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So, I started messing around with some new (to me) fractal software, XaoS, on my Linux box, and this is the first one I’ve rendered out and captured.

Like a lot of things in Linux land, the UI for this software leaves a lot to be desired, and there’s a bit more of a learning curve for it than there is with equivalent software on proprietary platforms.  In fact, if you read through their project pages, they indicate that the version they’ve released for Mac has a much better UI.

But hey, to use that, I’d have to buy a Mac, which should happen sometime around the heat death of the universe.

On the other hand, like a lot of things in Linux land, once you get past the dodgy User Interface, you actually have a lot more fine grained control over the software than you tend to in the equivalents on  Windows or Mac.  Live zoom, instant capturing, really good control over the algo, colour…  And it’s really light on system resources.  It renders the fractals out instantaneously on my Linux box, which has much lower hardware specs than my Windows box.

I had a lot of fun coming up with this one.  It’s a zoom of an Octal Mandelbrot set fractal, with some colour tweaks.  I then took the resulting capture, and did some colour, hue, and level balancing in GIMP, and this is the end result.  Long story short, this is by far the most “manipulated” fractal I’ve posted here.

Oh, and for those of you who are about to jump up and down and complain about GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program), let me just say the following:

• It’s about $700 cheaper than Photoshop (as in, GIMP is free, and I just checked the price for Photoshop at the Adobe site).
• You probably haven’t used it lately – the newest versions of GIMP are actually quite easy to use and fairly feature packed.
• It will run/look the same on Windows, Mac, or Linux.  For me, the Linux part is kinda important.
• It’s incredibly lightweight.  The latest versions of Photoshop are fat bloated resource hogs.
• All those fancy features in Photoshop?  99% of you will only use a tiny fraction of them, and the equivalent features for those are in GIMP.  For the other 1% of you, there’s a plugin available.  In fact the fancy liquid rescaling that was recently released in Photoshop was available as a GIMP plugin for a year and a half  before it was released as “ground breaking feature” for Photoshop. (If you don’t know what liquid rescaling is, it’s way too hard for me to describe – search YouTube for “gimp liquid rescale” or just go to the plugin page for an idea – it is a vastly cool thing to be able to do to an image).
• My wife, the one with the BFA in Graphic Arts, who currently works in architectural design and drafting, abandoned Photoshop for GIMP several years ago and doesn’t for a minute regret the decision.  She actually finds that all the key features that you use on a regular basis are easier to find in GIMP than in Photoshop, and she’s the closest thing I have on hand to a graphic arts expert…  So it’s nice that she IS a graphic arts expert.

So, for a $700 savings, (which equates, I remind you, to FREE) you get a highly workable graphics editor, that even if you’re a pro and need all the “deep” features, you can get plugins and extensions from a pretty vast repository.

FOSS is a pretty fun world, and it keeps getting better by the day.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made my choices and I’m sticking with it.  Day to day, I work in Linux and that isn’t going to change.  But there’s a good reason why Linux is a “Fringe” OS on the desktop, and why it will remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Mostly, it comes down to making simple things hard, and for no good reason.  Quite often, in the Linux community, simple things are made hard for purely political reasons.  Little pissing matches in the open source community with the end result that things that the average “Joe User” just needs to work, will work, but only once you make the poor schmuck jump through too many hoops.

The current example that’s annoying the heck out of me is the ongoing pissing match between the FOSS community in general and Oracle/Sun over Java.

Here’s the deal:  Java used to work brilliantly and seamlessly on the average Linux distro.  it wasn’t something you had to think about installing.  By and large, JRE was just THERE, and it worked, and you didn’t have to think about it.

But along comes Larry Ellison and Oracle, buying up Sun and the rights to the Java platform along with it.  Without getting too much into the details, Ellison is a world class wank and has gone out of his way to piss off the open source community.

The end result is that JRE no longer ships pre-installed on pretty much any Desktop Linux.  It’s not a technical decision.  It’s a political/business decision on the part of the distro makers.  And it’s a really dumb one.

Look, guys, Ellison may be an asshat, and what he’s doing to the open source projects that came part and parcel with the Sun purchase is greedy, self serving in a very shortsighted way, and in some ways nonsensical. But the fact of the matter is a huge chunk of the Web relies on the JRE plugin framework.  That didn’t change with the change of ownership of Sun.  JRE is out there, it’s widely adopted, and people just expect it to work.

The hoops to jump through to get it working on, say, an Ubuntu install aren’t that extreme – if you’re a nerd and mucking about on the command line is something you’re used to.  But if any “Joe User” is out there, I ask you:  Is opening up a terminal window and typing the following something you’re likely to know how to do – is it even something you’re likely to know how to google for?

sudo add-apt-repository “deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner”

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

My guess is no, it’s not something you would know how to do.  And you shouldn’t have to know.  Java is a part of the web.  Moreover, it’s a part of a lot of corporate infrastructures – thousands of companies have custom Java applets that their users work with on a daily basis, usually without even realizing it.

Taking something simple and making it hard is not how you gain converts.  It’s how you piss people off.  And not just “Joe Users” – you piss off IT people who have to face the wrath of the “Joe Users” who complain about simple things being broken.

So, Mr. Shuttleworth, get over yourself.  Linux distro makers in general: get over yourselves.  This isn’t a holy war.  This isn’t about idealism, values, open standards, or all the other crap that seems to get wrapped up part and parcel in the FOSS community.

It’s about making simple things simple, so that the poor guy at the far end of the keyboard, who mostly just wants things to work so he can get on with his day, can do just that.  They don’t want to know how it works.  They don’t want to know about the politics behind the community.  They have just one, count ‘em one, vested interest in their computer:

They want to turn it on and have things work.

I think I’ll stick with the tech theme of the past couple of days, as it’s what’s on my mind.

In a couple of unrelated events, Open Source Software has apparently made some giant leaps forward in U.S. Government circles, with two significant announcements within days of each other.

First, we’ll cover something that’s highly visible to the outside world.  On Saturday, October 24th, the official White House website launched the new Obamacized version.  While some might be thinking “about time” – it actually takes a while to accomplish a major redesign of a large website.  Add in typical government political/bureaucratic “issues”, and I’m surprised it got done this quickly.

Mostly, I could care less about the White House website.  It’s not like I’m an American, or really care about the info the site contains.  What’s interesting to me, from a technological standpoint, is that the site has changed the underlying technology from a closed source, commercial, content management system (CMS), backed my Microsoft IIS servers, to an open source CMS backed by Linux/Apache servers.

Under previous administrations (and no, not just Bush, but Clinton before him), the U.S. Fed has been notoriously gun-shy of open source projects.  Big Business and Big Government likes the comfort of buying from Big Business.  They have trouble, culturally, figuring out why people would donate their time to create a fundamental technology, and how such a “movement” could produce good, reliable software.

Whichever side of the Open/Closed source argument you may find yourself, what it comes down  to, in a lot of ways, is whether you have more faith in “the masses” or more faith in “big business.”

For the Obama Administration to make such a public site Open Source, is a strong indication of where they place their faith.  Not surprising, given how he ran his campaign.

Related, the U.S. Department of Defense Deputy CIO Dave Wennergren has signed and released “Clarifying Guidance on Open Source Software.”

Reported by both O’Reilly Radar and NetworkWorld, the “clarification” is a big deal, and should allow for open source software to make inroads into DoD procurements.

All the clarification says, in essence, is that when considering procurement, Open Source Software should be considered no different from Commercial software.  And that actually means a lot.  The U.S. Military has long held great cultural faith in Big Business to supply it’s needs.  Established, if bloated and expensive, Defense Contractors (Think Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, etc.) usually seem to edge out the “little guy” in most defence contracts.  Which is not surprising, really.  The military is a naturally cautious organization.

Overall, these two events should not be underestimated.  For two such conservative, staid, government entities to consider open source a viable option, speaks greatly to how far Open Source has come in the past two decades.

The first time I used a computer was back in the late 70′s. My dad used to take me with him to his office if he had to work a few hours on a Saturday (I think to get me out of my mom’s hair). He’d plunk me down in front of one of the terminals, get an ASCII game of 21 going (great entertainment for an 8 year old), and then wander into his office to do whatever the heck it was he had to do.

I can remember those green screen TTY terminals surprisingly well. They were hooked up to a UNIX mainframe that, at the time, was one of the most powerful computers in the city. It didn’t take me long to poke around and find other games, specifically Rogue (which later evolved into uMoria) . I’ve had Rogue or uMoria on every computer I’ve owned since.

Through the 80′s I was strictly a DOS boy. Not really by choice, but mainly because that was the operating system for home computers. UNIX was always, in my mind, for real computers, and real geeks new the ins and outs of them. I even resisted Windows until the mid 90s, because that GUI interface was for wimps.

Eventually I succumbed, migrated to windows, and have kinda been in that mode since. Linux intrigued me, but life had moved on, and I just needed my computer to work. Linux, I knew, was a great up and comer, but it was a hobbiest OS for a very, very long time. I tinkered with different Linux releases off and on, but none of them really cut the mustard. I just didn’t have the time to devote to the ins and outs of Linux.

About 3 years ago, that started to change. I caught on to an up and coming distribution of Linux called Ubuntu. It got me at just the right time. I was, for the first time, financially in a position to have several computers up and running in the house at any one time, so it wasn’t that big a deal to dedicate one of them to a “Hobby” OS.

Fast forward to now, and the picture has changed. 3 years can make all the difference. I have 3 PCs in the house, and one laptop. 2 of the PCs and the Laptop are running Ubuntu, and only 1 PC is running Windows. The Ubuntu Linux machines are all “working” computers – office apps, e-mail, coding, image editing, video and audio editing, and on and on. The Windows machine? Basically, it runs Windows so I can install video games. Really. The only reason I’m hanging on to windows is so I can make sure I can play Call of Duty 4, Rainbow Six Las Vegas, Civ 4, etc.

Why? Because things that are a pain on Windows are a breeze in Linux. Want to share files and drives and printers over your home network? If you’ve got a bunch of Windows machines, good luck with that. It’s a pain. I’ve done it, it’s doable, but don’t tell me it’s easy. Especially if the machines are running slightly different flavour of Windows. With Ubuntu Linux, it’s both simple and intuitive. My Home network is mroe networked now than it ever has been in the past. I’ve set aside a 250Gb drive as the “shared” hard drive, and all the computers at home have access to it, and nothing else. I’ve been able to give away my extra printers, because all my computers now share a common printer.

Sharing devices is uncomplicated on the Windows machine only if it’s hosting the device, otherwise it’s a pain. It never knows where to look. The Linux machines all know how to spot a shared device with the slightest of prompting, and also know how to use it.

And I’m not an uber geek. Really. I’m a half decent hacker, and get more out of my computers than most, but I really don’t have the time or patience to spend “tinkering” just to get something that should be simple, but often isn’t, to work.

I could go on, but I’ve learned from friends and co-workers that really, it just gets annoying when I do. All I can say is, if you have a spare old machine around (a pIII class or better will do), click on the picture below, download, burn, install, and…

Play.

Pretty soon, you’ll end up where I am. Windows will be the quirky hobby computer. All your work is going to get done in Linux.