The Zero Room

I'm in shock. I've just heard from Slashdot that the LugRadio podcast is soon to be no more. I've been a sufferer of LugRadio Syndrome - inappropriate giggling fits in public places - since series one, and while I can't say I've ever aquired any useful technical information from the programme, it did once render me breathless and weeping with mirth while in a doctor's waiting room, which I think got me in to see the doctor sooner than I otherwise would have. I've also learned that the proper response to, for instance, Novell announcing an exciting new product is to exclaim "Beard!", or "My chin!", and that you shouldn't give the actor who plays Harold Bishop in Neighbours a hard time about his weight, because he (allegedly) has a blisteringly funny riposte.

I haven't enjoyed a podcast so much since the Slashdot guys did Geeks in Space (of course it wasn't called podcasting back then, and we had to listen to it by piping the output of NCSA Mosaic to an eight-track cassette recorder via a SCART connector). I'm not sure what I'm going to do without LugRadio. The Rissington Podcast is amusing and geeky, but the presenters are, it must be said, Mac users, so there's a bit of a cultural divide to get over. FLOSS Weekly has some great interviews from time to time, but there's even more of a culture problem there (American). Can anybody suggest some others?

Someone's done a really nice home usability test on Ubuntu 8.04, using his girlfriend as the experiment. Apart from the good old-fashioned flame-bait value of this, I'm finding usability studies increasingly fascinating. From my own experience, it's remarkably common to find features that seem an obvious good idea from one point of view can be intimidatingly bewildering from another (and often I'm the bewildered one).

For example, I have one website that allows anonymous users to post content, although for obvious reasons each post has to be approved by an administrator. When content is submitted, the user is redirected to the site's front page, and gets a message in a little box with a different background colour to the rest of the page, telling them that their post is awaiting approval. Clear enough, you may think. However I got some feedback today from a user saying that the site is broken, because every time they try to post anything, all they get is an error message. You might say that the user should at least stop to read the message, but on the other hand something is wrong from a usability point of view if a message telling the user that everything is working perfectly fine looks at first glance like an error message. Usability is hard.

Robin 'Roblimo" Miller has an interesting bit of flamebait over at Linux.com, talking about why it's so hard to switch operating systems or desktop environments withing the one operating system. His point seems to be that our deeply-held preferences are established by first impressions (or even chance), then entrenched by habit, no matter how vigorously we might argue that we have a rational basis for them.

I'm not sure I agree with him; GNOME is a better desktop environment than KDE; both are easier to use than the WIndows or Mac user interface; nano is a sensible choice for a programmer's text editor, because... ah... okay, maybe he's got me there. ^O ^X

"Four species of penguins that breed in Antartica are endangered by global warming," notes Richard Stallman. "Even I, the only man in the world who can get angry from looking at a picture of a penguin, find this bad news."

If it's any consolation, the gnu has apparently increased in number from 100,000 in 1950 to 1.5 million. According to Wikipedia, the collective noun for a herd of gnus is 'implausibility'. This means something; I'm sure of it.

Just a reminder: you can help the other implausible GNU (and indirectly, that blasted penguin), by joining the Free Software Foundation. I finally did so this year, and ever since I have experienced a tremendous sense of tranquility and well-being. I now radiate a dazzling aura of geeky freedom, every Windows computer I walk past BSODs (although that may just be coincidence), and choirs of free software angels herald my arrival wherever I go. It's really cool.

I've been looking around the new features in Gutsy, and was interested in what's new with the "restricted drivers manager", the gadget that looks after any non-free software required to make unfriendly hardware work. Tried to launch it and was told:

Could these be the eight sweetest words in the English language?

Lugradio's Stuart Langridge (who must I'm afraid get used to the idea that he will probably never receive as much noteriety for anything else he does as long as he lives), after a laptop purchase which can fairly be described as a fiasco, asks the question "Which video card should I buy?" for his desktop PC.

Among the answers is a link to an awesomely useful page: http://free3d.org

The page uses the fairly rough and ready benchmark of the glxgears screensaver frame rate to rank different combinations of hardware and free software. I'm quite pleased with my 930 frames-per-second result (Intel Corporation 82G965 Integrated Graphics Controller, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4300 @ 1.80GHz), and my masculinity is not at all threatened by the >6000fps results at the top of the table. With figures like this, and two out of the three major 3D hardware manufacturers (AMD/ATI and Intel) actively providing free driver software (not to mention in one case complete hardware specsifications!), it's time to bury the myth that free software operating systems don't do good 3D.

This development makes me think of all those years reading HOWTOs and editing modelines and want to weep tears of joy:

Bruce Byfield at Linux.com has done the world a favour by collating the many and varied hardware compatibility lists into one, highly bookmarkable article.

Like many people, I was saddened to see Eben Moglen leave the board of the Free Software Foundation, but pleased that he would be carrying on his work at the Software Freedom Law Center. If somebody were to ask me (for the record nobody did) who should replace Eben, I would have said without hesitation Benjamin Mako Hill, so I was thrilled when he got the job. One of his key achievements in my view has been kicking off the very important, and long overdue, work on finding a definition of "Free Cultural Works", which will serve the same purpose for other kinds of creative works that the Free Software Definition serves for software. His presense also helps the FSF board continue to meet it's all-important beard quota.

Linux.com has a profile of Benjamin here.