Facebook activism - does it really work?

Everyone who has a Facebook profile has been invited to one of those activists groups who are trying to make our planet a better place to live. Stop polluting the air, fight racism, legalise marijuana... etc., there are groups of people who want to achieve some (more or less) moral goal.

Most of these groups are pretty naive and look like they're never going to achieve anything. How can few hundred people connected through the internet stop whale hunting? Why should anyone even bother and join one of these groups? It doesn't make any difference anyway... or does it?

YAUT (yet another ugly toolkit)

During my computer science studies at the Technical University of Vienna I have come across many software development tools and platforms. Some of them were quiet clever and useful. And some of them were not.

This week I had to develop a small application using the Globus Toolkit. It is a platform designed for grid computing - applications that require a lot of resources are ran on a grid of powerful computers. It uses something called web service resource framework (WSRF). It's an attempt to create stateful web services. During each call to the web service you not only specify the function you want to execute and its parameters but also some resources (stored on the server) that should be used during the execution of the function. The idea seems pretty nice, unfortunately the implementation is just terrible.

The specification, the API and the configuration seem to be designed by someone who hasn't written a line of code for many years. In an ideal software development platform you can write simple application easily while still allowing the user to create complex and scalable applications. Unfortunately with Globus Toolkit this is not the case. The tutorial which explains how to create a small grid-calculator (allowing addition and subtraction of integers) takes few hours. If you actually manage to get it running at all thanks to the configuration hell.

Globus Toolkit might be good when it comes to complex grid applications. But from developer's perspective it is a complete failure. I can't imagine that some would voluntarily start to create applications with Globus Toolkit, just for fun. And that's all that matters. If nobody wants to develop using your tools you're bust.

Tetris - 25th anniversary

This legendary game celebrates its 25th anniversary this week. If you feel nostalgic there are many free implementations of this marvelous game. For example you can try KBlocks from the new KDE4.

New wave of censorship in China

I haven't made any new posts in the last few weeks. I could make up some good excuses for stopping blogging but the truth is I was probably just lazy.

So why did I decide to give my blog a second try? Well one reason is that there is always something to write about. Writing down your thoughts and sharing your experiences makes your head feel lighter.

But the main reason for reactivating my blog is that I want to celebrate the fact that I am free to actually have an uncensored blog. It might not be the most interesting thing to read but to me it is important that I free to express myself through my blog and other people are free to read it.

Many people on this planet are not so fortunate. In preparation of the 20th anniversary of nothing happening at the Tiananmen Square the chinese government decided to block the access to Twitter, Flick, bing.com, YouTube and many more.

The communist regime is obviously afraid of revolution 2.0.

Windows recovery console - it works!

Today I have successfully used the Windows recovery console from the Windows XP install CD for the first time in my life. Until now I thought it was just a cruel joke on all sysadmins by evil Microsoft programmers. The list of available commands hardly fills a single screen so there isn't much one can do which can be very frustrating for a long term Linux user.

I was installing some drivers and got a BSOD during the process. After a restart the system was unbootable, not even in safe mode, complaining about a corrupted driver file in system32/drivers. Naturally I tried the "last working" configuration from the boot menu. Unfortunately that didn't help either.

So using the recovery console I was able to copy the correct file from lastgood/system32/drivers to the system32/drivers which fixed the system. In other words the "last working" configuration contained the right files. Unfortunately this obviously isn't enough and some more secret magic is required.

So if the "last working" configuration feature was working I wouldn't have to use the crappy console in the first place. It scares me that most people on this planet use a system that
1) can break during installation of hardware drivers and result in an unbootable state
2) has totally useless restore capabilities
3) and an even more useless recovery console!

And the fact that I got paid for repairing the computer didn't make me much happier (just a little bit).

MuseumsQuartier

Last week I went to MuseumsQuartier in Vienna to shoot a new panorama. It didn't turn out as good as I expected. I arrived to late and the sun was already too low. And it would have been much nicer if the trees were green. Well I guess I'll have to wait till spring!

Is GNOME really better?

I've always been KDE user. I love kwin, kicker, kate and all the other power features and utils that come with it. In my eyes Konqueror is the best file manager ever. I've been using Kubuntu for the last 3 years but I'm starting to wonder whether I should switch to something else.

I've been working with GNOME quiet often recently, especially on Ubuntu. And it's pretty good. I actually works where KDE fail terribly. For example file associations - which file types are opened by which programs. They are a horror in KDE. Sometimes I have the feeling that if I double click a file in the Konqueror it will be opened with a program chosen by a random generator. Some video files are opened by Kaffeine, some by MPlayer and some don't work at all (like flv videos) although they could be opened by MPlayer or Xine. So every time a install a new system or create a new user I have to fix the settings because the defaults just don't work! And if you're using Firefox (because Konqueror sucks as a browser) then you should prepare for even more trouble because it's file associations are completely different from KDE's.

Is it really so difficult to get these simple things right? You can't expect an normal user to work with a system with such fundamental problems.

And there are many more use cases where Ubuntu is clearly superior to Kubuntu which I'm planning to cover in the future.

I really hope that KDE4 will get this fixed.