, allow me to run KnowIt -- and it royally mixed up my Palm when I tried to sync to Korganizer. But I took a second swing at things: found a later version of automake in Synaptic, so could compile Knowit. I even managed to sync to Korganizer -- although there was so much doubling of to do and calendar entries, I had to delete it all, and stick with JPilot.
About the same time, PCLinuxOS STOPPED playing trailers. So what have I learned?
It's still good to play, and good to play with more than one distribution to understand just how fast this technology is developing. Ubuntu continues to be something that takes same wrassling to get it configured correctly the first time through an upgrade -- but then is very usable and stable.
KDE as a desktop environment (versus Gnome) gets always prettier and more usable.
PCLINUXOS upgrade - still good. Gnome is considerably spiffed up, although I don't much care for the new "start" button, which just looks like Windows. I seem to have settled into KDE on this box.
KnowIt - got a new version via the CVS nightly snapshot. The program now successfully exports just one branch (current level and children) to HTML. This makes it very easy to dump a tree to HTML, edit it in OOo, and it's good to go.
I've mentioned before that I use Ubuntu at work, and PCLINUXOS at home.
Both have been very stable. But I've used PCLINUXOS longer, so it's come a further distance. About a year ago, my family got huffy about the way I was always playing around with and "breaking" the Linux machine. So they clamored for a Mac.
Well, we cobbled together the money for a G5 iMac, and it's a good machine. But I've noticed that my wife and son are very inclined to use the Linux machine a good deal of the time.
And why not? It's fast, stable, pretty, and powerful.
Well, here I am in the moment before a big change. Texstar, PCLINUXOS developer, has just released a big bunch of packages, requiring me not just to download and install (automatically) some 161 packages, but also the latest 2.6.12 kernel. That also means that I have to manually update the bootloader and nVidia graphics drivers.
That's not as forbidding as it sounds. Downloading the kernel just means this:
Using Synaptic (the software maintainer), look for "kernel." Choose both the latest version and the "stripped source" version that matches it. That's one click for search, two clicks for the matches.
Click "mark all upgrades", then "apply."
The nVidia drivers are at: www.nvidia.com/object/linux.html. Click on the download for (in my case) Linux IA32 version for standard processors. It then downloads.
Reboot, choose the new kernel. You'll get a regular Unix-type login screen. Login as root.
Change to the directory to get to the nVidia download. There are two commands you have to type from a terminal window as root -- kind of like the old DOS days. But it's just a matter of following instructions, or cutting and pasting from one screen to another.
chmod a+x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1[tab] enter
./NVIDIA[tab] enter
then type
killall kdm
kdm
c'est tout.
I'm not worried about all that -- the kernel and the nVidia drivers. I'm a LITTLE worried about getting my Canon i250 printer back up, since there are no standard Linux drivers for it. I had to buy a proprietary one.
But hey, this machine, at home, is designed for me to learn on. No risk, no new knowledge. Sometimes a boy just has to take a chance.
Why do all this? It's supposed to be, by the end, faster, more seamless, and more reliable in dealing with various USB devices (flashdrives, printers, Palm, etc.). We'll see!
I downloaded the new nVidia driver. I did the kernel and stripped source download, then marked all other upgrades. 163 files!
They downloaded, I rebooted.
No X, as expected. So I logged in as root and ran the nVidia file. No problems.
Reboot. It all came up. X, wireless network, proprietary printer driver, palm sync, usbdrive. Fantastic!
I had a couple of clean up items:
- my KDE custom panel was missing a few things.
- some of my programs were missing from the menu, too.
I went to menudrake, and saw they were still there. Saved, logged out, logged in, and the menu entries were back. Then I restored my panel.
About the only thing missing now seems to be the cool penguin-in-the-sun logo instead of the K menu. Pretty minor.
OK, time to send in another donation!
(Now I'll go see how things look in Gnome and Xfce.) Really, that's a very impressive system upgrade, and I completed it in just a matter of minutes (not counting download time).
The more I think about this, the more amazing I find it.
As noted previously, I am working on a book -- something I've felt driven to do for a long time. But part of the process for me was picking a tool to write it.
On the one hand, I prefer using something very small and simple for my newspaper columns. I usually use the program "Gedit" -- a small text editor.
But for more complex pieces of writing -- articles, speeches, various logs, and now a book -- I wanted to be able to track the larger structure of the piece. At one point in my book planning, I decided there just wasn't anything out there in the Linux world that would do all the pieces I wanted. So I tried to get organized around a tool chest involving Openoffice.org and maybe hnb, a little outliner that I could run in a separate window.
But I could NOT get started. The tools weren't working the way my mind needed to work. (I was probably also processing things subconsciously, and wasn't ready.)
I found myself drifting back to Tuxcards. (Incidentally, the author of that program also added word count to his program for me, years ago.) But it wasn't a good fit, requiring too many extra steps to track my progress. The author of that program didn't seem too interested in the outline manipulation piece of his work.
So I sent an email to Michal Rudolf, author of KnowIt, suggesting some changes. Finally (after his wedding and honeymoon, which are excellent excuses for a delay) he sent me a new version of his program. Delighted, I asked how I could repay him for his labors.
He asked for "a list of features you'd like to see." Not money. Not even documentation. He was writing the program for the same reasons I was writing a book -- for the sheer pleasure of accomplishment. And his work is most impressive. (I hope mine will be, too.)
So now I have a partnership with a man who is writing the tool that I'm using to write my book. I have the opportunity to suggest features to customize the software to my needs.
This is so cool. It captures, for me, part of the excitement of the Open Source world -- to find this willing collaboration of creators. It also is a wonderful learning experience for me -- to see the development of features and command structures that retain an integrity and focus.
It's the sort of thing that confirms my faith in humanity.
Some years ago now, I designed a screen for the software in which I thought I would mostly easily write. It wasn't too unusual. The left side of the screen was an outline, a table of contents. You could click on a symbol to the left of a heading and expand or collapse any subordinate headings. Click on the heading itself, and you would reveal a "note" on the right side of the screen. The look was very much like an Adobe pdf reader format.
There are, now, several two pane outliners out there. I've used Tuxcards (see more below) for three years now. For the past several weeks, I've been using it to write a couple of chapters of a book I'm working on, "The New Inquisition."
The "note editor" pane is good. It has the usual text editing commands, as well as word processing styles. It has word count, which is vital. But it doesn't have spell check.
The "outline editor" pane is just awkward. But it's workable.
What I've wound up doing after a morning of writing is to cut and paste each note into an Openoffice.org file, to get the cumulative word count, and to do spell checking.
Then I ran across KnowIt (again, also discussed below). Its note editor had spell check but no word count. Its outline editor commands were both cutomizable, and far more powerful than Tuxcards'. But I use word count more often than spell check. So I emailed the author of the program, one Michal Rudolf, asking for the word count function.
Well, a couple of days ago, he sent me the revised source code. I compiled it on my PCLinuxOS system, and by golly, it works. It's fast, clean, powerful, and combines the note editor's word count and automatic spell checking into a much more flexible outliner. I love it.
KnowIt also allows the export to HTML of the entire file, a heading and subordinate headings/notes, or just one heading and its notes. This means that I can do one output, and have an HTML file I can open in OOo to get a combined word count, with headings I can preserve. This doesn't QUITE translate into the format my editors will want, but it is bound to be easier to edit that file, than cut and paste note by note.
In short, I spent the morning moving over my developing book to the new program. I recommend this new KnowIt very much, and it appears that Rudolf is picking up development on the project again.
It does require KDE/Qt. But KnowIt is almost a good enough reason to use Linux all by itself. I've offered to send Rudolf some money, or to spend some time on the documentation. As of today, I don't see the new version (.11Alpha1) at http://knowit.sourceforge.net/download.html. But it should be there soon.
This means, of course, I have even fewer excuses not to be working on a book.
Last Friday was our annual staff day. I had spent maybe 3-4 days working on a chart that compared the various differences among the four generational types: silent, boomer, genx, millennials.
Unlike the sermon I'd given a week earlier for the Unitarians (and it still astonishes me that I'm giving sermons!), my staff talk focused just on describing the generational types. I compiled comments and observations from a variety of sources, trying mostly to come up with a comprehensive look at how the generations might behave in the work place. A lot of fun for me, truly fascinating. I'll try to post the chart tomorrow.
I realized that I actually gave the first talk second. That is, the more general talk on generational types should precede what I gave the Unitarians, which was more focused on social moods and big change.
The big talk, based on the Fourth Turning, is seen by lots of folks as a "downer.' And so it is -- we seem to be on the path to world war. It worries me; I don't know why it wouldn't worry anybody else.
I've been away: a vacation back to Chicago (sandwiched between attending the centennial Rotary conference, and receiving an award at the American Library Association conference). Since then, I've been playing a little catchup at work, and enjoying a visit from my wife's utterly charming English cousin, who has been traveling around the world with an equally charming friend.
For the week I was gone, I touched a computer only once, really -- to check my mail at the Warren-Newport Library in Gurnee, Illinois. It was a bright, functional library, the legacy of Pat Losinski, a friend of mine who used to run the Pikes Peak Library after he left Illinois, and before he returned to Ohio. But there was no mail to check -- I must have looked just moments after my assistant back at work had downloaded everything. I was grateful.
Since then, I've begun to get sucked into the computer world again. PCLOS has gone through a lot of updates, although Gnome continues to lag behind. But the KDE product looks good; PCLOS is up to a solid .9 -- soon to be released, I bet, and already far ahead of most any beginner's Linux other than Mepis.
Lately, I've just wanted to lie in bed in bed and read. In the past several days I've read, "Alas, Bablyon," by Pat Frank, "The Spiral Staircase," by Karen Armstrong, and the "Messiah Code" by Michael Cordy. All were excellent. All, I see now, have a pronounced religious bent.
I've been thinking a lot lately about my persistent spiritual interests on the one hand, and my growing distaste for the aggressive, condemnatory "evangelism" of Focus on the Family on the other. Armstrong made the point that her explorations of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity have led her to believe that the core truth of these faiths is Compassion. Yet we are faced with strident self-proclaimed religionists intent on killing each other overseas, and forcing their faith on others here.
I'm utterly baffled by those who combine Christianity with support for the war in Iraq, a political endorsement that contradicts, that fundamentally rejects, the teachings of Jesus. Yet our headlines are full of the Air Force Academy's "Team Jesus."
Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, says his most current round of political activism was kicked off by the rejection of the public display of the Ten Commandments -- forgetting, I guess, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image" (which applies to the current round of anti-flag-burning sentiment, as well).
Jesus said, "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hyprocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men ... when thou prayest, enter into thy closet and when thou has shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret." Yet some Christians clamor for public prayer in schools.
Then there are the frequent claims of Christian persecution in America -- when the Councilman who stood silent during the Pledge of Allegiance (rather than say "under God," which he felt was a violation of the constitution) is cast out of public office by petition.
Then there's the link between Christian fundamentalism and the open economic warfare of today's Republicans: itself predicated on covetousness and, incidentally, violating the Sabbath. Or the elimination of the "death tax" despite Jesus's injunction to "Give your money to the poor."
How is such a divide possible? It's a kind of bipolarism: unintegrated values, judgment divorced from conscience. Surely these people don't set out to be hypocrites.
In other books, Armstrong says that fundamentalism is a revolt against "modernity." That's not a good enough explanation for me. I wish I had a better one.
The last couple of updates to PCLOS, plus a little fiddling around with kernels (now up to 2.6.11-oci12) and nVidia drivers has given me a very, very fast system. The new artwork in the system is also very polished and professional.
So I've spent a little while today, in this ungodly heat, mucking about with Gnome and icewm. The latter is very fast, too, although it seems to take a very long time to load the Terminal.
It is relatively easy to edit the menu, though. The configuration file is ~/.icewm/menu -- and the instructions per line pretty obvious. So I put in the KnowIt program, and found that the menu is updated the instant you save it.
I also popped in the live Kubuntu disk. It took awhile to configure, and even then, couldn't work out the wireless. Finally, I dropped down to the command line, and typed in the string of commands that seems, sometimes, to work. The two that always seem to give me a little trouble are "iwconfig eth0 enc on" -- turning on the encryption. The other is dhclient -- which seems to force the wireless card to connect. But after I loaded the right card driver (modprobe orinoco), I got it all up.
And for all that, Kubuntu is just a reasonably good looking, Debian based Ubuntu. PCLOS feels faster at home, has all the customizations without having to go through the customizing. So I'm losing some of my enthusiasm for other distros.
Power supply? Just lately, I come back after a night, and my home HP computer has locked up. I strongly suspect power supply issues.
XFCE. PCLOS, my home distribution of choice, has XFCE 4.2 in its repository. This desktop environment, like Gnome and KDE, is a front end for the Linux machine. But it is designed to run smaller and faster. The trade-off is fewer built-in features. On the other hand, XFCE is highly customizable through the mouse.
There are a few oddball settings with this. Like Cobind, the Gnome/XFCE blend of a distribution I used some time ago, and liked (http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7355), the PCLOS version of XFCE uses some Gnome settings (background, right-click to terminal, etc.) I can add programs to the panel, but I haven't figured out how to reconfigure the menu, which is packed with all the KDE and Gnome things installed on my system.
It's a good looking screen, though, with lots of themes that make it resemble many other looks, including the best Aqua theme outside of the Mac.
http://basket.kde.org/
This is an interesting program -- a sort of freeform database program that runs within KDE. You can drag URLs, files, text, and even graphics, to it. You can create new tabs, some of which may hold launchers. It could hold bookmarks, project research, and more. In fact, it could almost replace panels and icons and program menus. In many ways, it's a one-window StickyBrain (a Mac notes program), with a little bit of DragThing attached.
Ultimately, though, I have the same objection I do about DidiWiki. Yes, you can create tabs and arrange (drag and drop) the items within them. But the absence of a hierarchical system weakens the tool, makes it less desirable for me. On the other hand, it's a great tool for web research, and I might well use it for that. On the other hand, I don't know as it's any better than KnowIt or Tuxcards, except for the graphic handling ability, and the fact that it can set on the KDE tray.
With PCLOS, I went through a period a while back when I added a new Linux kernel. This process (adding a kernel through the Synaptic program) added the new kernel to my Lilo boot menu. But after I got it all tweaked into working, those extra boot choices were confusing.
I posted to the PCLOS forum, and got this recommendation for a cleaned-up version. Now, my machine will boot by default into the correct kernel.
default="pclinuxos"
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
keytable=/boot/livecd.klt
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-oci5.mdk
label="pclinuxos"
root=/dev/hda1
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.11-oci5.mdk.img
append="nomce devfs=nomount acpi=ht splash=silent"
vga=788
read-only
I got this from a Linux Journal article (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8308).
Start the word processor, Writer.
Open the Tools drop-down menu and select options. Open the Options box.
Select the first expansion box and click Memory with our mouse.
Change the default values under the Graphics cache from 6 to 128 MB.
Change the Memory per object from .5 to 20MB.
Click OK.
The article concludes: "I closed the word processor and reopened it two times. On each occasion, the application took less time to open. Under Ubuntu, I found that OO Writer opened in three seconds, and in Fedora it opened in less than six seconds. Previously, it took 30 and 26 seconds, respectively, for the word processor to launch." That worked for me, too.
I took another look at this this week. I also wrote a long review comparing it to Tuxcards. I shipped that one off to Newsforge. If they don't want it, I may post it here.
+ - Introduction
KnowIt! was developed by Michal Rudolf from Warsaw, Poland. The author describes it (on his website at knowit.sourceforge.net/index.html) as a note-taking tool. It is based on Tuxcards (www.tuxcards.de), but depends on KDE3.
Another way to describe it is a two-pane (and on occasion, a three-pane) outliner.
Leftmost is an outlining pane. It resembles a Windows Explorer or Midnight Commander window. Within this pane, you can create phrases, then create subordinate or "folded' phrases. These subordinate phrases can be expanded (revealed) or collapsed (hidden). Headings can also be moved or deleted -- taking all the subordinate phrases with them.
The right pane is a mini-note field, a word processing window. The note field is attached to the heading on the left pane. You can use bold, italics or underlining styles, although they seem a little flaky; the keyboard commands don't work reliably. You can change color of text. You can align it left, right, centered, or full. You cannot, however, mix alignment within a note. You can't mix fonts. There's no way to change point sizes. (Font and point size are set as a global preference.)
To the lower right, below the note field, is a small window that holds "links." These are references to local files or URLS. They do not contain the information itself, only a pointer to it. However, clicking on a link will load a URL in Konqueror, and a local file in any application you like. You can also modify or delete links.
+ - What's to like?
KnowIt is fast, and clean.
It has wonderful keyboard shortcuts. I've used Tuxcards for years, and love it. But too many of its outline commands are just clunky. Tuxcards has only one "add entry" command -- and that adds an item under the highlighted one. Rearranging headings involves using commands to move them up or down within a level (by mouse only), or by dragging them to a heading to change their level.
KnowIt also allows full editing with a mouse. But it permits a full range of keyboard outline editing commands, too. Most commands are accomplished with an Alt key combination. For instance:
* Alt-Insert inserts something at the same level of a heading.
* Alt-Shift-Insert adds something at the level below the current heading.
* Alt-Delete deletes something.
* Alt-arrow key moves a heading up, down, left or right.
* Alt-Shift-Home move a heading to the to the top of the outline
* Alt-Shift-End moves a heading to the end.
* Alt-+ expands all the headings under one heading.
* Alt-- (minus) collapses them.
Most of the above can also be changed to your liking through the Settings menu.
F2 allows the editing of a heading. Tab toggles back and forth between windows.
That's about it. It takes just moments to learn these -- then you fly from pane to pane, restructuring the headings and their attached notes with ease.
I should also note that a right-click brings up most common functions, too. In brief, the interface of KnowIt is crisp, intuitive, and usable.
By right clicking in a text window, you can run a spell checker, or choose auto spell check, which turns misspelled words red. That's the faster choice, by the way -- the separate spell check stops you at every hidden meta tag.
What could be better?
First, notes need the ability to have word count. This feature is what wins so many friends for Tuxcards. (Because professional writers need it!)
Second, there needs to be a way to save or export a KnowIt file to RTF. Right now, you'd have to copy and paste every single note one at a time.
If you have a KnowIt file with a lot of different topics, then you need to be able to save or export a file from a single heading, or include all subordinate headings.
Third, printing is buggy. Sometimes, the File>Print menu works, sometimes the command (Ctrl-P). I have never gotten the icon to work. Sometimes, none of them works. But since you can only print a single note anyhow, I find printing close to useless. (Follow-up note: I have never had this problem again. Now all three choices work. I have no idea what I did to fix it. Reset printer? Reboot after a synaptic upgrade? But cancel this criticism.)
The Find command moves through all trees, one by one. There's no list of matches, which would make it easier to sort through a lot of hits.
The Export to HTML, like printing, does only a single note, not subordinate ones.
While this isn't a big deal for me, KnowIt doesn't allow you to insert or paste graphics.
KnowIt is supposed to allow both bulleted and numbered lists of various kinds. However, you have to end each line with Ctrl-Enter, not just Enter.
KnowIt is only at .10.
+ - Summary
In summary, KnowIt is a very promising tool, useful right now for at least the note-taking it lays claim to, and even as a rudimentary writing planning tool. It is capable of being much more -- a superior Treepad for the Linux world. When it slides that decimal point one to the right, it will quickly become an essential application.
This one sounds like an old doowopper gone bad.
It's a local wiki.
I found it at: http://didiwiki.org/
After downloading, I untarred (tar -zxvf didiw[tab])
cd'ed to src, ran ./configure, make, sudo make install, make clean
To run it takes two steps:
- from a console, type didiwiki
- from a browser, point to http://localhost:8000
Now that I've got it, I'm not altogether sure what to do with it. It sets up a local wiki server -- hypertext links to files that are pseudo web page like, except more easily edited. The editing commands themselves are quite like HTML, but simplified.
It took about 15 minutes to learn how to create reasonably good-looking pages. But my problem with unstructured hypertext is just trying to follow a thread. The hierarchical approach seems more powerful to me on the retrieval side.
Still, it's there now, another information management tool.
I was supposed to be writing a book.
I took off the whole week to finally get in some real writing time on my book about responding to public challenges to the library. The first day was frustrating. I took two kids to school, wound up picking them up as well (my wife worked that day), and generally went through panic attacks about the impossibility of actually getting any writing accomplished.
By the end of the day, though, I'd worked through a whole new outline for the book, as well as learning some things about openoffice.org styles.
I write best with an outliner. But Linux outliners would require me to cut and paste everything into OOo anyway -- more work than seems reasonable. So my time testing the alternatives just confirmed my suspicion: I need to outline the work in one tool, then write it in another. So be it.
Second day: I needed sleep. Slept late. Got up. Reviewed the outline from the previous day, and worked a little on the first chapter. Took a nap in the afternoon. Spent my evening at a Town of Castle Rock meeting about upcoming tax issues.
That takes me to today, Wednesday.
But this morning the Douglas County Libraries was invited to the Partnership of Douglas County Governments. It was our first meeting, and I could hardly skip it. I managed to invite Mark, President of our Board, to come, too.
It started at 7:30 a.m. It ran till 10. And I have to say, it was absolutely fascinating. Representatives from every City, the County, the school district, and the library were there. We've figured some things out. Others need work. But it's clear that we can't possibly solve all these issues without cooperating. And it's bound to be cheaper for the taxpayers.
Then I had a board luncheon. Originally, I hadn't intended to attend. It was my vacation. But after putting in 2.5 hours in the morning, and stopping by the library again to drop off and pick up various files, I realized going to the luncheon was probably a good idea.
I have an amazing board. The conversation was engaging and probing. Fast forward to 1:30. That's six hours. Heck, it's a work day.
Then I came back to Castle Rock to sign the Castle Rock Players SCFD application. We have a new volunteer grant writer, who did a good job -- but I had some questions about some missing figures. We met and discussed it.
Then I facilitated a 2.5 hour session on the new Douglas County High School. This involved some 15 people from the area, and concerned the first high school in Douglas County to come in as a part of a municipality, instead of unincorporated Douglas County.
The group brainstormed about some things, then I led them through a process to whittle it down. Here's the bottom line: both the private sector and the public sector positively ACHED to get in the school doors. One wanted to talk about how to apply, and keep, a job. Another wanted to inform kids about how government actually works. Life skills and civics.
I found the whole thing oddly bracing. I remember something I learned back when my daughter, after a couple of years of homeschooling, went to her first public school. As a homeschooler, Maddy had gone everywhere with us. Museums. Galleries. Libraries. Public meetings. Concerts. When she got to school, suddenly, she ... couldn't go anywhere at all. She was utterly segregated from her community.
It's not an obvious insight. Public schooling in America not only removes children from their parents, but from the rest of their surrounding social and civic society.
It's time to turn that around.
The meeting ended just before 6.
Then I got a call from my friend, David. The AAUW was meeting that night. They needed us to fill in some entertainment. Would the Tuna Boys (our two man band) be willing to perform a couple of songs?
We played John Prine's "Angel from Montgomery" and "Dear Abby," then ended it with "I Went Down to the River to Pray," a capella. Time: 8 p.m. or so.
Finally, I helped David reload a truck he'd borrowed to load in the "Bye Bye Birdie" set.
So I got home about 9:30 p.m.
And you know what? OK, it wasn't a vacation day. But it points up why it's so hard for me to take one. I had an utterly engaging day. I suspect that EVERY community is as vibrant and alive as ours. But you really have to dig into it to find out. And then you see things that make you really admire the people around you.
I did have time -- between a couple of meetings -- to dive into the Ubuntu setup at work. And I finally figured out how to solve the Mplayer and sound failure on the machine I'm setting up from scratch. Short answer: install mozplugger, not just mplayer. Then reset various sound applications to use esd. It works!
I believe, at this point, I've solved almost every in-house computing problem we have. Linux will do it all. Caveat: I do not, yet have a solution for an automated rsync backup from our work machines to our backup servers. But I do think it's relatively trivial. I just don't understand rsync well enough. That's what Linux tech support companies are for.
Today, I was bummed. The only real job of an administrator is to hire the right people. I found the right person. And today, that person refused the job. Great sadness.
The joy of administration is to see the right person grow, to witness that huge leap of insight and ability. I have seen it many, many times in my career. It sustains me.
For the past couple of weeks, I have had no sense of smell at all. The diminishment of one's sense of life is profound. I didn't know if the problem was allergies, or sinus infection, or nose polyps.But today, my sense of smell returned. Life is good.
And along the computer vein, a week or so ago I set up an Ubuntu workstation for our IT manager, a very smart person. Since then, all kinds of issues with Linux in a library environment are being efficiently (and inexpensively!) resolved. Just this past week, we've figured out all kinds of obvious advantages to an open source hardware/software solution. No viruses. A stable and easy-to-use environment. Capable software. Palm sync. Ad blocking. Networked printing. Terminal client solutions to proprietary software.
Linux IS the answer to a host of library problems.
I got the Hoary Ubuntu Live CD to run on my home machine (HP Pavilion a520n). And I even managed to get the wireless up and running -- but through the command line, not the networking menu. Pretty -- but not as pretty as PCLinuxOS. I'm thinking now that the move to Ubuntu has been a little rockier (for plugins) than I'd hoped.
This one is interesting. It's a Slackware minidisc that displays the latest KOffice. Again, I'm not so much a KDE fan, but Slackware still looks so clean and sharp. KOffice seems to have more of a tool chest, and that better integrated, than Openoffice.org. KOffice now also writes to Abiword, WordPerfect, and Openoffice.org formats. See http://ktown.kde.org/~binner/klax/
It's a new month, which means I've collapsed the previous. The way this is supposed to work on the website is like this: people will click on the month, and just the expanded days and topics per day.
I spent some time googling up the emacs manual, and looking at the outlining mode commands. Emacs is powerful, and it's outlining mode appears interesting. But it also involves going deep into the commands of a text editor I don't expect to use often.
I downloaded vym for the Mac, but it wasn't loading. I quickly realized that I needed qt libraries. I found and downloaded those. But to set them up I needed a compiler -- a package of developer tools from Apple. I'm not using the Mac often enough to start mucking it up with developer files. So I backed off. But I noticed the Mac vym had some demo files that looked interesting -- I emailed them to myself and see what's going on there.
I discovered yesterday that my Ubuntu upgrade didn't go so smoothly after all. Specifically, there were all kinds of multimedia things that used to work, and didn't.
Apparently, Ubuntu changed the underlying sound driver to esd. Moreover, all kinds of things conflicted with the nVidia driver.
So I spent a lot of time on the fora. They were useful, but hardly tidy. Eventually I learned that I had to download the new nVidia drivers, delete some rc scripts, then update the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file from nv to nvidia, then reboot. Whoof. It worked, but if I hadn't just done it with PCLOS, it would have been much harder. Oh, and I also had to run some other script to update the headers from Warty to Hoary, without which the nVidia driver wouldn't install.
Then I had to update xmms to use a different codec (esd). Then I had to change the codec in mplayer (to something I do not now remember). Then I had to run pkill esd to view mplayer streams in Firefox.
So except for the last bit -- jumping to console to run something before loading a movie, I mean, please -- I'm running again.
Follow-up. I found another Ubuntu wiki fix that solves that problem, too -- although it also meant going from esd back to alsa. Now everything works, though, no tweaking necessary.
Back with PCLinuxOS, I fiddled around some more, then missed Gnome. It looks so gorgeous on that monitor. So I tweaked some settings and went back to it.
As I have probably noted above, I used GTK applications: Firefox, Thunderbird, JPilot, Gedit, OpenOffice. I also use, more rarely, Streamtuner, but that's almost the only KDE application. Gnome still is my favorite desktop.
I just have to say that despite fighting a sinus infection, I went out today, in weather that went from cool to cold to really cold, to sell Ducky Derby tickets outside the local grocery store. And I sold 40 tickets in just a hair under 2 hours. Not bad. Color me strangely proud.
One of the key sources of information about any distribution is its fora. Recently, Texstar noted that folks doing the whole dist-upgrade should also download the latest kernel -- 2.6.11.oci5. But another nearby thread talked about the significant problems getting the nvidia driver working for 3D acceleration again.
Well, if I'd ever downloaded a kernel, I couldn't remember it. So I did another big update, downloaded the kernel, downloaded the SOURCE of the kernel, downloaded the latest nVidia driver, rebooted into the new kernel, installed the new nVidia driver and rebooted one last time.
So it works, it's up, and I'm darned if I can see the difference.
But now I know how to upgrade a kernel, and make sure the nvidia driver is installed. Should such a thing ever prove necessary. Or useful.
I installed Ubuntu on a machine very like mine at work. This will be for Bob, our IT manager.
The install was fast -- 10 minutes to first reboot, then maybe another 10-15 for all the package installs and updates. Then, I suppose another 35 minutes or so to work through the ubuntuguide to grab extras.
That last piece was manual -- but really no more complicated than cut and paste. It all went smoothly and quickly -- until I reboot, launched Firefox, and tested the plugins. Acroread and Java worked. But I don't believe any of the rest of them did. So that's some troubleshooting to do.
A good challenge for a Windows expert trying to experiment with Linux. I'll be very curious to see what Bob makes of it.
I've been reading -- as have our managers and board members -- the altogether remarkable book "From Good to Great," by Jim Collins. This book is the result of Collins's research into great companies -- Fortune 500 companies that outperformed the market by at least 3 times, for 15 years. His analysis of these companies draws many conclusions about what it takes, and what it means, to move from good to great.
Halfway through the day, one of my staff members told me frankly that she didn't know what was expected of her now. I was grateful to her for her honesty -- but it was also clear that I hadn't been a very good director, if one might expect of a director that he or she could communicate such expectations clearly.
I took a stab at presenting (and graphically outlining) where I thought we were today, but have thought about that a lot since then.
I also took pains to tell her that the future of the organization does not, cannot, depend on one person. It requires deep engagement by all levels of staff.
This evening, I met with two other key people in my organization, and we talked for several hours about where the Douglas County Libraries need to go.
A library, of course, is not a Fortune 500 company. Its "performance" is not determined by profit. There is no generally agreed upon "market" to measure ourselves against.
In the book, Collins states that companies must settle on three "circles" -- questions that must be answered.
"What can we be best at?"
Look at it this way: what business are we in? For us, the answer is clear: we can be the best in the library business. We're already at the 96% mark in most measures.
More specially, that means:
* a popular materials library. We reflect the most in-demand products of our culture, as reflected by books, magazines, music, and video. This is a good fit for our demographics, our rapid growth, our very healthy book budget -- limited by the available space of our facilities.
* the definitive local history resource. Nobody can be better than us at gathering, organizing, and presenting to the public the history of our own background.
* a community hub. Douglas County has grown so rapidly that it is still seeking to identify its own human resources, its movers and shakers, fellow moms and dads, fellow students. We are working to solve the reference questions of our community, and to that end we are the meeting place and facilitation center.
But those aren't the only options. Another options: we might also be best at integrating the marketing of literacy, as reflected in English as a Second Language classes, or children's storytimes.
"What's our measure of success?"
Here's my best shot: 75% of the households in Douglas County have an active library card.
Clearly, "active" needs further refinement. At present, that means "has been used within the past two years."
Used for what? Circulation of materials. We also need to capture "use of our databases," or "use of our Internet terminals," or "registration in our reading programs," or even "use of our meeting rooms." All but the last, we can capture today.
Once we establish baseline data, we can push it; active might mean used within 1 year, or 6 months. or we might say that 75% of the households (as determined by comparison of patron addresses to our county Geographic Information System data) needs to be bumped to 80, or 90%.
To do this will take more than just running the numbers or giving people a card. It will require us to have services so tailored to our communities -- city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, house by house -- that we will deserve such use, because we will be meeting the needs of those units so well.
"What's our passion?" Library services. Specifically, that means a respect for the integrity of individual inquiry. It might also be a passion for literacy, for local past, for the dynamics of our community.
But here's the humbling thing about being library director. The bigger the organization, the less actual power you have. My thoughts on this are just that: thoughts. Mandating a direction in an organization, no matter who does the mandating, doesn't ensure its accomplishment. At some point, leaders must engage both the minds and hearts of essential staff.
Staff must passionately debate a direction. They must test hypotheses, and honestly report results.They must have the freedom to create new ideas, and discard old.
But in order to be successful, they must also be held to some kind of standard. The percentage of households with an active card just might be the thing.
After doing my PCLOS upgrade, I realized that synaptic does NOT automatically include kernel upgrades. That bears watching in the future. Sometimes, a kernel change is necessary to take full advantage of device recognition, for instance.
I discovered today that Freemind has a nice "cloud" feature. This visually groups element of a screen. To see a picture, click on the link below.
This is still a mockup of the Personal Information Manager idea -- using Freemind's cloud to visually separate and group the various section.
The colors only show on the mind map, however. They don't carry over to the HTML export.
Use of freemind: it's growing on me. It's easy to use, and like other good software titles, I'm finding that the more I use it, the more I learn. My PIM mockup is actually tempting to me -- my wife thinks it might be a better tool than the ones she's seen (Palm Desktop, Outlook, Evolution, Kontact, JPilot). It allows you to see more than one thing at a time, simply by adjusting the picture.
Of course, it doesn't sync to a Palm, which is a drawback.
I used a different mindmapper - vym - to produce my talk in Canon city last Friday (for the gathering of libraries from the former Arkansas Valley Regional Library Services System. Again, just click on the link.
Freemind has more automatic structure -- two stacks, one on the right, one on the left. vym allows you to drag things around more freely on the screen.
The computer gods have again been kind. This morning, I had a small problem with GAIM, and thought I'd try a quick "apt-get update" "apt-get upgrade" to see if something needed refreshing.
And my word, there was a lot of stuff -- all new KDE libraries, a new OpenOffice.org, and much more.
I took a deep breath and did the "apt-get dist-upgrade" dance.
It worked. Linux distributions have come a long way in a short period of time. Both Ubuntu at work, and PCLinuxOS at home work with all my hardware, are fast, stable, and just went through major updates (for FREE) just by typing a couple of commands.
And at that, I could have done the same thing through the graphical Synaptic. I didn't actually NEED a command line.
This is short, but nice. I followed the instructions I listed above to move from "Warty Warthog" to "Hoary Hedgehog." When it was done, I did have a black screen for a bit -- the move from Xfree to Xorg. So I followed the instructions on the same page. After that -- taking nothing but defaults -- I had a beautiful screen.
This is the first time I was able to move from one operating system directly up to another with just a couple of commands. The whole thing took about half an hour or less. Impressive.
+ - Uses of mind mapping software. After playing with Freemind some on multiple platforms, it seems to me it has a lot of potential.
Last name:
First name:
Title:
Company:
Business address:
City:
State:
Zip:
Business voice:
Business fax:
Mobile:
Home:
Email:
Fact1:
Fact:2
April 2005
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
(the output of the Linux "cal" command, then copied and pasted into a freemind text window)
1
2
etc.
+ - Other window managers
What is a window manager?
I've written above about the "desktop environment." But between the operating system and the desktop environment is the "window manager." These are the commands and looks that, predictably enough, define the characteristics of windows, such as the shapes, the colors, the handles, the controls, and how they get dragged around the screen.
Gnome and KDE have their own window managers, usually. But there are some much smaller ones. Two very popular ones are icewm and fluxbox.
Why use a non-standard window manager? Usually, because they are smaller, they demand fewer system resources. You still use all the same programs, but they tend to load and run a little faster.
icewm
Many themes
Icewm is known for its ability (through themes) to mimic Windows, or the Mac, or OS2. It runs well on machines too old to run KDE or Gnome.
How to set up
This is trickier than the fuller desktop environments. To customize your start menu, or the icons on the toolbar, you have to edit a file in the /home/yourname/.icewm directory. "menu" is for menus, and "toolbar" is for the icons on the toolbar, and the programs you want ot launch.
In both cases, the command syntax is very similar. For instance, the line
prog Terminal terminals_section.png xvt
means "launch this program, call it "Terminal," use the icon in "terminals_section.png," and use the command "xvt"
fluxbox
REALLY minimal
Fluxbox doesn't even HAVE a toolbar. There are no icons, either. But because of all that, it is even faster than icewm. To get the menu, you right click.
How to set up/home/yourname/.fluxbox directory
Edit a file called "menu." After making changes, you save it as something else (menu2, for instance). Then you edit another file called "init" to point to the new menu.
That sounds complex. It really isn't. the beginning of my menu2 file looks like this:
[begin] (PCLinuxOS)
[submenu] (Jasper) {}
[begin] (PCLinuxOS)
[exec] (XTerm) {/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm -name Terminal}
[exec] (Konqueror) {konqueror /home/jlarue}
[exec] (Firefox) {soundwrapper /usr/bin/mozffremote}
..... etc.
[exit] (Exit)
[end]
which means that the first submenu that comes up is all my favorite programs. Here the syntax is
"execute this program," called Xterm, whose command is named and located at xxxx.
Having gone through all that, I still like the look of the fuller desktop environment. But there's something useful in knowing how to customize all kinds of managers so you work the way you want them to.
+ - My book
I am currently under contract with Libraries Unlimited to write a book about responding to censorship challenges. The good news is that I've got some 48,000 words written already. I think about the subject a lot. I speak and write about it frequently. I really want to write the book.
The bad news is that I'm having the devil of a time getting established on some kind of writing schedule for it. on the other hand, after 15 years as director of the library, I've built up a lot of vacation time. I'm about convinced I need to set aside a day, or part of a day, every week. I'm confident that I can crank out some 2,000 words a week. Getting a book done seems to be one of the big challenges of life for me, in some ways a bugaboo I just have to put to rest.
My editor is wonderful, though. And she's agreed to send me weekly reminders until I get in the groove.
Once I knock this one out, I might like to take a crack at a book on Linux for librarians.
Now I'm writing this on Macintosh, also running Freemind. There are some differences between the Linux and the Mac OS X version. On the other hand, not many. I edited the /freemind/user.properties file to change "keystroke_add_child = INSERT" to "control ENTER." Now I have all the keyboard controls I need to do things. On the Mac, Freemind is a very pretty application -- and quite fast.
It was a little trickier figuring out a way to grab -- and to post -- this blog file. I now know enough about Unix/Linux to be able to use the terminal ftp program. But of course this is very inelegant in the Mac world.
I went to www.macorchard.com and downloaded a couple of things under ftp. Nothing free, although there were a lot of shareware options. Cyberduck does the job, and I'll see wheher I use it often enough to ante up.
At this point, I find that I don't really use the Mac very often. The family does, and by far prefers it to Linux. Things "just work," as O'Reilly put it. In Linux (at least at home, on my HP running PCLinuxOS), they can be made to work, but then stop working sometimes.
This isn't a reflection of PCLinuxOS -- other than, of course, I'm adding patches every other day as they race toward their 1.0 release -- and Linux settings aren't "pinned" like they are on the Mac. There may also be some hardware issues with my machine -- flaky power supply, bad surge suppressor, funny power (our house did get hit by lightning once). I bought a new surge suppressor, and it seems a little better lately..
Nonetheless, interfaces "grab you" or they don't. For reasons not entirely clear to me, Linux (and Gnome/KDE/Xfce) does grab me -- and I find, over the past couple of years that I've explored it, Linux is also teaching me a lot.
A friend commented to me recently that I'm all about interface. There's some truth to that. In Linux, I can see the interfaces developing. Because open source is in perpetual development, the changes in the interface and software is in constant ferment. Exciting.
But it's hard for me not to notice that the Mac works pretty smoothly.
Ubuntu and the Mac. I have an "old world" Powerbook that is none too stable these days. So I burned the Live Ubuntu PPC disk, and tried it out. I couldn't get the machine to recognize it. Same thing on the new G5 iMac -- although I tested the CD via md5sum to make sure it was good.
Part of the reason that the Mac causes fewer troubles than the Linux world, of course, is that the Mac controls it all: hardware and software. Linux just tries to make sense of the infinite varieties tossed at it.
The problem is the booting mechanism of the Mac -- I need, it seems, yaboot for the new, and bootx for the old. I may, or may not, find this worth the trouble.
Old computers. I believe, in fact, I now have several old computers in the basement:
* Baby Kay, my 1984(?) CP/M based portable Kaypro. Still runs, or did the last time I checked.
* a Mac Performa, pre-PowerPC
* a Mac PPC clone
In addition, there's the Powerbook, my HP running Linux, and G5 iMac.
The latter three are all running on our home network -- and there are times when all are in use. Truly, two librarians, a daughter in the International Baccalaureate program, and a son who is deep into Runescape can eat up the computing cycles and bandwidth.
But the other thing about old computers: I'm intrigued by the projects, like the Linux Terminal Server project (http://www.ltsp.org/) that try to recycle computer back to use -- but without the nagging insecurities and instabilities of earlier operating systems. For the same reason, I like BeatrIX (http://www.watsky.net), the very focused, free, mini-CD version of Linux.
My interest in all this stuff really isn't technological at base. I'm not gifted in that way. But I'm very keen to find solutions that are sustainable in the public sector.
I have, for the past several months now, been using Ubuntu 4.something at work. This is a Gnome based distrubution that promises to be forever free. However, one can find support through online fora, mailing lists, and IRC channels; one can also buy support. It's the brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth, a South African millionaire who is putting his money behind this Linux platform.
It's good. It took about 15 minutes to install, another half hour to update over the Internet, and a 35-40 minute session using the "ubuntuguide.org" list of options to add to the system (things like Java support, Flash and Shockwave plug-ins, the ability to run DVD's, and so on). Then you reboot -- after that, a very stable, secure, well-integrated system.
Last Friday, a new version came out -- six months after the introduction of the last one, as promised. The main enhancement is the incorporation of the latest version of the Gnome desktop environment. Get this: to grab the latest version, you can:
* download and burn a disk, and install from that
* ask the folks at Ubuntu to mail you an install / live disk (one to install, one to test it first)
* make some changes to your Synpatic software management system, and simply upgrade over the Internet
* make some changes to your /etc/apt/sources.list manually, and upgrade over the Internet.
It's all spelled out at http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/HoaryUpgradeNotes.
Oh, and did I mention? All of these are absolutely free.
Then came Kubuntu. All of the promises, including general distribution cycle, free cost,etc., are there. But Kubuntu is based on the KDE desktop environment. This means that some of the software choices are different: the Konqueror browser instead of Firefox, the Kontact package instead of Evolution. But it still includes Openoffice.org.
Moreover, this KDE desktop has a better focused menu than is typical.
This is one of the many religious topics in the computing world, by which I mean that people tend to make total allegiances, then say bad things about any other choice.
A desktop environment is what most people understand as "an operating system" (although some desktop environments can run on multiple systems). In general, it is the graphical interface -- how the screen looks, where the menus are. More than any other characteristic, it defines the feel of a Linux distribution.
The truth is, today, both Gnome and KDE are excellent choices, full featured, handsome, and each has its advantages.
In general (and this is VERY general), Gnome is a little more like the Mac. Things are larger and clearer. The focus is on obvious usability.
KDE tends to be more like Windows. Icons are smaller, dialog boxes have more options. It is studded with features.
Which is better? There is no objective answer. Which is better, chocolate or vanilla? Answer: depends on, and varies with, the person.
I do recommend Ubuntu or Kubuntu for either home or business use. (Note: Ubuntu seems to be the more full-featured and stable. Kubuntu seems, at this writing, to have a few more issues to be ironed out.)
In my case, I use, and love, PCLinuxOS at home. But at home, I'm a hobbyist.
At work, I just want things to be very stable, very well supported. Free is also nice. :)
Ubuntu/Kubuntu make extremely capable and powerful workstations. Moreover, as both are based on the Debian distribution -- with its "apt/Synaptic" package management software, and its deep dedication to free software -- they offer rich repositories of well-tested software for virtually any need.
As a librarian, I believe very strongly in robust public solutions. Ubuntu/Kubuntu fit the bill. If you're working at a library -- or a school/university/non-profit, give it a try. The Live CD, again, downloaded as a free disk, is a great way to test the look, and the hardware detection.
My Firefox and Thunderbird issue is NOT resolved. Not in PCLinuxOS and not in Ubuntu. In PCLOS, clicking on a mailto link works perfectly, providing Thunderbird is not loaded. If it is loaded, then I again get a "mailto:name.domain.type" message. In Ubuntu, it's even less predictable.
In most respects, using Linux has been, for me, a vastly superior alternative to Windows and the Mac. Linux is fast, stable, virus-proof. Because I use the PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu Synaptic software, ugprading or installing software is a piece of cake.
But on occasion, there are odd bobbles of software functioning that are maddening. In this case, I don't know whether to blame Linux, Open Source software generally, or the Mozilla / Firefox/ Thunderbird group. I'm inclined to be inclusive!
But SOMEBODY should have to run the spanking machine. Please: it never occurred to anybody that while using a browser, one might want to click on a mailto link? Or -- and how weird is this? -- that one might get an email with a URL, and might expect to click on it to get a browser?
The Mozilla suite used to do this flawlessly. Firefox and Thunderbird have improved to the point of ... failure.
The open source method -- many eyes testing things -- does a great job of finding and squashing bugs. It does, on occasion, an abysmally bad job of simple usability.
I was impressed, after installing Ubuntu, that I could run through a series of instructions that made the distribution fully functional. But I was not impressed that it wasn't included from the beginning.
The family slept in. After starting a leisurely breakfast, I dug out my winter boots and went outside to dig for the paper. The neighborhood was up and about already. One neighbor had snowblown my driveway out; another had shoveled the space behind the car parked outside. Like the big snow of a couple of years ago, the cul de sac was in a festive mood. So banana bread for the neighbors! And it looks like today will be a sunny, warming day, and all the snow (about 18") will be gone by midday. So I probably shouldn't have closed the library. But the schools are closed, and opening the library then leaves a bunch of children with nobody to watch them. So nature gives us all a family day.
My Tuna Boy partner, David, and I have been working on some new music. Mostly, we've got about 45 minutes of Americana, played on two classical guitars, and doing some close harmony. Now we're branching out into some more contemporary material.
I've been working on two songs: James Taylor's "The Lighthouse" (which has a fiendish number of chord changes) and "On Broadway." I've got a good right hand on guitar, and am a fair picker. My left hand continues to be weak. In part, that's because I taught myself, so my form is lousy, and I have trouble with bar chords. But David was classicially trained, and I'm learning from him. Also, all the piano work seems to be strengthening my left hand.
But there's nothing like a couple of days of downtime to work on the soul: music.
As obvious from my links on my home page, I've been interested in outlining for a long time. In the two pieces linked under "Computers" (http://www.jlarue.com/blastfrompast.html and http://www.jlarue.com/outlinersredux.html) I talk mostly about DOS, Windows, and some 68k Mac outliners.
For an update on what's up with the Mac OS X world (as we bought a G5 iMac for the family a couple of months ago), see Ted Goranson's "About This Particular Outliner" at http://www.atpm.com/9.10/atpo.shtml. Goranson shows that the world of outlining is seeing a spurt of development -- and he describes the Mac interface elements clearly, with lots of pictures.
Incidentally, I eventually bought the wonderful TAO (The Advanced Outliner/Organizer). It's MORE, improved. You can find out more about TAO at http://blue-beach-systems.com/Products/Software/TAO/. Recomended.
+ - But on to Linux based outliners.
Vim and Emacs are the two oldest, well-respected Unix/Linux text editors. Both are rich and complex, truly universes unto themselves. It happens that I don't really use either one of them, so balked at installing or testing them. The Vim Outliner has it's own website at http://www.vimoutliner.org. If you don't mind mucking about at the console level, and know vim already, the vim outliner appears to be excellent. Emacs has outlining built in (but like so many things in that editor, I never found it when I _did_ use it).
Others. I've heard of, and taken a look at woody, Think, and Tout Doux -- but the first two is dated, and the last is more of a database application.
Conclusion: hnb is a good quick and dirty tool, Tuxcards is a great planning and storage tool, Freemind and vym are wonderful for mind mapping. But the all-in-one tool I'd like -- on a par with TAO, or even the outliner/mind mapper combo of Inspiration (http://www.inspiration.com)-- doesn't exist yet in the Linux world.
If it isn't already obvious, I'm a Linux user. I've been using it at work since August of 2002. I began with Yellow Dog 3.something, running on an old iMac. Then I went back to the x86 world, and ran through Red Hat 8, 9, Fedora Core 1, and Red Hat Enterprise Work Station. Then I tried Knoppix, Cobind .2, Mandrake, Linspire, Libranet, Mepis, dozens of various live CD's, and have at last settled on Ubuntu. At home, I use PCLinuxOS. All of the above are good; finally, choosing a Linux distribution is like choosing ice cream. Tastes vary.
+ - Why do I use open source software?
Back in 2002, I moderated a "geekfest" panel of library tech leaders. They were full of tech admiration for this tool -- and open source, unlike a lot of library technology, was actually saving money.
I'm easily bored, my Mac (pre-OS X) was getting long in the tooth, and I was ready for a new hobby.
The more I read about it, the more I realized there are three excellent reasons to use Linux and other open source software:
Much of it is literally free, as in "you can download it from the Internet and copy it, legally, as often as you want." Some Linux distributions charge money, usually worth every penny, but most GNU/Linux distributions are free in another sense: the coding, the source for the core software, is wide open, accessible to all. That means if a business goes under, the code is still out there, still usable and able to be changed by any programmer smart enough to do so.
Linux users aren't troubled, at least not yet, by viruses, email worms, or pop-up ads. Linux is inherently more secure by design, and is predicated on the quaint idea that using your computer shouldn't have to be one long commercial.
Open source software is standards-based. When you create a file using these standards, you are far less likely to have your files get stranded in some now unsupported proprietary format.
Random idea: I wonder if I should take my Linux notes over the past year, and put them into this Freemind format. I've done a reasonably good job of documenting my stupid mistakes -- and that might help somebody else recover from them more quickly. I did a review of 18 Live CDs a month back or so, and somebody suggested that. It would be the work of some days, though....
As noted elsewhere on my site, I'm deeply fascinated by tools that help you think better. The two best writing and thinking tools I have found have been outliners and mind maps. There are lots of open source alternatives, making the exploration of these tools not only interesting from the psychological standpoint, but useful in keeping me up to date about technology trends. That comes in handy for a librarian.
I got up early today because (a) I thought I might have to close our libraries because of a projected blizzard (as indeed I did) and (b) I'd been interviewed by a radio show host about general library stuff.
Libraries have not yet hit prime time -- the half hour interview ran at 7 a.m. on 99.5 the Mountain, and 8 a.m. at 101.5 KOSI. Because I could not find a radio in the house, I learned how to use streaming radio to listen to it. I don't think I said anything too embarrassing (whew). And I think I DID manage to talk about something librarians don't talk enough about. Our future isn't about technology. That's all a means to an end. Librarianship is about storytelling, the pursuit of knowledge, and the building of community. Or so it seems to me, and hey, now I've been on the radio, so I must know what I'm talking about. 'Course, it was REALLY early on Sunday morning, so I'm not THAT much of an expert.
This is my first blog on the redesigned website. What I've done is to take a very dated and simple web design, and start mucking about with alternatives.
That alternative is not, yet, all that graphically sophisticated. I began with a very cool graphic -- an export from the vym (View Your Mind) open source mind map tool. The actual expandable outline (below the graphic) I built in Freemind -- another open source minding mapping tool. After building the map, I set the Preferences (under the Edit menu) to allow "folding." Then I output to HTML. What you get is this -- an expandable/contractable outline that allows one to view the structure of a document.
The more I thought about it, the vym graphic, although cool, was misleading from an interface design angle. It LOOKED like you should be able to click on the graphic, and until I know how to make that happen, it's a bad idea. So I'm back to the cheesy pundit picture.
But that looked lousy too. So I then edited the product with Nvu -- the Linspire-enhanced Mozilla Composer. It's still not all that fancy -- I just split the page into 2 columns. My picture and text are on the left. Eventually, I added the Douglas County Libraries search box on the left, too -- a very cool tool bar all are free to paste into their web sites, too. The Freemind output is on the right. But it looks a LITTLE better.
I have no idea if I'll keep this or not. But I was getting tired of the old website. While I've never actually died of boredom, I've come close.