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I’ll admit it: whenever I see the phrase “Web 2.0″ used, my countenance changes, a wall goes up, I assume several unkind things about the prescience of the writer, and I prepare to disagree.

On the other hand, one could make a case that “Web 2.0″ hype is to a great degree a creature of Tim O’Reilly, a man who makes his living by understanding what he’s called “alpha geeks” — early adopter, uber-geeks, the bleeding edge, whatever you’d like to term them. In other words, he has a history of being prescient, and of being more or less correct.

Before I go on, despite my dislike for the term “Web 2.0″, I can concede that there is a new-ness to a subset of the web applications of the last year or so. Some of them have design stylings in common, others have architectural models in common, and still others have only certain flashy technologies in common (coughAjaxcough).

All that being said, I don’t think there’s anything “new” here, and any attempt to define or discuss the “Web 2.0″-ness of “Web 2.0″ only serves to make that more and more obvious.

I probably disagree with Tim O’Reilly at my peril, but for what it’s worth, here goes.

Continue reading ‘Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0′

I humbly nod to mrben’s powers of perception and prediction; my new Gentoo Linux install lasted all of two days before I wiped it all away again.

I currently have SLED 10 on there again… quite honestly, it may not last long.

For starters: what was wrong with Gentoo? With Gentoo, nothing. With my set up of it, apparently quite a bit. It was crashing with astonishing regularity — so much for stability. On the other hand, I rolled my own kernel and I didn’t exactly do due diligence for each and every feature I selected… so that may well have been My Fault. I may give Gentoo’s genkernel a try — it generates a kernel for you using “stable” selections. On the other hand, I was really enjoying my experience with Arch Linux, and it was working quite well, IIRC.

Next: what’s wrong with SLED? Originally, I was frustrated with attempts to play a DVD — so one of the first things I did was figure out how to get libdvdcss on there and get it working. This was actually successful, although it currenly only works in Totem Movie Player, and mplayer (which I would prefer) is not working properly at all… The main issue I’m having with SLED right now is that it is not acting nearly as stable as I remembered it; apps are crashing, so on and so forth. It’s quite disheartening. It’s possible that there is a hardware problem in my machine, though I hope that’s not the case.

I’m going to have to do the smart thing and stick /home in it’s own partition, so I can switch distros with abandon without messing with my files… now there’s a plan. ;-)

At any rate, my goal has not changed — I still want to find a solid Linux distro and stick with it. That, in fact, is the object of what mrben (accurately) called my perrennial tweaking. I don’t ask for much; simply a rock solid Linux base, upon which I can run all the standard desktop apps, listen to music, watch DVDs, run Xgl/compiz (yes, I am a sucker for special effects), do development work, and run a light-weight webserver (intranet only). Any standard Linux distro, theoretically, should do 90% of this. Finding one that will do the whole 100%, that has been the challenge. I may even have to bite the bullet and try Ubuntu again; much as I hate to admit it, it should be among the contenders for the sort of box I’m trying to set up.

Oh well. Onward, space rangers.

UPDATE: I was incorrect, it turns out that playing DVDs with mplayer is working just fine. Must have been an ID-10-T error.

Creating Passionate Users has had a host of cool posts recently, but I’ll just link to this one about marketing and user manuals.

In brief, Kathy writes about how by creating slick brochures and advertisements vs. boring, clunky manuals, companies are implicitly saying they value prospective customers over actual users.

While I can see a place for a plain, to-the-point manual, I think Kathy has a good case. Maybe we don’t want or need manuals that look like Vogue advertisements — but let’s at least put that same amount of thought into them, so they are usable, complete, and attractive.

A short update: it turned out that the Gentoo installer had some sort of error halfway through. It left me with a system that was bootable, but had no network drivers. :(

So, today I spent quite awhile deliberating. What I really want is to pick a version of Linux that does what I want it to do (that being, well, everything we expect a desktop PC to do), and then just leave it on there. I’d like to leave the same Linux distribution on my box for not just a month or two, but more or less indefinitely. And, sorry, but, Ubuntu is not among the short list; I’ve installed that too many times and always wound up getting rid of it. I will admit that any troubles I may have had (I can’t even remember them) could have probably been resolved by my digging a little deeper into apt and other tools particular to Debian-based systems… but, what can I say? I can remember getting annoyed, for one reason or another, every time I had installed Ubuntu in the past. So, no more Ubuntu for this cowboy.

My shortlist was ArchLinux, Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED), Slackware, or Gentoo. I actually installed Slackware this morning; I would probably be using it now, except there was some sort of problem with Grub getting onto the MBR and it wouldn’t boot. :( So, my introduction to Slackware will have to await another time.

After that, I nearly installed Arch or SLED again, and suddenly struck by what Neal Stephenson’s Jack Shaftoe would have called the imp of the perverse, decided to install Gentoo after all… just not with the installer. I decided to do an old-fashioned by the handbook Gentoo install; the kind that takes two and a half days before the system (xorg, desktop evironment and apps included) is up and running.

Why would I do such a thing?

1. I’ve probably run Gentoo longer than I’ve run any other Linux distribution; for the better part of 2 years it was almost the only Linux I used. I’m very familiar with it, and very comfortable in the environment. Isn’t Linux… Linux? you might ask; well, no. Some systems use different directories for storing standard items like startup scripts and other configuration files, and I will guarantee you — when you become familiar with one way of doing things, all your senses rebel against some alternate (ergo weird) configuration.
2. It was the most stable system I’ve ever run. Bar none; I’ve had the occasional problem, but I would say the 98% of the issues I’ve ever had with Gentoo have been due to my choosing to install unstable, testing, or just plain incorrect, packages. Generally when Gentoo has a package marked “testing” — they really mean it. You are taking the life of your system into your own hands when you begin installing masked packages on Gentoo. In other words, most of the problems I’d ever had on Gentoo were my own fault. Back before I began installing all sorts of crazy things on it, it was as stable as a rock.
3. Heck, I just like it. I will admit it; I’m a sucker for good branding, and Gentoo is one of the few community-oriented distros with what you can only describe as Very Good Branding. It just cries out to be loved. ;-)

So, anyways, that brings me up to date; I’ve just installed Gentoo 2006.1 (actually, when you install from scratch the version numbers mean very little; you wind up installing whatever happens to be the latest version on whatever day you install); I’m recompiling the base system, which will be followed by compiling xorg, and probably Gnome (though I am tempted to try out a lightweight desktop for awhile… but I have a feeling I would go back to Gnome. Again, familiarity).

So… hopefully I will not be saying “Hey, I just installed fancy-new-distro-X” for a long, long time. At least, not unless I find a spare machine to use. I want to leave my main desktop alone for awhile.