2010 May 31 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for May 31st, 2010

The Big Question

Published by Robert Pogson May 31st, 2010 in Linux in Education and technology. 25 Comments

Rob Pregoraro at the Washington Post asks the question, “How can an operating system with those virtues, the open-source Linux, remain confined to a tiny minority of desktop and laptop computers at home? “. He’s missed the mark. GNU/Linux is not confined to a tiny minority of computers at home. It may be in the USA but globally, GNU/Linux is on about 10% of PCs. We know that because Ballmer told us and that was a while ago. 30% of netbooks run GNU/Linux and almost all ARMed devices do not run that other OS.You can buy “no OS” and GNU/Linux PCs from most OEMs and some retail outfits.

The issues he implies are holding back GNU/Linux have nothing to do with many homes where DVDs are not watched. Who ever thought of using a PC to watch DVDs rather than using a DVD player and a television? I have XP machines in this building that have DVD players but do not play DVD movies. Ask the teachers who bought CDs for them. DVD sales fell 9% in 2009. They are not pivotal in the acquisition of a PC used for games, word-processing, browsing, or e-mailing. YouTube distributed more video than Hollywood. YouTube does not distribute DVDs.

No, video is not the holdup. Go into most big box retail stores and you are unlikely to see even one PC with GNU/Linux, not because people will not buy them or use them, but because a seller makes more money selling a more expensive PC, period. It has nothing to do with performance or user-friendliness. It has everything to do with exclusive dealing by M$, OEMs and retailers. Here, I have people walk up to me and ask me to install GNU/Linux on their computers because they have seen how well it works. The world has seen GNU/Linux run rings around that other OS on netbooks and on the web. The world wants GNU/Linux and will get it when they demand it. That is happening now.

Today, I paved over (with Debian GNU/Linux) six brand new PCs sold by OEMs with that other OS because they work much better with GNU/Linux. That is all the reason anyone needs to use GNU/Linux. The rest of the features of GNU/Linux are a bonus. Of a shipment of 12 PCs probably 10 will run GNU/Linux because that is what the end-users asked. A couple are leaving and they do not care what OS is on their PC. Only two asked for that other OS for their own reasons, one of which was for DVDs to play video. The fact that we can create and edit our own video with these PCs running GNU/Linux just as some of the big studios do is all the proof I need to insist video is not a problem for GNU/Linux. If suppliers of DVDs want to ignore GNU/Linux as a market, they may do so at their own peril. GNU/Linux is growing in popularity much faster than that other OS. The new WebM file format and included encoding pretty well guarantee that GNU/Linux will not have this problem much longer. Distributors of video who want to distribute to those using GNU/Linux would be well advised to use WebM.

In this school we have a number of HP CP1215 printers. They are not wonderful but we have a bunch. A teacher in one room is running that other OS. It took two tries to download and install a driver from HP, about an hour of time was wasted. XP could not find it on its own. In GNU/Linux, I plugged in the printer, clicked “find printer” on CUPS (http://localhost:631) and installed the thing in seconds. I have encountered many printers that that other OS offered no help in installing. Same thing with our wireless devices. The installation on XP is the pits. The device is instantly recognized in GNU/Linux. It took two hours to set up a new XP machine to run on our LAN and use our printers for the lady who wanted DVDs to play. Another teacher out of the blue asked me whether an educational CD he had would work with GNU/Linux. I installed Wine and it did. Now we have a GNU/Linux box that can also run malware…

- Robert Pogson

Sins of Fathers

Published by Robert Pogson May 31st, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

65 years after the close of WW2 and 93 years after the “Balfour Declaration“, Israel and its neighbours are still squabbling. This time, Israel boarded a ship delivering aid to Gaza and 10 people were killed. 500 were aboard, apparently, unlike routine aid-missions. The group organizing the mission apparently sought confrontation and Israel gave them what they wanted. According to the Law of the Sea, Israel was probably justified in boarding the vessel in order to regulate immigration but that is questionable since Gaza is blockaded but not nominally Israeli territory.

It is high time the Middle East sorted out its problems. They have to live with each other indefinitely and although they do not have to like each other they should end this stupid waste of life, energy and resources over territory and power. If they cannot settle matters by negotiation, peace should be imposed. Neither Israel nor the other countries of the Middle East are powerful enough to defy intervention. Aid, bulldozers and enough military power to make use of force futile should be dispatched ASAP. Humanity needs to police itself sometimes in order that the whole world can share peace and prosperity.

- Robert Pogson

Cheating at KHangman

Published by Robert Pogson May 31st, 2010 in Linux in Education, Teaching and technology. 0 Comments

I remember playing “Hangman” on the chalkboard of a one-room school-house in the 1950s. It was great sport on rainy/cold/winter days when outdoor recess was difficult. One constructs a hangman’s scaffold with every miss at a guess of a letter in an unknown word. Being “hung” builds vocabulary as one is motivated not to be hung again. It worked for me. Even with my poor memory, I can spell most words I use even without the spell-checker.

The game, KHangman, comes with many distros of GNU/Linux, and offers most of the features of the chalkboard plus you have a clue as to the category of the word and its length. Still, for young children it is challenging. As losing is no fun at all and exploring the dictionary is educational I decided to create an accessory for cheating at KHangman. Here is the code:

#!/bin/bash
echo cheat, copyright 2010 Robert Pogson. You are free to examine, modify, use and distribute this code under GNU GPL v3 or later
echo ln -s anywordlist wordlist in your HOME directory permits changing the wordlist used.
echo
echo Supply a pattern of known and unknown characters marked by a “.”, e.g. .i.n could be lion
echo Type q to quit, PgUp,PgDn,arrows,spacebar to scroll in the list of words
read
while [ "q" != $REPLY ];do grep ^$REPLY\$ $HOME/wordlist|less;echo Supply another pattern or “q” to exit cheat;read;done

I put this in /usr/local/bin/cheat so it will be in users’ PATH and I create a link on the XFCE4 panel using their “devilish” emoticon to be opened in terminal. This programme basically uses grep to match the pattern of known and unknown letters in the word against a wordlist. I used the Canadian large wordlist which I place a link in each user’s HOME directory (ln -s /usr/share/dict/canadian-english-large /home/someuser/wordlist). That way, users can replace the link for their own purposes. For example, teachers of early years may use a Dolch wordlist or one they make up to meet their educational objectives.

Here’s what it looks like in action. I showed two windows to show the before and after shots of cheat.

The sneaky thing about this programme is that it encourages them to read the dictionary without it being a tedious task, just part of a game in which they are motivated by the base instinct to survive.

- Robert Pogson