LinuxLala’s Temple of Wisdom

Many awkward comments on recently published blogs on ComputerWorld, discussing Trademarks, have forced this post out of the drafts. Sorry post, I can only imagine how you suffered waiting in the ever growing queue.

Paul W. Frields, the untiring Fedora project leader, conducted a Fedora IRC classroom in March regarding Fedora Trademarks. While it pertains specifically to Fedora (or RedHat), the basics discussed apply universally to all trademarks, more or less.

The ever helpful Wikipedia and Google will throw all kinds of information on Trademarks at you, be it an introductory passage or the history or defending Trademarks in courts.

This IRC session was very basic; a simpleton’s introduction to Trademarks, if you will, so don’t go into it hoping to come out as a masterful legalese interpreter.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Trademarks_Classroom_(20090307)

And finally, to come a full circle, the case that piqued my interest in Trademark law — Nissan Motor Co. v. Nissan Computer Corp.
http://www.linksandlaw.com/decisions-141-nissan.htm

What distribution is ideal for me? This is by far the most often asked question on just about every forum board. New users are adopting Linux by the hordes everyday, and that’s a great thing, but because of the large number of distributions to choose from, they can’t help but wonder which is best for them.

To go 10 rounds with one distro only to realize you’re a different weight class is not the most effective way of learning something new or adopting a new environment. You’d be tired by the end of the second round, and while your enthusiasm and encouragement from your peers will keep you in the game for another eight rounds, what good comes from taking this beating, even if it’s from the best.

Instead of asking what distro is ideal for me, perhaps new users should be asking what distribution do I avoid, or stay away from initially?

Over the past several years, I’ve seen new users asking what distro to begin with and all through the years they’ve had people sharing their stories, talking about their fortunes and misgivings with certain distros. My response to such inquiries has always been pretty standard, and drab. I tell them to pick any of Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu or openSUSE, wet their teeth as it were, and when they are comfortable enough with that distro, to go distro hopping. It’s the best way to learn and get exposed to all the wonders unique to each distro, I tell them.

Of late, I’ve changed my response a little, like just about everyone else. While everyone now deliberates between Fedora, Ubuntu and Mepis (yes, this is just as often recommended to newbies as Fedora and Ubuntu), I’ve started telling newbies what distro they should stay away from. Slackware, Debian and Gentoo are on my list of distros they should avoid when starting with Linux along with all the other ideal-for-servers distros.

This isn’t because I find these distros particularly challenging. In fact, my first distribution over a decade ago was Slackware. It’s just that people are far more used to the experience as offered by more, for lack of a better word, user-friendly distros. I believe user-friendly is quite a misnomer if there ever was one. Doesn’t user-friendly just mean that you get an interface similar to what you’ve been using all along. When they say user-friendly, don’t they mean less of a learning curve?

And that’s what makes Debian, Slackware and Gentoo different from other distros. Not because they are difficult to use. Not because they have an ugly interface. Not because they are broken. Just that in some matters, they require a bit more from the users than other distros. Most newbies aren’t willing to do that extra bit, and those that are, don’t understand the first thing about what they’re doing.

So there it is. I tell newbies to stay away from some distros. Do you too have a list of distros that you would recommend new users to keep away from, until they’ve had some experience with Linux?

I wrote the cover story on DVDisaster for the latest issue of Linux Format magazine. This is my first article for LXF and it was a wonderful experience.

It’s quite different from writing for Linux.com in many ways. While Linux.com pressed for a more to-the-point structure, LXF insists on entertaining readers and not being a straight arrow. Consequently, Linux.com didn’t allow for much humor but LXF won’t accept write-ups any other way.

Can’t wait to see my mug on the glossy pages. Would you believe I’ve bee singing Klingon drinking songs for a few days now:

‘ej HumtaH ‘ej DechtaH ‘Iw
‘ej Doq SoDtaH ghoSpa’ Sqral bIQtIq
‘e’ pa’ jaj law’ mo’ jaj puS
jaj qeylIS molar mIgh HoHchu’qu’

It just isn’t the same in English.

And finally, do try DVDisaster if you’ve ever lost one of your backup discs. With DVDisaster you can create Error Correction files for your discs. You can then use these ECC files to rescue data off of discs with scratched surfaces and missing sectors.

Ever pondered the origin of the phrase: “The XYZ we/you/everyone loves to hate“? It’s been used a gazillion times — for people, places, cars, companies, and just about everything under the sun. Under the sun, heh, this phrase too deserves some ponderin’. But we can do that later.

For now, click on this link right here if you’re curious about the people that work at Apple, well they are actually just a bunch of guys who belong to the “powers that be” group of their own division. It’s an article that attempts to answer who would run Apple after Steve Jobs. Maybe that’s a question that you want answered, maybe that’s a question you already know the answer to. In any case, here you’ll find a list of 11 men who might take on that responsibility, some day.

If for no other reason, read the piece for a quick intro to these eleven.

Just a quick head’s up in case you weren’t aware of this. LinuxQuestions.org, the ever-lovin’ forum boards that’s now so much more also allows members to run their blogs. If you ever run out of interesting stuff to read, or are never tired of reading people’s experiences with all things Linux, head on over to HERE.

I’m sure you know of all kinds of people who write all kinds of blogs. Well, add me to that list too. After all these years, I’m going to break the silent promise I made to myself, when I said, “lala, I’m never going to blog about my personal preference, likes/dislikes, and the latest shopping”. It’s time I break that vow of secrecy and reveal everything to the world.

The first in this long list of revelations is my beloved Phillips QG3080 beard trimmer. This handy little 7-in-one is an absolute must if you’re not too keen on making conversation with the ever-friendly barber. It’s been months since I last visited the barber for haircut or getting my beard trimmed.

While I was only interested in a beard trimmer, to keep me from going RMS’s way, the QG3080 has enough extensions to truly justify it being called a complete grooming kit. Having used it for a few months now, I can safely conclude the barber didn’t do half as good a job as the QG3080. And it takes less than 10 min to trim my beard. Compare that with the 20 minute drive to the barber, add the discomfort of spending twice that many minutes in an uncomfortable chair listening to bad music or watching bad movies on the tee-vee and you can just about imagine how happy the little gizmo makes me.

Admittedly, the thing requires to be charged for hours before you get a 45min battery time, but that’s a very welcome tradeoff to the agony as described in the ‘graph above.

Keep trimmin’!

That’s right. It’s been years in the making but better late than never. Long time offender Cisco, who the FSF had hoped to talk some sense into since establishing the compliance process in 2003, seems to be either a slow learner, or just plain cheat.

As others have pointed out since this story broke out, FSF would rather sit and talk compliance with offenders than file lawsuits. I believe it’s high time we saw some more proactive enforcement measures on the FSF’s behalf.

As per Brett Smith, licensing compliance engineer at the FSF, which is a fancy way of identifying someone who deals with license-related issues at the FSF, “Unfortunately, they never put in the effort that was necessary to finish the process, and now five years later we have still not seen a plan for compliance. As a result, we believe that legal action is the best way to restore the rights we grant to all users of our software.”

That really puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? An outright rejection I can understand. Had Cisco refused to listen to the FSF at all, at least we’d have had a clear case on our hands, one of misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the license. To drag the communication process for this long, only for it to end up in courts, is sad.

While many of you might already have read the press release by now, here are some more details about the case and the bludgeoning bundle of blunder.

That blog posts that begin as an extension of the post title make for quite an interesting read. Not surprisingly, I’m the only one who does this sort of a thing. I’ve done this quite often in the past, mostly in posts announcing one of my articles on Linux.com. For all the English teachers in the world, for all the books, guides, tutorials, howtos, documentation and help on grammar and syntax of any language, there seems to be no coherent writing-style for blogs.

The blogosphere, truly allows people to be unique. Some may argue that the speech patterns for each individual are unique as well. I, however disagree. If you focus your attention on random conversations, and at some point attempt to make some sense from it all, you’ll discover that you can always, with unnerving accuracy, group people into categories based on their speech pattern, their choice of connecting-words, the words they use most frequently and how they blend their native language into the sentences they are speaking in some foreign language.

The most common example of this, perhaps, is ‘yaar’, the desi word for friend. It’s also used as a connect-word and as something you use in a sentence to refer to friends or to finish off your expression of shock and/or surprise (come on yaar, what’re you saying yaar, stop this yaar).

So, if you are attentive enough, you can fairly accurately place people into various groups. And these groups can be age, work, education (where they studied), marital status, etc. Needless to say, you don’t need to hear a person to be able to place her in one of the two predominant groups: male and female. (OK, I apologize for this sorry-a$$ joke interrupting the interesting observation and breaking your concentration.)

Because of this lack of grammar or writing style for the blogosphere, people have absolute freedom to write whatever however. Yes, you read that right. People have the freedom to write whatever they want, and they can write it however they want. It’s not so simple with speech, since people learn to ape popular phrases and begin using catchwords just because everyone around them is. That’s why it’s so easy to tell what group a person belongs to. For instance, having never been to a college, I’ve always called a Samosa a Samosa. But, college kids in Delhi, don’t call it that. They have some other excuse of a name for it, which makes perfect sense to them and their group/peers, but is as alien for people like me to understand as the Vulcan salute.

Of course, you can group people into various sections based on their choice of clothes, music that they like, celebs they think are fashionable, their political orientation, etc. but there’s no fun in that. But, to be able to judge someone solely on their speech pattern is quite a talent.

So, at the end of the day, what’s the purpose of this post? Isn’t it obvious? I’m simply asking you to be more attentive!

Begin Disclaimer — I’m a Trek fan. I use vi. — End Disclaimer

Here’s an interesting question: do you change your nick every time you step away from your desk, when logged into any IRC channel or any other IM protocol? I mean, what if you’re only going to take a leak and come right back? That shouldn’t take long. It’s not a complicated procedure. And what if you’re planning a very short trip to the kitchen, the run-in, grab and get out kind, the whole premise of which is to make sure you’re not caught, by your wife/husband/mom/kid/brother/sister?

I for one, don’t change my nick for such trifles. Any time I change my nick to linuxlala-afk or set IM status to Away, you can rest assured I won’t be back, not in the near future in any case. When I take the pains to announce I’m going away, do you really expect me to finish things off quickly and get right back? No sireee, not me! When I go away, I stay away, for at least long enough to justify the nick change.

Unfortunately, any time I don’t change my nick and go away, I still take my sweet time to return. This is not always deliberate on my part. Most times what happens is that the short trip to the kitchen turns into a delightful and engrossing indulgence that craves company. So, anything I’m taking a bite of (biscuit, glass of juice, some other snack), I go around the house offering to everybody else. If they say yes, not only do I prepare it for them, I spend some quality time with them, discussing random tid-bits, for as is probably the case with all of you, my parents don’t IM. As a result, what was supposed to be a quick in and out operation, becomes a long break that just won’t end. What’s worse, not once during the long break do I feel guilty for not changing my nick as a service to others.

Anyway, I thought that was going to be the last example, but believe it or not, someone just rang the bell, and I had to run out to see who it was. Obviously I didn’t change my nick before I ran off. In case you’re curious, it was the errand boy from the local medicine shop here to drop off some of dad’s medicines. Since we live in a world where monetary exchange is an absolute must to buy anything, I spent the next few minutes hunting for cash to pay the fellow for the pills. If you think I once gave thought to anybody who might’ve been inconvenienced by me not changing my nick, you’ve not been paying attention to anything I’ve written in the first three grafs. Go back and reread my dear fellow.

As this was going to be a totally useless post from the word go, I don’t have anything further or meaningful to bring this post to a conclusion. You can continue to change your nick every time you move away from the keyboard, or you can be ruthless and carefree as I am. The choice is yours to make, because at the end of the day, there can be only two kinds of people who IM, those who change their nicks for trivial reasons and those who don’t. Take your pick and be proud.

I somehow managed to bribe Sayamindu into adding my feed to Planet Floss India. Yay! The details of the deal are for now locked away in a not-too-big chest hidden in a place frequented by the scarecrows.

I am, even as I type this, looking for a picture (to make up the hackergotchi) that wouldn’t put people to deep sleep upon seeing it (don’t ask me how I manage to do this, it’s a trick the scarecrows taught me). There are however plenty pics of mine on Flickr if you’re in a hurry. How’d these get there? I’m not supposed to throw names here, so all I’ll say is that some people are desperate to spread the horror around and it’s all their doing.

See you around the next blog post.

Cheers!

Update: So I messed up the post title. I spelled planet as plant. All a man can say at this time is: it wasn’t my fault. The scarecrows must’ve done it. Honest!