computers – things twice

St Stallman: A Hero of the Highest Order

“I’m not God — I’m just a saint.”

Richard M. Stallman

The Phoenix > News Features > Tilting at Windows

Richard M. Stallman is a legendary figure without whom the world would have looked very different, and one of those few whose initials — RMS — is a concept, on a par with JFK and LBJ.

Within certain circles, that is. Outside of those circles, most people have never heard of him.

Back in the 70s he was a super-hacker at MIT, deeply involved in and committed to the creative movement where program code was shared freely, making everyone involved better coders thanks to the community.

In the 80s, when the commercial potential in computers and software started to rear its ugly head and most of the good hackers left for commercial companies, RMS stayed true to his ideals and laid the foundation of GNU (a recursive acronym for “GNU not Unix”) which later merged with the Linux kernel.

Bruce Perens, another open source legend, is cited in the article as claiming that RMS’s contribution to the world of software is worth $1 trillion. (Which tools or formulae he uses to determine the monetary value of something which is patently and fundamentally free, eludes me, but at least it makes for a good headline.)

Anyway, RMS happens to be one of my idols, but enough proselytizing. If you want to know more, read the article or go to his site, stallman.org.

What I wanted to comment upon in the lengthy profile was this quote:

“What we need,” he says, “is enough people not to be outright cowards, and we can win.”

“We can win”

Now, RMS may have an IQ “up in the range where trying to measure it starts to get silly,” in the words of Eric J Raymond, yet another colourful open source profile. But this is where Stallman is wrong. “We can win”. Yeah, sure.

He is wrong, but I don’t hold that against him. There are different ways of being wrong, and RMS is wrong in the right way.

It’s quite simple: if “we” are the people who fight the influence of corporate power and who acknowledge and resist the drive towards that power: the power over people and people’s minds that comes from controlling the economy, then “we” can never win as long as software has any importance in and influence over people’s lives.

There are plenty of people runnning around and saying “We can win”, sometimes with the addition “…, if only [we had more people | someone would give us what we deserve | the government wasn’t such a bunch of corrupt idiots | etc.]”; sometimes with the implied meaning “We demand to win!” — and sometimes without any ostensible substance at all.

There have also been apocalyptic prophets around, foreboding the collapse of the system, for as long as there has been a system that can collapse; and moralists calling for change and repentance for as long as there has been anything to change and repent. Lunatics. The ones who end up in the margins of Monty Python movies. The ones who have no message except doomsday and moralism, and (as “we” tend to suspect) who take pleasure in pricking our bad conscience once in a while.

Stallman is different, and that’s why he can be completely wrong and it’s still quite ok.

The Harry Potter boycott

First of all: he knows what he’s talking about, he is intelligent and well-argued. Even when he is pushing ridiculous cases it is virtually impossible not to agree with him.

His boycott of J. K. Rowling is a case in point: by mistake, fourteen copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had been sold from a Canadian supermarket a couple of days before the official release date. Oh horror! Rowling and her publishers used the copyright and trade secret legislation as a lever and manged to have a court order issued which prevented these fourteen buyers from reading their own books.

One lawyer stated: “There is no human right to read.” That is a statement with some heavy ramifications, some of them pointing quite directly to nazi-Germany, but even there, the limitations imposed on the public had to do with which books it was legal to acquire, not with limiting your right to read a book it was legal to own. Stallman drily comments:

Any official, judge, or legislator who is not outraged by this position does not deserve to be in office.

And he promptly launched his own Harry Potter boycott, urging others to do the same. He would only lift the boycott under certain conditions:

On what conditions should we end this boycott? Forgiveness is called for when someone recognizes what he did wrong and acts accordingly. I think we should forgive Rowling (or her publisher) when she (it)

Recognizes that this injunction was wrong.

Promises not to do anything like it again.

Calls for changes in the law so that nobody can get such an injunction again, and to establish a clear and firm “human right to read”.

I’m sure Rowling and her publisher have spent many sleepless nights worrying about the consequences of this boycott. They must also certainly have felt it as a blow to their wallets. Yeah, right.

The boycott appears as slightly ridiculous — not because Stallman is wrong regarding the substance of his argument, but because it is presented in all earnesty.

But that’s also where it transcends the ridiculous and turns back on the reader (this reader in any case): the initial giggle over little David taking on J.K. Goliath Inc. easily turns into hysteric laughter (literarily speaking; don’t worry — I’m not turning mad), because it is so right and yet so impossible.

It is hysterical (literally, but again literarily) to pick a fight with the big corporations, because of course money doesn’t talk, it swears, buys presidencies, twists the law, and protects itself. But Stallman’s pathetic little boycott highlights the difference between lawful and just, between power and right.

Not utopism

And the saint is he who disregards power because he is right. Who can look the forces of the secular machinery squarely in the eye, because he has principles of a higher order to fall back on.

This brings us to the second reason why he is wrong in an acceptable way: he has integrity and commitment — he actually lives by his own principles, and thereby, in his own weird way, demonstrates that it is possible. He doesn’t have a mobile phone; he doesn’t browse the web but downloads the html pages with wget and reads them in his email reader; his only computer is an uncomfortably small Chinese netbook, not because it’s best, but because it can run with a non-proprietary BIOS.

To most of us, his way seems exaggerated and crazy, like a dinosaur from the paleolithic eighties. Some of the open source prophets even hold that his stubborn inflexible attitude is detrimental to the cause. These are the ones who’d like to see open source as a strong contender in the marketplace rather than as a beacon for freedom.

Stallman’s position is the latter, and nobody upholds it more strongly than him.

What about us cowards?

Why aren’t we all like St Stallman, then? Surely, that would make the world a better place to be, if we weren’t such outright cowards? Better not only for those we help, but in the end for ourselves as well, since we win the aggregated help of the rest of humankind (in addition to the warm glow of complacency, should we harbour such emotions in such a wonderful world).

It has to do with many things, but cowardice is not one of them.

It has more to do with the Prisoners’s Dilemma: the simplified description, in the form of a game-theoretical scenario, of situations where acting egoistically will always be the most favourable option, regardless of what the other “players” do, even though it would be more favourable for all if everybody acted un-egoistically.

Pollution, global warming, equal distribution of goods — these are all real-world examples of the prisoners’ dilemma: for me (and you) the sacrifices involved in living an eco-friendly life through and through are high, and the benefits will only come once everyone changes their lifestyle — which is to say: never, since the sacrifices involved … etc.

Now that we’re in the religious sphere, here’s what my wife, who is a church minister, once said on the matter, in a sermon on one of the texts where the crowds in Galilee persecuted Jesus in their boats to hear some Truth:

Here’s a truth: “Every two seconds, a child dies of hunger.” And we can’t hear it, because if we really could hear the full extent of that statement, we would all have rushed out of our churches, gotten into our boats and rowed, not in order to persecute God as we’d like him to be, but to live by the words that God’s will is not done with bibles and good intentions, but with bread and by creating a society where nobody is left in the ditch. But we can’t.

We can’t, because when moral obligation, the quest for redemption, or just an overwhelming empathy enters the prisoners’ dilemma, there is a chance that insanity lies just around the corner.

What “we” really need

So, not wanting to give up the benefits of a better proprietary program in favour of a less functional free one is not cowardice. It’s the other way around: hacking away on a sub-par computer in impractical ways because one’s principles dictates it, is to show courage — but a courage verging on stupidity because it’s a lost battle. It’s the stuff epic legends are made of, but in the real world David very rarely beats Goliath.

And yet, “we”– the rest of us who aren’t saints — probably need them, not for their actions but for the stories. We need those epic legends: the Joan of Arc, the bunch who went out Saving Private Ryan, the loners and lunatics who go to battle against all odds and hopes.

What “we” need is someone who is willing (or compelled; for us it doesn’t matter which) to fight that fight, even though we know that it can’t be won. We know that — they hopefully know it too, although it’s hard to tell, because part of the fight is to believe in victory.

We need someone to remind us that even though it is not human-kindly possible for all of us to do what’s best, it is possible, at least for one of those human beings who make up society, to act in such a way. One is enough to make a difference if that one is everyone.

Or to put in differently: we need the actions that define and move the outer limits of the discourse: that define what it is possible to do or think. That’s what Jesus, Joan of Arc and RMS have in common.

The fallen saint

At the end of the article, Stallman is quoted with a modified version of his statement:

“If we fight,” he says, “at least there’s a chance we might win.”

Perhaps he isn’t a saint after all, just a windmill-fighting madman. But that’s fine, I can live with it. Quijote is a myth-making character too.

“The Learned Helplessness of Windows”

LinuxPlanet – Opinions – The Learned Helplessness of Windows – Where are the Pliers?

I don’t think I’ve written a single dedicated pro-linux post on this blog so far — not because I don’t think that way, but because I haven’t really had anything I have needed to communicate about, beyond the obvious.

This article from LinuxPlanet, however (in two parts 1 | 2), is the best presentation I’ve seen in a long time of the fundamental problem with Windows.

The post is “based on a true story”, as it’s called: Woman has a jammed garage door. Friendly Neighbour comes by and offers to fix it if she gets him a pair of pliers.

She told me her husband was not at all mechanically talented and she was even worse. Her husband had told her they were probably safer with no tools in the house than running the risk of trying to fix something themselves.

Best not keep any tools around. Better call the maitainance guy and pay him a couple of hundred instead. Better safe than sorry. No pliers in the house.

I don’t know what is worst in this story: the extra expense of having to pay someone who charges indecent amounts of money every time something needs to be done, or the self-imposed mutilation, the “Learned helplessness”?

What made me react to this particular article, was the level on which it operates: pliers. Pliers (image by Dori, courtesy of Linux Planet It’s not about operating a steam drill or a chainsaw. Sure enough: Linux provides you with tools to bring down the house if you want to, but as an average user you’re not even likely to know that you have them, and you don’t have to use them (unlike what the persistent myth about Linux keeps telling us). But a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, a hammer…

The post reminded me of a column I read, I think in the now defunct Tux Magazine. The author had been asked to name the main reason why he used Linux. Sitting down and thinking it through, he came to the realization that it was not because it’s free, even though that’s nice; not because of the politico-ideological aspects of open source as an instance of freedom of speech; not necessarily because it’s always better than Windows or Mac (which it sometimes is, sometimes not); but because he had control of his computer.

My sentiments exactly. I spend several hours a day in front of this beast. I interact with the world around me through it — it’s an extension of my body. The best thing about linux is that it gives me the possibility to control it on a day-to-day basis, and the tools to do so. If I break a leg, I’m glad there are doctors around to take care of that. But thankfully I don’t have to go to the barbershop if I need a shave, or call a carpenter if I want to hang some pictures on the wall.

I’ve got pliers, and I know how to use them.

One Laptop Per Child

When I first heard about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project I thought, “Dream on. Nice idea, perhaps a tad imperialistic despite its good intentions, but more than a tad unrealistic — it’ll never happen anyway, so not to worry. Nice dream, but dream on.”

The idea was this: a laptop, designed to be simple, rough, directly usable, under any conditions, even in areas with no reliable power supply, and so cheap that it could be sold in underdeveloped countries and finally let them in on the digital revolution, and powerful enough not to be simply a toy. The precondition was that enough orders were placed, so initially 1 million laptops per order (i.e. per country) was the minimum. This, in turn, would bring the price down to $100. So for a measly sum of 100 million dollars — hardly a week’s worth of mortgage to banks in the West, I assume — a whole population would be given all the chances that a computer can offer.

And there was more: the mesh networking on which the laptop is based allows any laptop to be connected to any other OLPC laptop in the area. So with just one laptop connected in, say, Zaire, the whole million of other OLPC kids would be online, in a gigantic, organic network, covering and connecting countries, continents, heck, the whole world.

OK. Nice dream, but dream on.

Or so I thought. But with increasing, incredulous astonishment I’ve gradually been led to believe that it may not be just a dream.

Every time I read a report on the progress of the project or a review of the product, my hair rises in excitement. Literally. I think “This is too good to be true.” “This is mind-boggling in its implications, it couldn’t happen, but it does!”

Several countries have already signed up. The fourth beta version has brought the speed up (which was a major objection in earlier versions). Most reviews are overwhelmingly positive (including the one written by someone in the target group, a 12-year-old).

The laptop will not cost $100 but $200, but what they have managed to put together at that price seems incredible. But true. Up to twelve hours battery life, supplemented by a mechanical generator and a solar cell panel; the mesh network; a case which must appeal to kids (perhaps even to some adults); a sound selection of Linux-based software; a one-button peek into the internals of software where the user can make changes directly (and restore them if something goes wrong) in order to stimulate the understanding of the internals of computers — I want a laptop like that! And had I been living in North America I could have, through the Give 1 Get 1 program.

What’s most fantastic about the OLPC program is that . . .

No, wait — what’s most fantastic is probably that millions of children in underdeveloped countries will be given a chance they didn’t have before, opening up opportunities to get a better life.

But other than that, what’s most fantastic about the OLPC program is that it shows that it is still possible to be visionary, to get a wildly unrealistic idea and follow it through to realization, and — if it works out like it seems to — to change the world for the better.

KDE help — give me a break!

I use KDE, the most usable Linux desktop environment. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I love KDE, but I couldn’t live without it either.

Except on those certain days, that is. When I want to look up something in a help file. This is one of those days.

Frankly, and no offense, but the help system in KDE is disastrous. I should have known by now — I’ve virtually stopped even considering pressing Shift-F1 a long time ago. Mainly because it annoys me no end.

(Edit: In fact, it’s so long ago that I’d forgotten it’s ctrl-F1. Shift happens, as they say.)

I will pass lightly over the fact that many programs don’t have proper documentation. Disclaimers such as “under construction”, “this part needs to be written. Volunteers?” and the like — I don’t mind them, it’s an honest matter that time is scarcer than ideas.

I will also merely mention that to find things in the “Khelpcenter” can be an ordeal in itself. Loads of categories to search through, some of which are ordered alphabetically. And I’ve never been able to search the help files en bloc. There is an option to build a search index of all the application manuals, but every time I’ve tried it, on several different systems (Ubuntu, Mepis, Archlinux, etc.) and with many different versions of KDE, I always get the error message “htdig failed”. A google search reveals that I’m not the only one, but it’s been unresolved for so long that I’ve stopped considering it.

But even when it’s there, it’s usually less than useful. They must have some kind of help file template at KDE central derived from a statistical analysis of most frequent entries in Windows help files. Pages upon pages of things like “File -> Open… (Ctrl+O): Search the file system to open an existing file.” OK, I suppose it needs to be there, but surely there are more important things to spend time and diskspace on?

This mass of trivialities becomes close to ridiculous when compared to the advice one can get elsewhere. I once had the pleasure of asking a non-trivial question at the mailing list of one of the KDE apps. I was greeted with the traditional RTFM (Read The F.\{3,6} Manual), and a list of eleven pointers to places in the manual where my question was answered. Only it wasn’t. Some of them were references to other, developer oriented KDE applications which could be used to accomplish the task in a roundabout manner, others were of the general, non-informative kind above, and others again were of the kind “write a script to do it”. (The whole answer — and the ensuing discussion — was soaked with sulky consternation that I had suggested a Windows program did this better and easier. Proof of point, if I ever needed one.)

In other words: what’s lacking is the middle ground between trivialities and programmers’ tricks. Here, there is something to learn from vim, the uber-geek editor par excellence. I once tried to make a syntax highlighting scheme for Kate, the advanced KDE editor. Nothing fancy, I just wanted to be able to start a line with “;” and make them appear in red to use them as headers in text files. I managed in the end, but it took me forever and a while. Compare it with vim, where it’s done with a couple of lines of easily understandable code.

That‘s user-friendly: it enables me to do what I want to and assumes I am smart enough to understand it, as long as I’m willing to follow some links in the manual and read some very precise but clear instructions. An average KDE help file doesn’t: it tells me what I already know (that I can open a file with ctrl-O), and some things I can’t really use (that this can be done if I’m a programmer), but I don’t get the steps in between, which is where most “users” will be, after all.

Phew. I just needed to get that off my chest. Feel much better now. Think I’ll go and make a syntax colouring scheme.

Browser stats, day #3

Can you tell me what is strange with this picture, which shows the browsers that have been used to view the pages on this site during the three days since I moved?

If you say: “That Firefox has almost 50%, and more than IE”, you’re part right. On the other hand: it is not surprising, is it? After all my plugging for it here, one would really have to be a n00b to use IE, right?

It is not either that “Lynx” is represented, with a whopping 0.6%. Lynx is a text-based browser, quintessentially retro, which is fine for a site like this one and great for quick lookups, because it starts immediately — no need to wait for a modern browser to load all its bells and whistles if all you want to do is check for new updates at Things Twice, now, is there? (the only surprising thing is that it’s Lynx and not one of its more capable cousins, like Links or Elinks).

No, what’s really surprising here is the number at the bottom: that Opera is used by 0.3% only of my visitors — even less than Lynx! — that’s a surprise. I know these numbers are not statistically significant or anything, but nonetheless: Opera is the best browser of them all, really: 50% faster than Firefox and 100% faster than IE, according to recent studies; comes with an email program and a newsreader as well; is even more standards compliant than Firefox; works on all platforms, Linux, Mac, and Windows; and has some features that others don’t. The only reason I’m not using Opera is the Vimperator extension to Firefox, which I can’t live without, but if it wasn’t for that, I’d be on an Opera any day.

So, you might ask, if Opera is a such a damn good browser, how come nobody uses it?

Opera is one of the casualties of the Free/Open Software war where Firefox is the true winner. Opera actually used to be a program you’d have to pay for — fairly unthinkable today, and that didn’t last so long either: you could soon get it in a free version with a banner ad at the top which you couldn’t remove. Fair enough, it was still the fastest browser around, and the most configurable one, and banner ads are all over the place anyway, so one more or less . . .

Then even that disappeared. Today’s Opera is totally free of such commercial bindings, and we’re back to the mystery again: why is the fastest and most able browser out there stuck at 0.3%? Well, in the meantime, Firefox had had its tremendous success and had more or less exhausted the field of “Alternatives to IE”. Besides, even though Opera is Free as in beer, it is still not Free as in speech — the source code is not open. For most people, that is completely irrelevant — who has ever looked at the source code of Firefox, other than geeks and software developers? — but ideologically, it apparently makes a difference.

But 0.3% . . . Let’s put it this way: if you’re looking for a blazingly fast, small browser with excellent functionality, I suggest you try it out.

LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer

I’ve earlier performed a little test, comparing two files: one produced with MS Word, the other with OpenOffice.org Writer. The purpose then was to demonstrate that Word isn’t necessarily such a bad piece of software — it’s just not always used in a way which is likely to give nice results: most people don’t change the default settings of Times New Roman/Arial and ragged right margin, and they apply formatting manually for each new element, which is bound to lead to inconsistencies.

Now it’s time for the next round of tests, this time including another application in the comparison: the “typesetting environment” LaTeX. I will also go more in detail with the points of comparison, not just considering the crude parameters such as font size and page margins, but also taking into account the finer typographical details. In the former test, I had deliberately turned off hyphenation. That led to a discussion about various hyphenation algorithms, and this time, I have decided to turn on automatic hyphenation in all three programs, using the default settings.

Continue reading LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer

The dylanchords.com guide: “How to use Word without hurting Heiner’s eyes”

Upon general request, here’s my guide to proper use of MS Word:

Never ever use direct formatting.
That means: never ever click on any of the buttons in the formatting toolbar
. . . which means that you might as well disable that toolbar altogether (right-click in the toolbar area and uncheck “Formatting”)
You are allowed to keep it there for two reasons:
1. To control what is going on in the document, and
2. to click on the “Styles” button (the one with the two “A”s), which opens the “Styles” sidebar, . . .
. . . which should always be visible, and which is the only acceptable way to format the text.
Create styles for the types of text that you are going to use, and/or modify the existing styles to suit your desires.
These desires should under no circumstance include using Times New Roman or Arial, which are Microsoft’s rip-offs of slightly more acceptable typefaces; but which in themselves are objectively ugly; and which give a discerning reader the impression that you don’t care how your document looks. Good alternatives are Garamond (which, in Microsoft’s version, is not a Garamond at all but a Jannon, but it comes close enough), Gentium, a nice, free unicode font (a combination of three huge advantages which are rarely seen together), or for that matter Book Antiqua, which is also a rip-off, but of a nice typeface: Hermann Zapf’s Palatino
Use templates:
- In an empty document, set up all the different styles that you think you will be using (plain text, indented text, blockquotes, headings, etc.), and save the document, not as a Word Document, but a Word Template (choose it in the drop-down list below the field for the file name).
- Choose New document from template from the Files menu and select your template.
- Lo and behold! All your styles are there.
- You can apply your new template to any document through the Functions > Templates menu. Check the box with “update styles automatically”.

The politics of typography

Did you ever consider the political implications of the ascii standard? No? Thought so.
Someone who did is Robert Bringhurst. And these are not the only implications of typography that he has considered. The title of his book The Elements of Typographical Style may not be sexy, not the kind of thing you would read on the bus or in bed, but, holy shit, it is! If one happens to be a typography freak, this is just heaven, but I suspect that even people who use Times New Roman and Arial (or who don’t know which fonts they’re using, which probably means that they use Times New Roman and Arial), might find something to enjoy here, and even get their horizons widened, so that the next time they open a book, they may not go straight to the mental images behind the curved lines on the paper, but stop for a split second and think “hey, that’s a nice ‘g’!”
Where was I? Oh, the politics. Consider this, about the ascii character set, the standard upon which most computer type setup is based:

The fact that such a character set was long considered adequate tells us something about the cultural narrowness of American civilization, or American technocracy, in the midst of the twentieth century.

The basic ascii set has room for 94 characters. Since c. 1980 we have had the extended ascii set, with 216 free slots — a considerable improvement. But —

This ignores the needs of mathematicians, linguists and other specialists, and of millions of normal human beings who use the Latin alphabet for Czech, Hausa, Hungarian, Latvian, Navajo, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yoruba, and so on. The extended ascii character set is the alphabet not of the real world nor of the un General Assembly but of nato: a technological memento of the them-and-us mentality that thrived in the Cold War.

Bringhurst is a Canadian, of course… They ain’t so bad, them maple-lovers!
And if you thought that things have improved — well, yes, perhaps. But Bringhurst has some cold water for that burning enthusiasm too:

The rate of change in typesetting methods has been steep — perhaps it has approximated the Fibonacci series — for more than a century. Yet, like poetry and painting, storytelling and weaving, typography itself has not improved. There is no greater proof that typography is more art than engineering. Like all the arts, it is basically immune to progress, though it is not immune to change.

The ascii set has 94 characters, Gutenberg used 290 for his bible. ‘Nuff said.

Useful software III: Image viewers and editors

I wrote earlier about a new image viewer — FastStone. I did like it, but it turned out the “Fast” part was an exaggeration. For a quick, efficient, feature-rich picture viewer/editor, there are really only two alternatives: irfanview and XnView. Which one is the right one, depends on your needs, but they’re both free and small, so why choose? — you can use them both.

Irfanview is the fastest viewer around. If what you have is collections of images off the net, this may not make much of a difference, but if you have the occasional 18 Mb scan on a CD, you’ll be grateful for the speed. It is also quite versatile in the handling of images.
The cons are, as always, a reflection of the pros: it is a bare-bones viewer/editor, and there is not much frills — not even the frills that may improve usability. There is a thumbnails viewer, but it opens in a separate window and you have to switch back and forth between them, so in practice, it has no thumbnail browser. There are also quite a few configuration settings you can do, but they tend to be well hidden, both in terms of placement in menus, and in terms of lingo — you have to know quite precisely what you’re looking for.

In all those areas, therefore, XnView is my #1 choice. Just as quick as irfanview for “everyday use” (I’d say; but the bigger the file, the greater the advantage of irfan), but way ahead in terms of usability: a good browser mode, with thumbnail view, preview and file browser (all can be configured), a tabbed interface, and a greater selection of filters and other effects, should you want to use it as a “Photoshop light”. Everything works the way it is expected, and it works efficiently. Good program! And free.

But if what you want is something even more in the direction of Photoshop, but you don’t want to spend that money, or don’t have time to wait for it to load, PhotoFiltre is what you want. That may actually be the case even if you think you want Photoshop. . . I have found it to have a much smoother learning curve than PS, so that even though you can do some more advanced stuff with PS, chances are you will never know, because you have to be a super-user to find out about it. PhotoFiltre works very intuitively, and in 90% of the cases, it has the tool you want, and it has it for you much quicker than that other program.
And it’s free for personal use.

All this applies if you’re a Windows user.

“. . . whatever / I Stumble Upon”

It started with “google” — an internet term which became a standard word in any word class and in any language. Then it was “blog”, which is apparently the word that most quickly has been entered in French dictionaries.
But where I live, “Stumble” tops them all. People can be ‘thumbs-upped’ for their great stumbles. It’s the best example I can think of of an idea which in itself is great, but which, when put into practice, not only proves itself as great in the way it was meant, but also has a potential for growth in all possible directions, which the originator could never have imagined.
The basic idea is this: say you’re interested in cats. You look for pictures of cats, but you’re not sure which cat picture sites out of the 61,700,000 hits on google are the good ones. But your friend, who also likes cats, sends you a couple of good links, and now you have somewhere to start.
He also happens to like dogs, and he sends a couple of dog links as well. You’ve never cared much about dogs before, but his links are good, so you check them out.
This is StumbleUpon, a link-sharing network community. You pick your interests, click a button, and come to a site which someone has recommended in that category. I’ve found some great sites-you-didn’t-know-you-needed that way. If you find something you like, you give it a thumbs-up, or if you don’t like it, a thumbs-down, and you will not be bothered by that site or sites like it any more.
But that’s not where it ends. You can write your review of the pages you come to. They will be collected in your own area of StumbleUpon – something like a blog. A blog with a purpose, because in principle you don’t just write about your cat (well, in this case you do), but about sites you like and why.
Especially the option to “photo-blog” has boosted this aspect of Stumble enormously. You will now find Stumblers whose profile pages are nothing but a collection of nice pictures (of cats, mostly). You will find networks, both organized and the wild, unorganzied ones that grow out of a common interest, a weird idea, a common aquaintance.
Check out my stumbles, and take it from there.

IE—FF 54—33

I’ve collected some browser statistics from the visitor tracker for the blog. IE is still in the lead, but nowhere near the 90% which was the state of affairs at the main site before november 1, 2004. A third of the visitors now use Firefox/Mozilla, which is what specialist’s and web developers’ sites usually have. I’m very satisfied with you!
The main site statistics are not as accurate — they only track the last 100 visitors — but there, the figures are 68%–18% at the moment. A little less for FF, which is expected, but still a good share.
Those of you who haven’t made the change yet, may want to read my top seven reasons not to use the thing with the blue e. (And, in case you’re concerned: you can have both browsers installed at the same time, and Firefox will ask if you want to import all your favorites from IE, so you will not lose anything.)

Here are the complete figures:
Internet Explorer (4, 5, 5.5, and 6): 15,481 (54%)
Mozilla (Firefox and the Mozilla suite): 9,450 (33%)
Netscape: 1,559
Konqueror: 963
Safari: 933
Opera: 264
——————
Total: 28650

Useful software, update

Having tested the various file management programs a little more thoroughly, I’ve ended up with a fifth favorite: Total Commander. The main features are more or less the same as in the other programs (two panels, tabs, ftp client and archive support integrated, almost unlimited configurability, great keyboard support, etc.), but it works more smoothly, it is quicker, and doesn’t crash, which all the other programs have done on some occasion or another. But what is probably the greatest advantage is the active user community. Not only does that mean that a host of plugins for any possible task is available for TC, but when a lot of people rever a program with almost religious sentiments, that is usually a sign of quality (it is also a sign of a lot of people having too much time on their hands, but that’s a different matter).
The one disadvantage is that it is shareware, not freeware. Some would say: why pay for something when you can get (almost) the same for free. Others would say: the extra features and the general quality is worth $30. (Others again might say: I can live with the nag screen).

Among the other programs I recommended, I’ve switched the order of the two top contenders. In the end, the lack of a good favorite handling and some other things made me abandon FreeCommander, much as I liked it, and go back to FileAnt. It didn’t seem to do any bad things to my system files after all, and the AntHill — quick links to your favorite folders — proved really useful.

That gives the order:
1. Total Commander
2. FileAnt
3. FreeCommander
4. ExplorerXP
5. xplorer²

Useful software

Now that I’ve come up with some new tabs, I think I’ve earned the right to talk about something else again. I’ve revamped my computer lately, and found some stuff that I thought I’d pass on.
After two years of heavy use, loads of downloads, installations, ex-stallations, trial versions etc., my computer was becoming excruciatingly slow — so slow, I couldn’t stand it anymore and decided it was time to do something more drastic than just a defragmentation.
The first step was a major clean-up of registry, junk files, etc. It’s not a good idea to mess around in the registry too much on your own (and if you don’t know what/where it is, don’t worry), but there are many programs out there to do the job for you. I chose Advanced System Optimizer, which has been rated the best system optimizer by C|Net. It comes in a free trial version, which found hundreds of errors here and there in the system jungle (and I wasn’t really that surprised).
The next step was a number of tweaks to enhance performance. That helped a bit too.

But the main target was Windows Explorer. Even opening the three items in “My Computer” (A:, C:, and D:) took an enormous amount of time — I wouldn’t say hours, maybe not even minutes, but hey, we’re supposed to be high-tech here, live fast and all that — every second counts, and many of those during the day adds up to a life. So I went looking for alternatives, and luckily others have had the same problem, so there are legio. I found four that came highly recommended:

xplorer² is a lite version of a commercial product, which does a better job than Explorer, but didn’t do it for me (I don’t know why — perhaps it was the bragging tone of their home page: “Why are we head and shoulders ahead of any other program” etc.)
ExplorerXP was far more appealing, for two main reasons: the use of tabs, so that you can have several windows open at the same time, and the favorites window, where you can add shortcuts to the directories you most often use.
An oddball in the lot is FileAnt. It comes with two panels as standard, each with the possibility of multiple tabs. That will probably take a real power user for it to be really useful, but just having it there was nice. A smart handling of direct links to favorite folders, and ample opportunities for customization and keyboard shortcuts almost made me forgive the ugly interface. I didn’t pick it, though, both because someone said it did bad things to your system files upon installation, and because I found my favorite:
FreeCommander — it does nothing to advertise itself, at least not well. The home page is just a list of features, a download link, and a couple of screen shots which initially scared me away. I came back, however, took it home and installed it, and after I had changed most of the default settings, it looked good, felt good, worked fast, did what I wanted it to do, and I was happy. It doesn’t come with a help file, but mostly it’s self-explanatory. Two panels, each with its own tree, so moving files is no hassle at all. Integrated handling of zip and rar files, which you can browse as if they were ordinary folders, without the need for additional programs. Direct access to the Desktop, the Control Panel, the Command prompt, and System files and administration, calculation of the size of folders, and a way of saving favorites which I think I’m going to like. It also shows you all the files that Windows has decided that you don’t want to see. All in all, a superior product. And it’s free, of course.

But I still wasn’t satisfied. I needed an alternative to Winamp as well: it has become slow, and crashes all the time. I ended up with Media Player Classic. It looks like Windows Media Player used to look like (and I instantly wax nostalgic), but below the surface, it is a very powerful and customizable media machine, which plays files in every format you can think of.
With the extra packages Real Alternative and QuickTime Alternative, you can ditch RealPlayer, with all its annoying ads, its security holes and its frequent malfunction, and you can ditch QuickTime, and play it all in one program. (Before you install the two packages, you should uninstall any Real Media or QuickTime programs to avoid conflicts. Disclaimer: there seems to be a problem with streaming Real Media directly from the browser, but I’ve made it work by copying the link location and opening it directly in MPC).
If this isn’t enough, there are two additional packages of codecs on the same site, which should solve any problem file you may come across. I haven’t tested it, though.
Update: The newest version is 6.4.8.3, just released. Someone at a message board recommended to stick with the previous version, 6.4.8.2, since the “unofficial v6483 is very, very buggy”. That was posted before the final release of 6.4.8.3, however, and he seems to be referring to a previous beta version. I’ve tried both, and haven’t noticed any bugs, but not much of a difference either — other than in the file size: 4.8 Mb vs. 1.3 Mb)

While I was searching for these replacements, I found another one: FastStone is a really neat Image viewer, which has now replaced IrfanView, itself a really good freeware program, as my standard viewer.

I think that was it, for now.

ClearType

Today, I happened to look at this page on a computer without ClearType activated. And man … I had completely forgotten how ugly text on a computer screen can look. Really, with Clear Type, what you see on the screen comes reasonably close to looking at a printed page (whereas the “old” screen view comes close to looking at a piece of paper someone has dropped on a henhouse floor).
If you have Windows XP, this is already available, but for some reason MS have decided not to turn it on by default, and furthermore they have buried the setting in some menu one would not normally look for something like this.
Here it is:

Right click on the desktop and select ‘Properties’
Select the ‘Appearance’ tab and press the ‘Effects…’ button (who would have guessed? “Effects” makes me think of pointer arrows with blinking christmas decorations or weird screen savers, not typographical subtleties).
Check the box for ‘Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts’, then
select ‘ClearType’ in the dropdown list, and
OK your way out again.

That’s it — your way to a better browsing experience, whiter teeth, longer vacations, better guitar playing skills, peace on earth and most other places, or at least to a better browsing experience.
If you want, you can fine-tune the settings with a tuner program you can download from www.microsoft.com, but it works its wonders even without it.
Do yourself a favour and follow my advice — without it, what you’re looking at now is ugly (which means that all my web design efforts will have been spent in vain, so do me a favour as well).

The Battle of Wichita — the full story

OK, here’s the full story of the battle of Wichita, as requested.

It sounds pretty easy at first — just a run down similar to so many other songs (The Wicked Messenger, Down the Highway, and quite a few others), but when it came down to figuring out the details…

One thing was for certain: the highest string had to be tuned to the tone that is ringing throughout — there was no way in the world that that was going to be a fingered tone, the dexterity that would have been involved in that, would have been quite alien to Dylan (no offense). So there was one string…

For the rest, I worked with the different tunings that I knew Dylan used at that time, and I worked on alternative tabs in each of them, but I never even got through the initial run. (I can’t — at least I don’t want to — count the hours I’ve spent, listening to 3-second segments at reduced speed.) The special things about the tuning that he actually uses are the fifth between the first and second string and the major third between the bass strings (4th and 5th). The second of these has the acoustic effect of producing a lot of clashes between overtones in the audible range, which might create the impression of a different tuning. This, together with the bassy/slightly distorted sound of the two Freewheelin’ outtakes, made me believe that the deepest sounding string was lower than it actually is. I had made a tab in open D, I think it was, which was acceptable, but still clearly wrong, both because it was impractical to play and because it had the wrong tones in it.

Now, working out a tab when you know the tuning, is fairly straightforward. It may take some concentrated listening and occasionally some extra technological aid, but it’s not that hard, once you’re used to it. Working out the tuning is usually also straightforward — each of the common tunings have their specialties (I’ve expanded on this elsewhere — in the FAQ section of the main site). But this was an unknown tuning, with specialties that pointed in different directions. The figure that is heard in the second bar of the downward run, on the 4th and 5th strings, sound like the common E-Esus4-Em-E figure in standard tuning (Baby Please Don’t Go, Lost Highway, etc.), but other traits pointed clearly to an open tuning. I had worked out which pairs of strings had to be at which distances from each other, but putting it all together…

The CD had another version, the live version he played in Cynthia Gooding’s appartment some time before he recorded it, but in the same arrangement. There, he used some other chord shapes more consistenly (the A7 chord 003300), which gave me hope that I might break it because of them, but again, …

The CD only has the song itself, but since it was originally from a longer tape, where this was the second song, there ought to be some useful information to be gained from what happened before and after the performance itself, I thought. So the other night I posted a request at the pool. The morning when I got up, there was indeed a file waiting for me.

With trembling fingers, tossed between Schylla and Charybdis, high hopes and deepest desperation, [etc. — building up to the dramatic climax] I played the file, and what do I hear, if not Dylan tuning the guitar, string by string… Exactly what I wanted. All I had to do was, then, to follow his tuning, put on the capo, and play along…