Friday MLP

Kevin Tolly makes a good point on the mysterious Novell/Microsoft deal: "Operation is really just coexistence and that is about as complicated as you and I taking an elevator together." There's no such thing as a software cooperation agreement. There are only negotiated exceptions to software non-cooperation agreements. Software, even proprietary software, is cooperative by default.

Amazon countersues IBM. All of the patents getting dragged into this fight look like patents that wouldn't pass a reasonable standard of obviousness. So watch the Supreme Court, which seems to have a "level of hostility" for the current patent-lawyer-friendly standard. Big picture, the IBM v. Amazon situation shows that IBM fears EC2 and S3. Put your startup on an Amazon backend, and you cut out a lot of what had been potential business for IBM. (Watch this space Monday morning for what should be a fun piece on web APIs, including Amazon's.)

The LinuxWorld podcast now has its own theme music, by Brian Wood. These things are sounding a lot better now. Quick notes on the setup:

JK Audio Inline Patch: connected inline to phone line. Connections: "From Phone" mic cable to Mic 1 on the mixer. "Aux Send" on mixer to "Send to Phone Line" 1/8 in. jack. Settings: "From Phone" all the way down, other knobs about halfway. Keep "Send" as low as possible to keep noise down.

MXL 990: on desktop stand with Sterling Audio PF1
pop filter and MXL shock mount. Connected to Mic 2 on mixer.

Computer: headphone out to Line in 5-6 on mixer. Audio in to Tape Output on mixer.

Mixer: Mackie MS 1202-VLZ. Has speakers plugged in to the control room outputs, but I leave those off for podcasting and phone. Aux all the way down for channel 1, part way up for channels 5-6.

Suggestions welcome.

The fun part is that thanks to a little utility called dtmfdial I can put the Inline Patch into off-hook mode and dial from the podcast rig without picking up the phone. Currently this is just pasting a phone number into a shell command but I'll have to think of something a little easier.

When I administer servers, I'm a very, very happy person because I let the Debian Project do the tweakier, less interesting parts of the system administration for me. I don't have to trust applications' own "installers" to put things in sensible places or clean up after themselves. Life is good. ("apt-get install dtmfdial", for example, or the three commands it took me to get all the software I needed for an SMTP and IMAP server installed on another box). I say again, life is good. I have one Debian box that has been up and running since 2000, and hasn't been polluted with the kind of residue that installers leave behind. Even my Debian laptop has gone since late 2002 or early 2003 without a reinstall.

But now, Ian Murdock says that software installation on Linux "sucks". That's true for stuff that isn't packaged, but for stuff that is, the Debian crew does do a good job of getting things packaged and easy to install. It's almost like being one humble user of a multi-user system where the admins are the kind of guru types who turn you on to new software. I don't really want software on my system that's not packaged, anyway -- it's one more thing to keep track of for security updates.

Ian writes, "no, moving everything into the distribution is not a very good option. Remember that one of the key tenets of open source is decentralization, so if the only solution is to centralize everything, there's something fundamentally wrong with this picture."

Ian has a real point when it comes to software for your bleeding-edge development box. I do want to try Jokosher, and one of its key dependencies is a modified version of gstreamer that's only available through CVS. But when it comes to your production machine, there's a lot more potential suckage in dealing with ill-behaved installers than in staying on the apt-get plan.