Satan’s Garden

Back in February, I took a look at the new KDE4 and what I had found was less than desired. Always willing to re-address an issue, I installed the newer 4.1 version of the beta and dug around a bit.

I found much of what I had complained about has been cleaned up. Configuration is much easier now and previously missing configuration controls have been put back in place. The KDE team has restored my faith in the new version with this alone. I was dreading a Gnome clone.

They also canned the Duplo Lego look, for something not quite as chunky, but still too large. Thankfully, with the re-established controls in place, you can fix it quickly.

The Plasma widgets never really impressed me and they still don’t, though they are getting better. Dolphin is an interesting file manager, but konqueror still holds my heart there. Both are included, of course, so choice rules supreme. (Not that I do much with a graphical file manager, as the command line is where I typically roam.)

Kickoff finally has the ability to revert to the standard KDE3 style menu. Thank you!

Integration with Compiz-Fussion was seamless and I didn’t run into any troubles - rather amazing considering the complexity of it.

However, the one thing KDE4 still lacks is application stability. I couldn’t go for longer than ten minutes at a time without an application crash. Scrolling menus often didn’t refresh correctly. Shortcut settings would change in the interface, but not work. KMail couldn’t empty the Trash folder on my IMAP accounts without dying. The desktop itself never died, but I couldn’t get much work done.

In short, KDE4 is not ready for real work, but it’s getting better - much better. Once the environment is out of beta, I’m pretty confident at this point that it will suit me just fine and satisfy my needs for a completely configurable desktop environment.

Again, I’m thankful. I didn’t really want to move to Gnome.

Addendum: It appears that the newly released Kubuntu 8.10 has abandoned KDE3 and gone exclusively with KDE4.  I can’t imagine why they would do this, considering the issues I’ve seen with lack of stability.  Time to dig up a test machine and try a fresh install, I think.

I don’t think there’s anything more frustrating that dealing with the typical technical support call. In this case, my DSL modem bit the dust. It’s was an ActionTec GT701-WG, which I was not completely thrilled with for starters, but it did the job well enough - until yesterday.

Out of nowhere, the Web interface died. Normally people aren’t on the Web interface to their DSL modem everyday, but I have a script running which queries the status page once every ten minutes. If the PPP or DSL connection is lost for three minutes after first discovery, the script triggers an X10 power switch to reset the modem (complete with a 20 second pause between power down and power up.) A script like this wouldn’t normally be required at all, except that I had two incidences where I lost DSL connectivity while I was at work and needed to obtain files from my home machine and for some reason or another either DSL itself or PPP wouldn’t re-connect. The script had helped me out, according the logs, once since I enabled it.

Back to the current issue: Along with the Web interface giving up its mortal coil, the PPP connection finally dropped as well. DSL was still trained, but that was it. I had a modem which wouldn’t respond to me and no line to the outside world.

The system had worked flawlessly, as I said, for about two years, with the script in place for the last eight months, so nothing had changed on my end for quite some time. I tried connecting several times manually, and managed to get in on the Web interface for about two or three minutes a couple of times each, before its little brain went south again and then wouldn’t even respond to ICMP pings. From that data gleaned, I verified settings and what connection status there was with my ISP, just to be thorough. I tried the hard-reset process - which didn’t work. Finally, the beast simply wouldn’t come back to life at all.

All signs pointed to a dead modem.

Come this morning I gave Qwest a call. It didn’t take long to reach a “technical” support person, I have to give them that, but the rest was an exercise in stupidity. I explained the complete situation, from loss of the Web interface to the lack of reset capability and asked what it would cost to replace the modem. He didn’t answer the question, instead wishing to go through a series of trouble shooting steps. I won’t bore you here with the full conversation. Suffice it to say that after an hour and a half of walking through the various steps on two different computers over this “technical” support person’s script, he came to the thoughtful deduction that the modem wasn’t working correctly and needed to be replaced.

No way! I would have never guessed. How nice it is to have “technical” help like this.

Since it wasn’t under warranty anymore (nothing ever is when it dies) I have to pay for a new modem. They wanted $50 for a refurbished replacement. Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll get a brand new modem, thank you, even if it costs more. My biggest problem now is finding a decent modem on a timely basis. Everyone in Salt Lake seems to sell nothing but ActionTec - which I’m not very trustful of. Cisco 678’s are getting harder to find as well.

In any case, I wasted an hour and twenty minutes of my life, appeasing a script reader. Had this “technical” support person just listened to what I had to say at the very beginning, and answered my original question, I’d have that time for my purpose instead of their scripted nonsense.  I suppose I should have been more forceful in my demands, but I would have hoped that I didn’t need to be.

I do know now why Qwest’s motto is “Spirit of Service” - you certainly get nothing very tangible.

Take a few minutes and watch this video of a demonstration of Windows 7 multi-touch technology. At first glance you may be thinking, that’s some spiffy new technology. I’m going to run down a whole list of reasons why this is going to flop.

Screen dirt

I can’t speak for everyone on this concern, but it is a big one for me. I can’t stand a dirty monitor. If there are fingerprints, smudges or smears which get in the way of my work, it simply pisses me off. At the resolution I run displays, even a tiny drop of pop spit up by carbonation of a nearby drink is noticeable. Now you want me to smear my fingers all over the screen on purpose? No thanks.

Tired arms

With your monitor in the traditional position of straight ahead of you and up at eye level, arm fatigue is going to set in very, very quickly. Don’t believe me? Try it now. Pretend you’re working with this interface on your monitor for a few minutes and see if your arms don’t start to tire. This means you either have to suffer through the arm fatigue and take more breaks from your work, or move the monitor into a non-tradition position of flat on the desk in front of you. Now try working in collaboration with someone else on a problem with the screen flat down on the desk.

Fat fingers produce little detail

Pointing with a mouse or trackball is as precise as the cursor. Pointing with our fingers works to a certain extent, but how often do we pick up a pen or other smaller diameter object to point with, even for a large screen presentation? Trying to run CAD or photo manipulation software with your fingers is going to simply suck. How about just spreadsheet work? Do you want to be pushing around on a spreadsheet, trying to narrow it down to the correct cell?

Blocked vision

Speaking of tired arms and fingers, what about the fact that your hand is in the way? Does anyone want to be editing a photo or laying out a spreadsheet with your hands blocking the view of your work? Try to imagine touching up a photo, where you’re trying to clone another portion or work at blending a scratch or other damage, where your hand is blocking your view.

Screen longevity

Touch interfaces take their toll on screens. I have a HP PocketPC, which after three years is already scratched and slightly worn in spots (such as the close button, which is always in the same place) in spite of my rather careful attitude toward keeping the screen intact. How many users are going to want to buy a new monitor every two to three years, because you’ve scratched up the one you’ve been using with your fingernails, or the touch membrane is wearing out and becoming less responsive? How many women with long nails are going to want to cut them short because their monitor at work uses capacitive connectivity rather than pressure?

Touch screens have their place, and they’ve been around a long, long time now (1971) - but never caught on for mainstream applications. Why? Because it is a senseless waste of effort for most tasks. Leave it to Microsoft to try to redo an otherwise limited vertical market of Point of Sale systems, pocket devices and industrial interfaces to a general PC interface. They just couldn’t take the clue that the reason this hasn’t taken off in the mainstream over the last 37 years is that there simply isn’t a need for it.

A whole lot of “gee-wiz” and not a damned bit of common sense in this one.

So that I’m not accused of being unfairly biased against Microsoft (I am biased against Microsoft, but I don’t believe I’m being unfair about it. ) I have to comment on the latest fiasco from the Debian Linux team.

This one hit me head on and caused me a few hours of unwanted work, as well as a general feeling of unease, as the two workstations and three servers I own personally are using Ubuntu’s OpenSSL and OpenSSH packages (Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian.)

The problem is a simple one.  The package maintainer of OpenSSL of the Debian project decided that because Valgrind and IBM’s Rational Purify were having issues with error messages when linked against OpenSSL, that he’d ‘fix’ OpenSSL and OpenSSH (and everything else using libssl) by removing the code needed to generate truly random numbers for key generation.  This limited keys to being seeded by a short INT: 1 to 32,768.  Well, you don’t have to be a security expert to know that if you are limited to 32,768 “random” numbers, it won’t take long to brute force attack such keys.

Hence, the problem.  All versions of OpenSSL and OpenSSH used by Debian since Sept. 17th, 2006 up to the recent Debian updates, use this retarded random number scheme and generated easily broken security keys, for otherwise secure standards.

What this meant for me was a general feeling of insecurity and now a distrust of the Debian distribution, not to mention a few of hours of my life I would have rather spent doing anything but replacing keys.  This isn’t just an innocent mistake, this is moronic maneuver beyond belief.  Gergely Risko, sums it up nicely.

The whole mess was caused by one person, Kurt Roeckx.  He took a shortcut rather than a valid fix for a simple problem. To make it worse, he somewhat tried to cover up his mistake by releasing the real fix (putting the code back in) in the “unstable” release code, and not saying a word about it for a full week.

I’d almost be willing to forgive him for the initial mistake, if it weren’t for the fact that even a non-expert in security code (aka, me) could tell at a glance that this was a very bad thing to do.  That he tried to silently re-introduce the code back in without letting people know of the dangers, is even less forgivable.

If the Debian team has any integrity, they’ll move Kurt over to something that he can better handle, something which is not essential to security.  No sense in throwing out the maintainer with the bath water, as it were.

In the meantime, I don’t think I’m going to have a lot of trust in ‘fakechroot’ doing the right thing, either.  (Kurt maintains that package as well.)

May 1, 2008 (Computerworld) Microsoft Corp. confirmed on Wednesday that it delayed the rollout of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) because changes to the operating system can corrupt data in the company’s retail point-of-sale and store management software.

I hate to laugh, but I have to.  If it was some bizarre interaction with a third party software package, I might be able to forgive it as an oversight.  But to create two different service packs, for two different OS’s that both corrupt data in one of Microsoft’s own, rather expensive, software packages?  How pathetic can you get?

Certainly it is within the best interest of every systems administrator out there, to test all service packs and updates with the software they run, to ensure that their mission critical applications don’t explode on them.  It falls on their shoulders, ultimately.  However, you would hope that Microsoft, as large as they are, would test their own software against their own OS roll outs.

I know that Microsoft is the 800 pound gorilla in the software cage, which makes them a natural target, but with their recent mistakes in judgment and poor software offerings (Vista simply sucks, the Windows Genuine Advantage is anything but and has screwed up several times now telling valid customers that they’re software thieves, Windows Home Server still corrupts any data you save directly to it across the network, and the last two service packs weren’t released to paying Microsoft Developer Network customers, etc.) I have to wonder if they’re not starting to collapse under their own weight.

This article is scary in so many ways, that it gives one pause to even browse the Web anymore.

The gist of it all, is that the FBI put up some faked URL’s on a message board which they thought was being used for trading child pornography and then recorded the Internet Protocol (IP) number of any system which connected to their fake site. They made no distinction of how a person got the link, however. This means that someone could email the links in question to a person they want to damage, using misleading names on the links and cause a completely innocent person to find the FBI’s honeypot!

The FBI then took the IP information and traced it down to the supposed owner and used this to obtain a warrant for each location for dawn raids.

Let’s be blunt about this: when the FBI made no distinction on how someone got to the site, they engaged in utterly shoddy police work.

One of the most disturbing lines in the article is as follows:

Vosburgh faced four charges: clicking on an illegal hyperlink; knowingly destroying a hard drive and a thumb drive by physically damaging them when the FBI agents were outside his home; obstructing an FBI investigation by destroying the devices; and possessing a hard drive with two grainy thumbnail images of naked female minors (the youths weren’t having sex, but their genitalia were visible).

The obstruction and possession charges seem legitimate, but I have to ask, what the hell is an illegal hyperlink? What is the definition being used for this? If the hyperlink is illegal, can’t the FBI be charged for creating an illegal hyperlink?

Between this kind of questionable police tactics and the ongoing construction and use of data fusion centers, we’ve entered a whole new age of Orwellian existence. I would recommend to everyone to start encrypting everything, whether it is sensitive material or not. Make them waste time on trying to decrypt chocolate chip cookie recipes and text files that only have quotes of the Framers in them. Make them expend effort for nothing, so much effort that they become mired down under the weight of it all.

Following are links to various encryption tools.

http://www.gnupg.org/
http://www.truecrypt.org/
http://www.arg0.net/encfs
http://www.freeotfe.org/

And a page covering many drive encryption systems.

A friend of mine likes to say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result each time.

By that definition, Microsoft is the quintessential model for insanity.

I made the mistake of taking on Windows systems administration a few years ago where I work, as I thought the challenge of learning the intricacies of a previously unfamiliar OS would give me a more rounded experience with systems administration in general and allow me to learn to appreciate why Windows admins seemed to love the environment they worked with. Coming from a solid Unix background, I figured that I would find similarities in function and implementation, to the point that course work would not be needed to learn the ropes. I was correct in that aspect and learned quickly via a couple of incidents where I was able to resolve issues that long time Windows admins could not, that having my previous systems administration experience was a boon in general and very much a keystone to ability that only required study of freely available documentation to attain.

What I was also to learn, however, was that many of the paradigms I was used to would have to be ignored and the replacements that Microsoft had implemented, just plain suck. Consistency of methodology is damn near non-existent. Graphical User Interface (GUI) tools got in the way more times than they helped and their interfaces were inconsistent from each other. To get at the real functionality of the GUI tools, half the time you have to right-click on unexpected places to pull up hidden options. Even the simple structure of system settings are inconsistent and stupidly designed.

A perfect example of the nonsense I ran into can be found in the local security settings of any Windows box. You can find sensible settings, such as, “Domain member: Require strong (Windows 2000 or later) session key” with the options of “Enabled” or “Disabled”.  Just below it, however, are “Interactive logon: Do not display last user name” and “Interactive logon: Do not require CTRL+ALT+DEL” with the same options, “Enabled” or “Disabled”. This double negative verbiage is simply ridiculous.

Or how about the fact that even though you’ve setup your Active Directory (AD) domain when you promoted the first Windows server to be a Domain Controller, with clients logging in on your domain and the forest setup with trusts to other domains, et cetera, the name of the Domain Name System (DNS) domain is still “default_domain_name” (or something like that, memory serving,) until you open up the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), run the Active Directory Sites and Services plugin and right click on the entry to chose “Rename” from the popup menu. This is in spite of the fact that you have to enter the DNS name as part of the AD promotion process. I discovered this when I refused to base our entire network’s DNS service to Microsoft’s implementation and had to copy all the SRV records in the netlogon.dns file to the Unix DNS server. After digging around for an hour or so, I finally found out what was up. Of course, if I had enabled DNS and auto-updates of DNS on the AD controller, the information would have been setup correctly then. Most Windows administrators would have simply setup DNS on the AD controller and been done with it. I’ve even read articles advising doing so, no matter what you’ve been using for DNS before, just in case something breaks later with a change suddenly instigated through an update from Microsoft!

Like I said, inconsistency reigns.

The task set before me this week was a new one. The primary Active Directory controller is old and needs to retire. New hardware was ready to go and was tested, so it was time to replace the old with the new. Yes, Microsoft claims that there is no such thing as a Primary Domain Controller (PDC) anymore, but it is only a half truth - as you still have Flexible Single Master Operations (FSMO) server roles, limiting edits of various services to specific systems. You can (limitedly) spread them out among multiple machines, but that doesn’t change the fact that the FSMO roles exist on specific systems and do not have an order of precedence to roll over to another server, should the FSMO server go down. So, even if you spread out your five FSMO roles among different machines, now you have multiple points of failure instead of one. Net gain: nothing.

In my case, our AD domain is tiny. We support about 30 Windows machines anymore, so we had two AD controllers, with the first one setup as the FSMO role server for all five rolls. (This happens automatically the first time an AD controller is setup in an AD forest.) The process to transfer the FSMO roles can be done in one of two ways: right-clicking on a bunch of clumsy GUI menus through three different MMC plugins or running the ntdsutil on the command line and suffering through what is the most abysmal modal command line interface I’ve ever seen.

ntdsutil sucks - it really, really sucks, but it was better than flopping around in three different MMC plugins. So, I started the process of transferring all five FSMO roles from the old server to the new with the command line tool. The PDC Emulator and RID Master roles transferred without a hitch. But try as I might, the Schema Master, Domain Naming Master and Infrastructure Master roles would not transfer, giving a generic error that multiple searches on Google could not elucidate.

So, I decided to make the new server seize the roles which would not transfer. This worked - to an extent. All five roles were reported by the new server to be handled by the new server, but the two old domain controllers now believed that the old FSMO server was still serving all five roles. How the two which had previously transferred correctly were now on the old machine again, was yet another mystery. At this point I didn’t want conflict, so I tried to transfer the roles back from the new machine to the old, all of which failed without even an error message to tell me something was amiss. I now had two AD controllers in the same AD domain of the same AD forest, who both thought that they were the FSMO role master for all five roles.

I left it this way over the weekend, just to see if things would work out or whether additional error messages might tell me something of what was going on. No change came. No new information was revealed.

I tried demoting the new server to stop acting as an AD controller, but it would not allow me to demote the system, giving yet another seemingly random numbered error message. That was enough for me. In desperation, I did what many Windows administrators do at times like these: start over from scratch and do that exact damn thing all over again. I powered the new machine off, re-installed Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, put on anti-virus software and updated with all patches, promoted it to an AD domain controller and kicked up ntdsutil on the old machine and transferred the FSMO roles in the same order I had during the first attempt. Everything worked perfectly. A quick check with the netdom command showed that all three machines now understood that the new server handled all FSMO roles and the whole process was done in just a few seconds time. I had done everything the second time around as I had the first, each step was in the exact order as I had written down. Nothing different was done and everything suddenly worked.

A friend of mine likes to say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result each time.

I understand now that this is why so many people cannot understand that computers are not supposed to crash or otherwise fail in stupid and unpredictable ways. They keep doing things the Microsoft way and insanity prevails and becomes the norm. They can’t understand that things should work the same way every time and that system up time can be measured in years instead of days on a stable operating system. I’m half convinced that Microsoft went to their once a month “Patch Tuesday” methodology for updates, just to make sure that all Windows machines would have to be rebooted once a month, in order to keep the systems appearing stable. I have also come to realize that many people have been fooled into believing that a boondoggled GUI is “more advanced” or otherwise “better” than editing simple text files for system settings - that somehow editing a text file is primitive in comparison - overlooking the fact that cumbersome GUI’s are often simply doing that very task.

If my varied and insane experiences over the last eight years with Windows has taught me anything, it is that whenever possible, no matter how difficult the transition may be at first - if you can run the service on Unix instead, do so. If you leave it up to Windows, you leave it up to sporadic behavior, inane tools and retarded, clumsy and often secretive GUI interfaces. You seemingly leave it up to pure chance.

To me, that is insane.

I don’t personally use Windows for anything but a gaming console, so if you’re not a Linux or BSD propeller head, this blurb might not mean anything to you. Windows users don’t have a desktop choice, so this entire topic is going to be an alien encounter, and if you think that Vista’s Aero is an advanced interface, you’ll definitely be traveling well outside of known space here. One thing to think about, however, poor Windows laden sods: KDE 4 applications will run on Windows. Perhaps this article might not be of interest to you, but KDE4 might be after all is said and done.

Currently I’m running KDE 3.5.8 using Compiz-Fusion 0.6.2 as the window manager and it is a beautiful marriage of functionality for how I work on a computer. So, I was excited to see what KDE4 had to offer that might improve things or simply surprise me. I took a little time over the weekend to checkout KDE 4.0.1 on my Kubuntu 7.10 system and I have to say that my feelings are mixed.

On one hand, Plasma seems to be heading toward its desired goal and will likely be an improvement to the desktop metaphor in the long run. Personally, I don’t use the desktop for anything but a background image, as I hate icons and widgets being covered up by other Windows I’m working in. I find it very annoying to have to close or make windows transparent to see the widget and I don’t want a widget on top of my working application, either. Dragging widgets off the desktop and into the taskbar can avoid the desktop clutter, but I already have this. I run a single session of gkrellm and all widgets I need for monitoring and what have you are in a contained dock which isn’t covered and takes little room on the screen. So for me, Plasma probably won’t offer a lot, as it adds nothing to my work environment. However, for the typical desktop user, I think it will add quite a bit to the experience.

It is good to see the typical file and folder concept extended to be more than a visual key to a hierarchical filesystem. Container systems such as KDE3’s Basket is a similar step in the right direction. Organization of material by thought process, rather than filesystem placement is a more natural organization system. Aside from a few anal people like myself, most don’t really implement much of a logical hierarchy to their personal files to be useful in locating needed material. Plasma’s not-quite-finished ability to “zoom” between relational structures has some real potential and that holds my keen interest.

I also liked the polished look of things, though the default large font sizes annoyed me to no end. Once I had that straightened out, my general experience improved dramatically. The OpenGL additions seemed to work seamlessly and frankly, I’m a sucker for eye candy as long as it has some functionality as well. (Though, there was nothing there that I don’t already have with Compiz-Fusion, KDE-only users will appreciate it.) The true integration with Compiz-Fusion’s virtual desktops via the KDE desktop manager was a long desired feature on my list and it’s implemented beautifully.

Honestly, my enthusiasm wanes about there. There are many things that I found disappointing with the interface and I hope it is not a sign of things to stay.

First and foremost, where did the traditional hyper-configurable nature of KDE go? The whole reason that I chose KDE over Gnome was two fold: the ability to customize everything, from the layout of menus, to the exact width and height of specific applications when opened (to name just two of thousands of customizable settings); and the integrated application intercommunication that DCOP made so easy to use.

KDE4 hasn’t lost the application intercommunication, it has merely switched to D-Bus, still allowing modular components to be used by multiple applications and cross application communication is still there, (though I haven’t played with it yet, as I have with various scripts to manipulate the DCOP environment in KDE3,) but the GUI customization options are simply gone. It’s dumbed down, giving no where near the flexibility of KDE3’s normal environment. Mind you, since a lot of configuration is apparently now being handled by XML files (D-Bus standards,) or so I’ve read somewhere, perhaps customization is merely a text editor away. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single source of documentation for doing any of this yet. I’ll admit as well that I have to learn D-Bus usage in general, as I’ve barely examined the system. I am actually excited about D-Bus being used, though, as Gnome and many other applications use D-Bus - allowing the functionality of KDE to extend well outside of the scope of KDE itself. I would imaging it is Compiz-Fusion’s support of D-Bus which allows the KDE4 virtual desktop manager to interact seamlessly, for example. This was a great decision on the KDE design team’s part.

I mentioned the large default font sizes earlier and I wish I could say that this ended with fonts. The new taskbar is a eye sore, far too large for my tastes. There is no option to resize the taskbar in KDE4 at all and that’s inexcusable in my book. I want control of my interface, especially a part that intrusive. Speaking of super-sized interfaces, everything in KDE4 felt that way. It reminded me of working on the Amiga years ago. Huge this and large that - a veritable Duplo Lego block desktop. This would be excusable if you could tweak it how you wanted from the default, but again, such is not the case. This Windows-like behavior of locking you into someone else’s aesthetic viewpoint, really turned me off. The lack of customization for each application came to be no different than the general desktop. It’s gone. KDE4 applications seem as non-customizable by default as Gnome or plain X Window System. It can be done, I’m certain, but a simple GUI method for doing so is missing and desired. About the only thing kept from KDE3’s customization system is the ability to change keyboard shortcuts.

By far the worst of the interface change is the main menu, Kickoff. The layered, step-into approach that Vista blew chunks with, is mirrored here. Eh gads! I can’t express how annoying this menu system is for me! I find it clumsy and slow. The original Kmenu and Tasty Menu (which I use in KDE3) are far superior. One can only hope that decent replacements for Kickoff come out for KDE4. Raptor, doesn’t look to be it. I need a menu where I can quickly examine offerings based on category, listing available applications that I may never have run before.

Moving away from interface design issues - though I realize that KDE4 is currently in Release Candidate form, it feels more like a beta to me. Konqueror crashed on me repeatedly and when I added my server’s Sitebar URL to the Konqueror sidebar, it wouldn’t refresh. Even resizing the sidebar left behind non-erasable tracks of the previous divider positions. I also couldn’t fill in form data on any URL I tried within the sidebar.

KMail seemed equally robust - that is to say, it crashed three times on me in half an hour, finally loosing all settings for server (IMAP and SMTP) accounts in the last crash.

As it stands to date, KDE4 is certainly not ready for prime time when it comes to stability. I expected some problems, but what I hit was too much. This is beta or even alpha level software, if we’re being honest here.

If its customization ability is going to be locked into the current state, without the hyper-flexibility I’m used to with KDE3, then I’m going to start shopping for a different desktop manager. Plasma offers nothing for me, really - which unfortunately seems to be KDE4’s eggs in one basket. It will be great for those who use desktop icons and various gadgets, who don’t cover the whole available screen with application windows, or are willing to hit a key to hide those or bring widgets to the forefront - but that’s not me.

Quite honestly, Compiz-Fusion provides enough of the tweaking and interface control I need for almost everything, so having a desktop manager on top of that has been for the inter-application connectivity more than anything else, coupled with a functional taskbar. With D-Bus being used as a standard, I’ll be able to run KDE4 applications (once they’re release quality) without having to run the entire KDE environment and still have the inter-application operations.

The lack of application level customization in KDE4 might actually make me re-examine Gnome. There will be no need to have the bloated taskbar and other interface crud, if KDE4’s only advantage over Gnome is Plasma - which I won’t be using. With both desktop environments running D-Bus, inter-operations should be seamless. I’ll run KDE4 apps when I need them, no matter the desktop environment running.

I’ll hold off final judgment until KDE 4.1.x is released, as I imagine it will truly be a release candidate by that time. At that point we should be able to tell if the lack of customization is simply an oversight for the time being, or the nature of KDE to come.

The ol’ Brothel was feeling a little antiseptic these days, in spite of how much I liked some of the features of HemingwayEx (the previous theme of this site.)

So, I dug around and found this new theme, Greenmagic, from i Web Net, which fit the bill. Though I’ve modified it slightly, the basic look and feel remains the same. Thanks for making this theme GPL licensed, guys!

Since it doesn’t fit in with a brothel theme, I’ve stepped out into the garden for now. It’s good to reinvent yourself a little, now and then.

(The image pictured is from Weird Tales, April, 1934, with the featured story, “Satan’s Garden”.)

As if the mongrel police forces in America didn’t have enough civil rights abolishing capability as is, May 14th, 2007, is the deadline for ISP’s all over the nation to be compliant with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. In short, CALEA demands that all ISP’s and telephone companies provide data to law enforcement on their terms, using their data collection methods to provide email, Web browsing histories and other online activity reports on legal demand, as quickly as possible. The law forces your ISP to be their spy. Though the act does not change standards for legal use of wiretaps, it is notable that when the telephone compliance was finished in 2002, court-ordered surveillance nearly doubled from 2,586 applications granted in 2002, to 4,015 granted in 2006.

When you make it easier to spy, than to do actual police work - you can guess the results.