Wyrtual Life

Finally, i found a new cozy permanent place to build my nest in.

The NWF’s Website finally got its new feathers up and running. Still a bit of nitpicking to do, but the baby is officially online.

As everything comes differently from what you plan in life, my little trip to do some oyster farming lasted for the amazing length of a whole day and i found myself driving 1500 km down the east coast back to Melbourne in this little big beauty. Not only does it look good, has four wheels and ran reliably the whole distance, it also provided me with enough space to sleep for a night. And all that for just 800 bucks.

Apart from the truth the title has for my life at current stages, over the last month i had my first payd open source job. The task was to extend the Tango emoticons and here are the results.

Apparently, some artists are more able to step up with the times they live in than their labels. Paul McCartney just joined the raign.

Novell, Xandros, Xerox, Samsung, LG - what do all these have in common? They are part of what might me the biggest disturbance in the flourishing of free software so far. They all signed non-sueing agreements with Microsoft over alleged MS intellectual property (aka patents) in Linux.

The interesting thing is what separates them:
Novell nowadays has it’s head entirely wrapped up in Linux.
Xandros is a Linux distribution.
Samsung is a hardware vendor, with systems capable of running Linux in their product portfolio.
LG is perhaps the world dominating electronics manufacturer, from washing mashines to mobile phones, but they only had two products so far actually featuring or being based on embedded Linux.
Microsoft itself has nothing to do with Linux whatsoever.

So why is Microsoft making deals with other companies about something that isn’t theirs, that they have nothing to do with at all? This is what puzzles quite a few people these days.

Novell started it all and the Novell deal among all seems the greatest mystery to me. What did Microsoft want from Novell? FUD? Scaring customers?

Let’s look at the others.

Xandros was born with a mission statement to enable proprietary MS technologies in a Linux desktop. For Xandros to sign a patent treaty with MS just confirms this commitment. For MS, to sign a treaty with Xandros means one controllable Linux distribution. Furthermore, a distribution that enables their own proprietary technologies, exactly what a huge part of the Linux community is trying to counteract on. Furthermore, groklaw tells us that

Xandros will make royalty payments to Microsoft based on shipping products

. And then there is BridgeWays, which Xandros develops to interact with MS servers and which is closed-source software. Apparently, BridgeWays includes licensing for MS network protocols.
To summarize, Microsoft sells Linux through Xandros. Yes, whenever Xandros will sell this distribution, MS will get a little patent tax, not based on actual patents, but based on Xandros signing non-disclosed patent allegations. How often did your mother tell you not to sign something you didn’t read? And you don’t think Xandros pays this tax, do you? Nope, it will be routed through to the customer…that’s the usual practice.

That actually brings me to Novell. Wasn’t the Novell deal about interoperability as well? Wasn’t there some royalties payment involved as well? Even if not…so Novell wants to interact with Microsoft products…and Microsoft gives permission to do so. The Novell deal was partly celebrated as a recognition of Linux in the business world. But did anyone realize that it was also a “yes” to proprietary technologies from Microsoft? Indeed, well done, Novell.

Let’s look further…Samsung, Xerox, LG. How much did they ever have to do with Linux? As good as nothing. Instead, Samsung and Microsoft are happy technology partners on a wide range of fields. But all could potentially be. So what’s good in this deal for them? Well…at least for the LG deal we seem to know that MS payed LG a one-time payment for the treaty, while LG is supposed, once more, to pay per implementation royalty fees to MS. So LG gets some money…and since they don’t produce anything Linux anyways, who cares about the royalty fees. So a win-win for LG?

Remember that nice chess tactics where you place your tower, queen or runner in a single line with one of the opponents figures AND the king? This could be exactly what MS does. As soon as LG wants to implement Linux in their devices, MS will ask for royalty fees. So, for LG, Linux isn’t as cheap anymore as it used to be. Or then LG could route that tax further to the customer, making the product more expensive. Again, Linux isn’t as cheap anymore as it used to be. So, don’t move, LG.

And the more vendors sign contracts of this type with MS, the more Linux will get a price tag attached - in the business sector. And the price is made by Microsoft. And the profit goes to Microsoft. For something they had nothing to do with at all. For something they just claim violates their non-validated (as groklaw and other sources tell us) patents - if they even have them.

Thanks and congratulations, Xerox, Samsung and LG. You just locked yourself out of what Microsoft sees is becoming the cheaper fully viable alternative. And thanks Novell and Xandros, who by doing so, disrespect the authors of the software you are selling, and intellectual property itself, by circumventing the stated intentions of the GPL. Who else wants to chip in?

Apart from that, of course there’s the whole GPLv3 story…which, conveniently, just adds to the same issue. If GPLv3 doesn’t allow those deals, everyone MS manages to persuade into one, excludes themselves from Linux and ties themselves up to MS. I guess this is how vendor lock-in works in times of interoperabilty.

It was always a bit of an issue for me that wordpress can’t autotranslate my postings into the language you want to read it in. Of cause the real problem here was that incident with the babel tower. In neither case i have the power to do something about it. Hence i just decided to do it the Salvatore way (The name of the rose) and write in whatever language suits me at the moment. I’d love that to be finnish, but i’m afraid i won’t…so you’ll mostly read english here, spiced up with a good ounce of german salt.

Welcome to the brand new “Nicht egal” category and it’s first post. I would have liked to give it an english title, but what i associate with this category most is just another Kettcar line: “Nur weil man sich daran gewöhnt hat, ist es nicht, noch lange nicht egal.” Or short: “Nicht egal.” To say it in other Kettcar words, this is to reflect a bit on the times i live in. If you like it’s the political corner of this site. All about the great phenomenas of our times…the big anti-terror-charade, digital rights mismanagement, patent ridiculousness and so on.

And thanks Microsoft for lending itself as the opener. Who would have made a better fit, really? Yes, Microsoft is back…with Windows Vista and Office 2007…and a good bunch of ridiculous accusations,
pissing off the competitions community and members of their own community.

So, Lenovo just released the T61, it’s second incarnation of the T6x series.

And i must say i’m at least slightly pleased and a little surprised with what i’m seeing.

When the ThinkPad brand got handed over to Lenovo i was a bit sceptical, to say the least…and the first couple of models that came out of the new home didn’t impress me much. But now, here’s something different…Lenovo seems to be able to focus on sensible features rather than tech specs. So what have we got…

First of all, the T61 comes with a so called Magnesium roll cage.

Ain’t it beautiful. This almost makes my good old T41p look cheap.

The other nice innovation is the optional 1GB of “Turbo Memory”. Ohh these marketing buzz words. However, what this is is the idea of a hybrid harddisk made independent of the harddisk. Huh? Well…it is 1GB of Flash memory that caches harddisk access and can hence speed up harddisk operations significantly. The advantage over a hybrid harddisk solution, obviously is that you can exchange the harddisk without loosing the flash caching.

Lastly, the T61 features a standard firewire port, now. Good.

So, Lenovo, i’m impressed. Though, this get’s deminished by quite a few little glitches in the new models design:

• the Turbo Memory occupies one of the two express card slots (it should have been internal)
• all usb ports are vertical, whereas horizontal would be the preferred layout
• the audio plugs have been moved to the front (which is nonsense, side is perfect for them)
• the vga port is still in the middle of the left side (the back of either side or on the back side would be better
• apparently, all models are widescreen now (as long as there’s a UXGA+ option, that’s fine)
• the large left display border on the 14″ models is ugly

So…as you probably found in your googling, people seem to be happily running InDesign 2.0 under wine. Some even seem to have found a way to get Photoshop CS 2 running. But most attempts to have a go at InDesign 3.0 aka CS fail at the end of the splash screen.

You can do something about this: open you winecfg, create a InDesign.exe application profile and create the following dll overrides: comctl32 (builtin, native), comdlg32, commctrl (native, builtin), ole2, ole32, oleaut32, rpcltc1, rpcltc5, rpcltccm, rpclts5, rpcltspx, rpcmqcl, rpcmqsvr, rpcns4, rpcrt4. Set them all to native if not otherwise given in parentheses here.

Of course you will need the according dlls in you fakewin/windows/system32 dir. ies4linux can get them for you.

This will make both the installer and InDesign.exe run almost flawlessly.

However…a critical remaining issue is that the open and save dialogs don’t show up. Apparently there is a problem with actctx. From what i’ve googled it seems it’s a core kernel32 part that was introduced in Windows XP and needs to be implemented in wine core. It also seems it’s one of the working areas at the wine project.

I’m using 0.9.29 (which is what gentoo has currently). Maybe there’s improvement in 0.9.35 already? If anyone could shed more light into this…