Category Archives: General

Pirates of the Mediterranean

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Pirates of the Mediterranean

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

Ottawa, OLS and the war museum

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Arrived in Ottawa today for OLS. Managed to get in early enough to make it over to the new (2005?) Canadian War Museum. Unfortunately, there was only two hours left before close. Two hours was not nearly long enough to do the museum justice. Even if you have been to the previous war museum you should go again. The new building is gorgeous and there is lot more stuff to look at. If you like to read everything in a museum, you need to budget a LOT more than two hours.

For those new to Ottawa, walking to the war museum from OLS will take under 30 minutes.

Photo 20060718-cwm-1.jpg from the Canadian war museum
Photo 20060718-cwm-2.jpg from the Canadian war museum
Photo 20060718-cwm-3.jpg from the Canadian war museum
Photo 20060718-cwm-4.jpg from the Canadian war museum
Photo 20060718-cwm-5.jpg from the Canadian war museum
Photo 20060718-cwm-6.jpg from the Canadian war museum
Photo 20060718-cwm-7.jpg from the Canadian war museum
Photo 20060718-cwm-8.jpg from the Canadian war museum
Photo 20060718-cwm-9.jpg from the Canadian war museum
Photo 20060718-cwm-10.jpg from the Canadian war museum

RedHat summit videos

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Red Hat has posted videos of the keynotes from the Red Hat summit in Nashville. So far, I have only watched two of the three videos. Both were excellent.

Eben Moglen: Discusses the philosophical and political ideas behind free software. He argues that free software is about allowing individual creativity. If you don’t ‘get’ free software you need to watch this speech.

Cory Doctorow: Provides a bit of history on copyright change and how the incumbent industries always try to stop progress. Lots of good DRM discussion as well.

There is no future in which bits will be harder to copy than they are today … Any business model that based on the idea that bits will be harder to copy is doomed. [Cory Doctorow (2006 RedHat summit in Nashville)]

I found both of these speeches to be inspiring. Free software is the start of a wider revolution. As Moglen says in his keynote (paraphrasing), it is an incredible privilege to live through a revolution.

Operating system design

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The following article offers a nice introduction to some design techniques that may be used to create more reliable operating systems.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that microkernels long discarded as unacceptable because of their lower performance compared with monolithic kernels might be making a comeback due to their potentially higher reliability, which many people now regard as more important than performance. The wheel of reincarnation has turned.

Can We Make Operating Systems Reliable and Secure? by Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Linux and proprietary (graphics) drivers

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From New Linux look fuels old debate:

For Nvidia, intellectual property is a secondary issue. “It’s so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help,” said Andrew Fear, Nvidia’s software product manager. In addition, customers aren’t asking for open-source drivers, he said.

The open-source community already maintains many drivers. Even if NVidia’s drivers are somehow better at present, I bet NVidia would be very surprised how quickly the community would improve them. “It’s so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help,” sounds like something people would have said about building a high-quality operating system like Linux 10 years ago.

Secondly, as an NVidia customer, I am asking for open-source drivers. I am sick of the driver dance that closed drivers force me to go through. I want my graphics driver to be packaged and updated as necessary by my distribution just like the rest of my system. I want an open-source driver so that the Xorg developers can modify the driver to take advantage of new features and architectural changes. As the speed of development on Xorg increases (which appears to be the case in recent history) proprietary drivers are going to have more difficulty keeping pace.

The next graphics card I buy will have good open-source drivers, even if it slower than the alternative with proprietary drivers. From the article linked above, it looks like it may use an Intel graphics chip.

Note: If you don’t understand why the Linux kernel developers dislike the idea of closed-source drivers so much you should read Linux in a binary world… a doomsday scenario by Arjan van de Ven (also linked to in the quoted article).

Isn’t it semantic?

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Isn’t it semantic?: An interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. There are some interesting comments on the semantic web in this interview.

In physics, to take the behaviour of gases as an example, you visualize them as billiard balls, model the rules they follow and then transpose that to a larger scale to account for the effects of temperature and pressure – so physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.

So we could say we want the Web to reflect a vision of the world where everything is done democratically, where we have an informed electorate and accountable officials. To do that we get computers to talk with each other in such a way as to promote that ideal.