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The case for automating the Ubuntu download/burn process

May 25, 2010 in Code, Software | No comments

For people installing Linux the first time, the world can sometimes seem like a minefield of technical jargon and unfamiliar concepts. Understandably, this disillusions many: the Ubuntu Testimonials and Experiences forum has a tendency to alternate between page upon page of unmitigated pontificating to the converted, and trollish cries of “ZOMG why u make ubuntu SO COMPLICATED!!!!1111111???????”

A common stumbling block comes before anyone’s even managed to start Ubuntu for the first time: working out what to do with the strange ISO file that comes down the line when you click the “Download Ubuntu” link. Thankfully, Windows 7 features an ISO burner by default, so that problem is somewhat mitigated – however, there’s still potential for foul-up.

In the past, people have copied the ISO file to the CD using Windows Explorer, and tried to extract it and find another image file contained within. Consider, also, people without Windows 7: for this, people have to download third-party software to create their Ubuntu CD. This is likely to scare off new users.

One way around this is to use Wubi – however, this only creates an installation inside an existing Windows install, which is far from ideal in many cases. In interface terms, however, it’s definitely on the right track. Read the rest of this entry »

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Dear RMS – You’re doing it wrong

February 17, 2010 in Software, The Law and Technology | No comments

Damn you, nonderivative licenses.

Damn you, nonderivative licenses.

The FSF is a bizarre organisation. True, its intentions are noble – to develop and promote free and open-source alternatives to proprietary software – but it seems to have completely the wrong idea about the way to go about it.

They’re simply way, way too childish about it. Consider the Windows 7 Sins campaign, which screams, on its front page, that PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE ATTACKS EDUCATION!!! (In big, bold, Time Cube-esque letters, just in case you didn’t notice it.)

A click on the link will reveal the following tract:

Many US states even boast about how they are cooperating with Microsoft, either ignoring or not understanding the corrupting influence that accepting freebies from this huge corporation has on their government. Because Microsoft’s software is proprietary, it isincompatible with education — users are simply passive consumers in their interactions with Windows, they are legally forbidden from adapting the software to solve a particular problem, or from satisfying an intellectual curiosity by examining its source code.

Now, the bit about restrictive licensing, I can agree with. I even sort of agree with the giving-freebies-away thing (I say, writing this from an installation of Windows Server 2003 obtained from Dreamspark – please don’t hurt me!)

However, it then continues:

Free software, on the other hand, gives children a route to empowerment, by encouraging them to explore and learn. Nowhere was the promise of an educational platform using free software more significant than the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Launched by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in 2003, OLPC was designed to lead children around the world to an advanced education using the combination of information technology and freedom. The project aimed to produce low-cost devices (starting with one called the XO) so that millions of children could have access to them, and free software, so they would have the critical freedoms to explore and share their software.

Then under pressure from Microsoft, Negroponte backed the project away from its commitment to freedom and announced that the machine would also be a platform for running the nonfree Windows XP operating system.

Microsoft is not the only threat to education — Adobe and Apple are both firmly placed in education, even on Windows. Adobe’s proprietary Flash and Shockwave players and Apple’s QuickTime and iTunes are widely used by educational software.

However the highlighted part qualifies as news is a mystery to me. “X86-powered machine runs X86-compatible operating system.” In other news, “two-legged woman in Ramsgate wears two-legged trousers”, and “sighted man in Putney watches television”.

One of the great things about free software is choice. With enough expertise, you can choose practically every single detail of the system. However, there’s also a choice not to use free software if you want to. This also goes the other way for developers. You have the choice of releasing your software under any free software license you so choose, but you’re welcome to keep the source to yourself if you want to.

Following this, there is a link to an article by Lord Stallmanbeard himself entitled Why Schools should Exclusively Use Free Software. The premise is flawed from the start, but let’s take a look at some of his arguments first:

Schools have a social mission: to teach students to be citizens of a strong, capable, independent, cooperating and free society. They should promote the use of free software just as they promote recycling. If schools teach students free software, then the students will tend to use free software after they graduate.

Hmm… last time I checked, teaching students to be citizens of a strong, capable, independent, cooperating and free society didn’t consist of being sat through endless hours of furiously scribing “I MUST RECYCLE,” or “I MUST ALWAYS BUY FAIRTRADE,” or “I WILL NEVER GET INTO A PRIVATE CAR AS LONG AS I LIVE FOR THE GOOD OF THE ENVIRONMENT.”

This is the thing: he’s proposing fighting the alleged “indoctrination” of schoolchildren into using BorgWord and related software, by getting them to indoctrinate children into using OpenOffice instead. It’s hypocritical tit-for-tat childishness.

He continues:

Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, “The knowledge you want is a secret—learning is forbidden!”

No, proprietary software says, quite simply, “we’re not giving you the source code to look at because we make money by selling precompiled binaries, and don’t want other people making money out of compiling our source code.” Again, it’s not an excuse I entirely agree with, but the concept that the Borg, Darth Jobs of Cupertino and Monkey Boy all want to turn your children into vegetables is simply not true – and, I don’t know about you, but it has a whiff of conspiracy theory about it.

(Incidentally, he then reaches this astonishing conclusion:

Schools, starting from nursery school, should tell their pupils, “If you bring software to school, you must share it with the other students. And you must show the source code to the class, in case someone wants to learn.”

For some reason, I can’t imagine a four-year-old being particularly interested in seeing the source code of some irritating Flash game based around a talking caterpillar.)

And now, for the more practical reason his premise is flawed. For the most part, a lot of free software simply does not work unless you’re a serial computer-tinkerer.

I’ve already mentioned I’m writing this on Windows. This is for two reasons: 1. at present, I’m in the middle of coding a Visual Basic.NET application in Visual Studio (something which, incidentally, has no equivalent on GNU/Linux, making programming for the system an utter nightmare.) 2. Ubuntu, at the moment, is as sluggish as hell.

Gnash is the finest example of nasty FLOSS software besides Hurd. Touted as a free replacement for Flash, it still can’t even handle most YouTube videos without muting the sound after nearly five years of development – if anything, it’s worse than Adobe’s own (appalling) Linux implementation of Flash.

(It might also be useful here to note that Stallman doesn’t like Silverlight, even though it’s better than Flash from a free software viewpoint, because it has a FLOSS implementation (Moonlight) that works most of the time, and because it’s sort-of open source anyway. No prizes for guessing why.)

It doesn’t stop there. Windows may not have a proper permissions system, and it may need defragmenting every once in a while, but at least Explorer doesn’t take ten seconds to display the contents of a single folder *cough* Nautilus. Hardware support, while improving, is still as shaky as ever, and how anyone can honestly put up with the crap-laden disgrace that is OpenOffice.org is beyond me.

The Windows 7 Sins campaign launched with the symbolic throwing of copies of Windows 7 into a giant trashcan in a Boston park, by a man dressed in a giant gnu costume shouting “GNU wins again!” (which it hasn’t, because people are still using Windows, Mac OS X and plenty of other things that are NOT GNU.) I can’t help but think that if they’d spent the money on hiring programmers instead of an infantile publicity stunt that had no impact whatsoever, we’d be an awful lot closer to something like a better Flash implementation.

Hence, we return to our original point. The FSF is concentrating too much on trying to discredit the alternatives, whilst failing to actually provide anything to replace it that’s any good. True, a lot of free software is brilliant – GIMP, WebKit, GNOME and most of Ubuntu and Fedora are great examples – however, only everything about it gets better than the rest will people start using it.

Cheap point-scoring doesn’t work for the FSF. It works for Apple with those astonishingly smug Get a Mac ads, because they have something that works to replace Windows. A simple visit to the FSF website, on the other hand, will befuddle you with a variety of links to distributions like gNewSense, the probability of which working seemingly depends upon your hardware, the alignment of the stars, and the ratio of milk to cornflakes in your breakfast this morning.

This is mostly due to a cult-like belief that anything so much as tainted with proprietary software (such as all the good Linux distributions) is therefore evil. Hence, you’re pointed back to a distribution that fails to recognise your wireless and graphics card, makes you think (by association) that all free software is shit and makes you switch back to BorgOS.

Guilt by association is another immature frame of mind. Consider this, from Stallman’s own web page on his computer use:

I stopped using the OLPC because the OLPC project made their machine act as a platform for running Windows. Now I use a Lemote machine which has a free startup program and all free software. Since the processor is a variant of MIPS, Windows does not support it.

Again, guilt by association. Because the OLPC can run Windows (and the OLPC project collaborated with getting it to run Windows, for people who wanted to do so) it is, therefore, evil. It’s like a small child saying “I won’t play with little Johnny because his brother Jimmy stole my ice-cream.” It’s like saying that because of 9/11, all people who look slightly dusky are terrorists. Or that because of Gok Wan, all gay people should be thrown off the nearest cliff edge.

With this incessant campaigning (the majority of which is useless, simply because no-one outside the technical community gives a fuck) the FSF is missing the point entirely. With this in mind, here’s my list of wishes to make the FSF actually work:

  1. Get some bloody coding done. Yes, Flash is evil. I knew that. But does Gnash provide a viable alternative until HTML5 finally stamps on Flash’s remains? No.
  2. Recognise that proprietary software, in itself, is not evil. It’s only evil when the proprietary aspects are used to control and monopolise the market.  Therefore, a binary-blob driver for a wireless card, while not necessarily good, is not a reincarnation of Beelzebub.
  3. Stop using the guilt-by-association argument. I happen to think Microsoft Office for Windows and iWork are the two best office suites out there right now, I like Visual Studio, and I also enjoy playing a few games from Steam from time to time. This does not make me a Microsoft whore, so quit preaching that I should only ever use free software.
  4. For god’s sake, be more professional. If you want to peddle free software (providing it’s all fixed, good and reasonably bug-free and snappy) then do so without scaring potential users into thinking they’re supporting a fascist regime by using Microsoft, and don’t do anything as ridiculous as that bloody trashcan again.
  5. Don’t be so arrogant and elitist. The Mac ads are love-it-or-hate-it – many people hate their smugness. Arrogant, holier-than-thou attitudes towards potential users simply alienate them, especially when the software you’re peddling isn’t as good as the one they already had.

Note: I’ve been meaning to write this for some months, and finally hammered it all out in a one-hour spurt during which the word count has steadily shot up to 1768. Cripes…

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Whatever happened to good icon design?

July 16, 2009 in Software | No comments

screenshot_023Yesterday, on Twitter, I was alerted to the existence of Helveticons, icons inspired by the classic typeface Helvetica. THEY. ARE. BRILLIANT. They’re simple, elegant, clear, unambiguous and scalable, which is something sorely lacking in icon design today.

Now comes the bad news. They’re $279 for the ‘Basic’ set. True, they’re royalty-free, but if you wanted to include them in, say, an open-source project, you’d be proverbially screwéd by thine own Licensing rules.

My irks with modern icon design are rather simple: icons are usually far too ambiguous, and sometimes make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

For example, here’s a screenshot from Evolution, using the GNOME-Colors icon set.

The icons, from left to right: print, mark for deletion, mark as junk, mark as not junk, stop operation

The icons, from left to right: print, mark for deletion, mark as junk, mark as not junk, stop operation

Now, GNOME-Colors is one of the better icon sets… but even so, this is dreadful. The icon for ‘delete’, in most places, means ‘forbidden’, ‘no entry’ or ‘end of zone’. I’d be more inclined to suggest that the ‘stop operations’ button would mean ‘delete’, because in most places, stop is indicated by an octagonal sign.

It’s this ambiguity that infuriates me. Too often, these sets are poorly thought out (GNOME-Colors is an exception, but it still has occasional hiccups, as demonstrated above.) Too often, they end up confusing users.

Of course, the Queen of Good Icon Design is Susan Kare, the graphic designer responsible for UI design on the original Macintosh, and is currently designing for Facebook and Chumby. Her designs are simple, use colours only when they enhance the image, and are very unambiguous. (In fact, Kare designed the original set for Nautilus, GNOME’s file manager: however, this has since been added to, expanded and revised so much it can’t really be called her work any more.)

The bottom line is that Helveticons are a good set. If they were open source, they’d be perfect… but the FLOSS community must start designing user interfaces better.

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