Ubuntu is a fairly new distribution compared to other mature distributions. It made a splash for its user friendliness, building on the strengths of the robust Debian distributions and a lot of marketing, it shot to instant fame. Ubuntu promised that every 6 months there will be a new release, so far it has held to that promise.

However I realize everytime there is a new release, there are lots and lots of problems in them, and unlike calling them "full releases", they seem like a beta release to me. I'm not an ubuntu user, however this week when Ubuntu 7.10, the latest version was released my friend immediately downloaded it, and since then has been grappling with problems: widescreen resolution won't set, compiz-fusion on ATI closed source drivers is broken, gdesklets, Evolution on 64bit Intel etc... And he is not alone, in a thread in ubuntu forums, which is has swelled to 84 pages at the time of writing. So people definitively have lots and lots of problems with the latest release. So I want to ask to the ubuntu community, is in their opinion "6 monts a release" working? To an external observer it doesn't seem to.

I'm an avid OpenSUSE fan. I've waited long for OpenSUSE they went over 6 alpha releases, and many beta releases also its been more than 8 months since the last opensuse release. For me it matters most that new version of a distribution is stable enough even when it takes a year, not hurried to a 6 months artificial time schedule and release it in what ever form it is.

I'm sorry that I havent blogged for a long long time. Because I was very busy during the summer. I was working as an openlab student in the CERN IT department in Geneva, Switzerland. I gained some interesting insights there into scientific computing, Grids and virtualization which I will be sharing on this blog in the coming weeks. I'm now in the UK, pursuing my PhD.

One would think that web search is a solved problem, however this is not the case according to Google. Google's Udu Manber talks about some of the challenges here. One of the amazing features described in the link is the capability of writing a query in a foreign language, Google translates that query into English, searches the web (Most pages on the internet are in English), and returns matching results in the same language as the query, hence it automatically translates the pages. This is an amazing feature in my opinion.

Linux is considered the de-facto server based operating system. A typical Linux distribution comes with everything any web developer could have asked for: php, apache, python, perl, ruby etc. However there is one thing that Linux sorely lacks: Web Development IDEs. Sure KDE comes with Quanta, and there is BlueFish, and there used to be Nvu. Each IDE has its own strengths, for example I love coding php in Quanta, BlueFish rocks at HTML authoring, however there is so much more to web development nowadays: XML, CSS3, JavaScript to name a few. And each IDE really sucks in handling these things. Today I was coding in Javascript and Quanta kept crashing!

To just give a flavor what the open source world is up against when it comes to web development IDEs. Just have a look at the latest enhancements to the already powerful Visual Studio (not a web development IDE par se, however VS always has supported web development due to ASP). Then of course, no comparison is complete without the mention of Adobe Dreamweaver, MS Expression Designer although seen as lame in the Windows world is light years ahead of any open source web development IDE unfortunately.

So what is a Linux web developer to do? Put up with crashing, feature deficient web development applications, or get the proprietary ones and run in them in through virtualization (this is the path I'm thinking of adapting)?

Adding full read/write NTFS support to Linux has been a story of damaged reputations, data corruptions and human ingenuity!

Since 1995 various groups have been working on adding support for NTFS to Linux, however their efforts were dealt a severe blow when Microsoft significantly changed the filesystem in Windows 2000. The project which came most near to a providing a complete support for NTFS was Captive NTFS which used Windows's own native ntfs driver wrapped in ReactOS, however due to proprietary issues Captive NTFS could not be accepted as a mainstream solution.

Now after 12 years in development, there is a full driver at last! NTFS-3G, which uses Filesystem in User Space (FUSE), and provides full read/write support for NTFS partitions. Such was the demand that within 5 days of release the projects main page, received 2 million hits! Here is a brief tutorial how to make use of it.

Installing NTFS-3G

The entire software can be downloaded from http://www.ntfs-3g.org/index.html, many distribution specific packages exist.OpenSUSE users can refer to this.

Creating a Parition

For full guide, check the official how-to by TLDP

Formatting the partition to ntfs

use the mkfs.ntfs utility to format a partition to NTFS, you could also use any Windows installation for this purpose (I would recommend the latter, as mkfs.ntfs is very slow)

usage:

mkfs.ntfs drive-name [eg. mkfs.ntfs /dev/sdb1]

Mounting NTFS drive

mount -t ntfs-3g drive-name mount-point [eg. mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1]

Unmounting the NTFS drive

umount drive-name

Intially when I installed ntfs-3g, I faced lots of stability problems. It complained something about using a kernel less than 2.6.20, I was using opensuse's default kernel 2.6.18-34, and I faced data corruption twice. Now I'm using the 2.6.22-2 kernel, and it seems to be working stable now. Additionally it was reported in the media that writing is slow in this driver, however I have not noticed any difference, maybe because I was writing to an external hard disk and the bottleneck was in the USB interface. Real performance can be measured in internal hard disk partitions.

In in Software terms it is! And let me explain why.

KDE's default sound subsystems, aRts (Analog realtime synthesizer) has been part of KDE since ages. I really appreciate the quality of lots of software it comes with, however aRts is a real disappointment. Since Windows 98 I believe MS Windows's sound system had the capability of running multiple sound streams at the same time, this is 2007, and one of the most popular window managers for Linux lacks this capability.

I was yesterday running an online video conferencing application, based on Java, and due to some bandwidth issue it wasn't going so well. So I logged into Skype, and guess what? Skype couldn't open the sound device, because it was already engaged by the Java application, hence I could run only one sound application at once. I've been aware of this problem since ages, from a previous Slackware 9.0 experience, however when I encountered the problem again yesterday I was both surprised and shocked how this problem could have gone unaddressed since ages. It turns out that since Dec 2004 development on aRts has been abandoned.

And if your wondering? No! There are many sound subsystems for Linux, which do not have this problem, you can run Amarok on Xine, and play some DVD movies on Xine at the same time, and you'll face no problem or you can run two instances of mplayer without any issue, however mplayer is an application. And there is no way

Fortunately, in the next major KDE release aRts will be replaced by an engine which makes it easier use more capable backends like Xine. In the meantime while KDE 4.0 is not out, we have to bear with aRts!

There is this killer resource for web 2.0 developers at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/06/20/ajax-javascript-solutions-for-professional-coding/

It contains tutorials for nearly everything: from text auto-completion, menus, tabs, misc. interactivity etc..

Enjoy!

There seems to be a loud and clear backlash by developers against Apple's decision not to provide a SDK for third party software development for the iPhone. They rather insist on on limiting third party apps to just AJAX applications, and that too without providing support for Flash!

I think that Apple, if they want to see the device really take off like its other hardware, they will eventually have to open the platform up, otherwise AJAX applications, as they stand are no match for native applications and as Gizmodo said it:

"So no SDK == no access to iPhone's cool frameworks == no revolutionary apps, no real new concepts coming from third-parties, no eye candy available for anyone but Apple and no possibility for some really crazy games that will fully exploit the graphic and multi-touch power of the iPhone."

A major problem I have seen with Linux smartphones is that they too do not come with a SDK, hence third party development for them is nearly null. Windows Mobile smart phones have a large third party software ecosystem and hence they have more penetration. Microsoft has always been a developer-friendly company.

I was once involved in a software project which involved a client side solution which was to be run on a mobile device, I explored numerous options, however Microsoft .NET Compact Framework was the only suitable and easy solution to develop for mobile devices, hence the company decided to develop their solution using Windows Mobile smart phones. Not having an SDK for the iPhone means that its penetration in enterprise circles would be minimum.

And for those people who believe that iPhone comes with MaxOS X and that even without an SDK they can run OSX applications on it, they would be disappointed! Check this peace by Josh Bancroft out.

Maybe its just me, but I feel a LOT more productive with a touch screen interface. I just came across this post, which highlighted numerous problems with touchscreen interfaces (a la iPhone) namely:

"Some of his problems with touchscreens include: sun glare (MacBook users are already intimate with this one), grease, lack of one-handed operation and the potential for trapped dirt."

I agree with most of the highlighted problems, they indeed do cause a nuisance, however one claim which I just can't agree is that touchscreen interfaces are 'slower' at writing text than regular keyboard interfaces. I dont believe that's true at all. Touchscreen interfaces are just so much more productive. I use a Motorola e680i, which features a touchscreen interface and has no keyboard. I can write on it a lot quicker than on a regular cellphone, additionally its word prediction technology is a great time saver, theoretically in a touch screen interface you can type as fast as you can move your finger. I think there will be many problems with the iPhone's touchscreen interface, but typing is not going to be it!

It seems that Slashdot.org, has introduced a Digg/reddit type moderation system where the users vote up or down some story, which may eventually aid the moderators in approving them to the system.

Officially dubbed as "Firehose", it says:

"The Slashdot Firehose is a collaborative system designed to allow users to assist our editors in the story selection process. Try tagging and voting on the entries below, and by using the 'feedback' menu by each entry. The hose can contain submissions, RSS Feeds, bookmarks, journal entries and Slashdot stories. "

Slashdot, once the feared for its 'slashdot effect', has been tamed since the introduction of Digg, compare the alexa rankings of the three sites, digg, slashdot and reddit. Firehose may be an attempt to take its once coveted position back by opening up its moderation system.

• slashdot.org (blue)
  
• digg.com (red)