Happy Birthday E-Mail

Yahoo reports that e-mail was born 30 years ago yesterday. The creator doesn’t remember what the first message said, but he knows it was in ALL CAPS. I had to laugh.

LUG

Just returned from a Linux user’s group mtg. Small group, about seven people. But very fiery. Despite all of my complaints about Linux and the weaknesses of the OSS development model (to which few zealots will admit), I have to admit that it’s very contagious. The thing is, there is FIRE in the Linux world now. The last year of BeOS has been almost nothing but depression. People begging for breadcrumbs, grateful for any scrap thrown our way. Linux is very much still in the process of self-creation. The love and the lunacy is still there. I thrive on that. Everyone thrives on that.

Samba

Set up a home Samba network for the first time. Hair-pulling experience at first. Sometimes it’s just a matter of finding one little key, then the whole things busts open…

BeTips on MySQL

Finally got betips up and running on the linux machine last night at 3:30, sans discussion board. Should have that part up later today. Built a nice back-end so volunteer editors can go in and manipulate tips / process submissions. That should keep the site living and healthy without my intervention on into the future.

Also added a bit about the site change-over to the TrackerBase page.

Before going live, I wanted to get all my MP3s and movies off the big data drives, since going back to get them after this point will mean taking the server down. Consolidated what I wanted to keep onto tink, and popped out Wensleydale (the drive that and the Be community got together and bought for Amy and I for a wedding present, stuffed with MP3s (don’t worry, I saved them all)). Put the drive in my Win machine temporarily, reformatted it with fat32, and put it back in the server. Copied all the stuff to wensleydale, losing all the precious BFS attributes on those MP3s. The attributes meticulously created with RipEnc and ArmyKnife. The attributes the power of which I’ve crowed endlessly about in public. So sad to see all those go to waste. If BONE and BIYS were stable, I’d keep those BFS partitions around and still use BeOS for home MP3 serving, but they’re not. I’m going to find a similar Linux solution.

Of course, fat32 doesn’t support all the characters that BFS does, and the copy process (which took 2.5 hours because Be’s FAT driver is slow) choked on a few files and directories with quote marks etc. in them. Had to go back with ArmyKnife afterwards and fix those. I love ArmyKnife, and I guess using it was the last thing I’ll ever do in BeOS on that machine.

Back in Linux, had to learn how to mount a Windows drive. In BeOS, you right-click on the desktop and choose Mount | DriveName. Doesn’t matter what the filesystem is. And if you want to learn what drives attached to your system are potentially mountable, you use mountvolume -lh or DriveSetup. Linux doesn’t appear to have any such command or utility. Even the GUI tools for drive mounting won’t tell you what’s potentially mountable. Instead, you have to cat through /etc/dmesg to see where your physical drives are, then use fdisk on each of those to find your partitions, then execute a mount command, and if you want that drive mounted in the future, add that stuff to /etc/fstab. What a royal f*scking pain in the ass. And after all that, the drive still isn’t writeable by my normal user, even though I did chmod 777 /mnt/win as root.
God, Linux pisses me off. Be figured out so much about usability so long ago. And the world never cared.

I think that part of what pains me about the conversion of betips is that the site is no longer special. It was the first (if not only) site on the entire web ever to be served out of a database without a database, just using the filesystem and attributes. It was a proof of concept as much as anything. It showed a new and exciting possibility for BeOS. Now it’s just another mysql site. But it’s stable. Getting over BeOS is going to take me a while. Just have to stop thinking about it. Like the death of a loved one…

BeTips to MySQL

BeOS is just too fragile as a server, tired of dealing with it. betips.net has always been a proof of concept site, using the filesystem as a database to serve a live web site. But it’s just not worth it anymore, so I’ve been porting the whole TrackerBase database to mysql on a linux box and will soon start hosting it there. That server box will share several duties:

– Hosting all of betips.net
– Hosting the submissions and search functionality of kissthisguy
– Hosting large images and other stuff that doesn’t fit on birdhouse

For all of this I’ve wanted a fatter upstream pipe, but my current provider is too expensive. Doing research, it seems that the fat upstream pipes all come at a huge premium. We’re trying to save money, so it looks like what I’ll be doing is to get a speakeasy account with faster downstream and slower upstream (bummer!), give up my seven static IPs, and start using a linksys router for port mapping and firewalling.

The new betips should go live in a day or two, but won’t look much different except for URLs, and the search engine will be a bit different.

OS Shuffle

Over the past few days:

– Decided win2k was just too slow on the laptop, so built a new 800MHz, 256 workstation.

– Backed up everything I needed from the laptop and moved it to the workstation.

– Put latest BeOS updates on the laptop and moved betips to the laptop, so I could use the betips workstation for a linux machine.

– CGI wasn’t working under Apache2 on the laptop and couldn’t figure it out. Finally copied the whole config directory from the betips workstation to the laptop.

– This fixed the CGI problem (still not sure what file(s) fixed that problem, but now the laptop wouldn’t boot except in safe mode. Fiddled with all the usual boot options, which didn’t help. Finally realized that in the process I had copied over ~/config/settings/app_server_settings. Deleting this allowed me to reboot.

– Backed up years of BeOS work to BFS and ISO CDs. My loyal betips workstation is now officially retired . It’s been a champ, but time to free up some resources (and the laptop is so much quieter to have as a 24×7 server).

– Over the past couple of days I had downloaded two 677MB iso images from Mandrake mirrors to the new Win2K machine. Now I needed to burn them. Duh! The SCSI card is in the old betips workstation and I’m going to want it in the Linux machine. So had to FTP the images to the betips workstation, which took forever because Be’s 3com drivers suck. Then burned the images with Be’s CDBurner. How ironic that the last official job of that machine is to burn install CDs for another OS. CDBurner sure does a nice job though.

– Detached all drives in the old betips and installed a 6GB IDE I had sitting around as primary slave (the only slot left in the IDE chain).

– Installed Mandrake 8 to the 6GB drive, which took forever. I have to say, this is the nicest Linux installer I’ve ever seen. Still had some problems with it, but fairly minor.

– Spent most of yesterday learning and tweaking my new Linux system. Damn, there’s so much great software out there. KDE 2 actually rocks pretty hard. Maybe Linux is destined for usability after all.

– Wanted to upgrade to KDE2.2, downloaded all the RPMs and learned how to use urpmi to do a system upgrade. Very nice.

– Noticed that the installer had failed to give me MySQL, Apache, and PHP, which I had asked for.

– This morning re-attached the Be machine’s other drives, just so I can get to it when/if I want. Booted from CD and ran bootman. Rebooted – oops, linux boot signature can’t be found. Probably because the installer wrote to the MBR rather than the boot partition. It didn’t even ask me. It was trying to be friendly and made a bad assumption.

– Figured I could boot Mandrake from floppy or CD and fix the location of the boot record. Yes, I could boot from CD, but no, I don’t see any way to fix the boot record. Searched the net, searched all options in the installer, didn’t find anything. In the process of looking for the answer, went into the text installer. It said “F12 for next screen” and I wanted to page through until I got to the part where the bootloader is installed. I assumed that F12 was basically cancelling each dialog, not the equivalent of hitting OK to it. So I’m tapping F12 and all of a sudden I see “Now formatting /dev/hdb1”. Crap crap crap! So now I’m reinstalling the whole damn thing again. Fortunately this time I found the advanced install options and made damn sure I’m getting apache, php, myql.

Linux installation is getting better, but they still have a lot to learn from BeOS. Not that they ever will… but every time I’ve messed with Linux I’ve gotten into trouble. Every time. It’s so damn frustrating. Copy and past hell, software installation hell, crashing apps… kind of surprising given all the stability claims I’ve heard. Well, the OS is stable, but many of the apps are not.

Palm Buys Be, Inc.

Still trying to figure out how I feel about today’s news that Be, Inc. has been purchased by Palm. Or, to be more specific, Palm has purchased BeOS, BeIA, and has dibs on Be engineers – they didn’t actually purchase the company per se. But Be will probably close up shop once the sale is complete.

In a way, we were all prepared for this for a very long time now. We’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it finally has. I don’t think that many of us thought that whoever bought the company would have big designs for the desktop OS, and Palm almost certainly is uninterested in doing anything on the desktop. More likely, Palm wants to beef up and extend its product line – make palm-sized devices more media-friendly, and possibly build appliance-like units for the home. No one has heard yet whether Palm has any plans for the desktop at all, but I doubt it.

This pretty much seals the deal – it’s the end of the road for BeOS as we know it. In a way, it’s been dead for two years. But now, barring a miracle or a surprise announcement from Palm, BeOS is really, really dead. I have to confess that there’s a part of me that just wishes BeOS would go away. It has left me exhausted and apathetic. Tired of waging a battle against ridiculous odds. Tired of the humming of betips.net in my office. Tired of trying to stand up and evangelize like a crazy old man with tinfoil in his hair ranting about the second coming. But another part of me still believes deeply in what Be is and what they’ve created. Believes that there is a way to best MS at their own game (without having to tread the open source quaqmire). Believes that there is no better desktop user experience, period.

I don’t think any of BeOS users are shocked, really. More like relieved to finally know where things are headed. The people who continue to use BeOS after this news are going to be the hardcore users only. Like the people who still use their Amiga boxes after all these years. I doubt I’ll become one of them. At this point, only the regular Byte gig keeps me hanging on and watching the news. If that falls away, I probably won’t be using BeOS anymore. The compromises have become too plentiful to outweigh the advantages.

More than anything, I think what’s sad about all of this is that it sends a message to the world : “Don’t bother trying to create a better desktop OS — it doesn’t matter how hard you try, how many engineers you throw at the problem, how much money you spend, or how many years you put into it. Microsoft owns that space and, worse, the public is totally complicit and fine with that fact. People will not stop using Windows. It is a losing battle.” It is unlikely now that anyone will ever again attempt what Be has attempted.

And that’s the saddest thing of all — the insidious ways in which the monopoly has wormed itself into the fabric of our economy and culture. The message that “resistance is futile” has been hammered home.

The Joy of Linux

I’m reading this book The Joy of Linux by Michael Hall and Brian Proffitt. Pretty interesting read, and quite funny in places, but the arrogance and blindness of the authors is astounding to me as well. They use words like “elegant” to describe Linux, and talk about how cohesive the Linux community is. What a joke. They never even mention BeOS once in the whole book, even in the context of “fighting the good fight” etc.

Anyway, it’s nice to read a book about computing culture by otherwise very good writers rather than the usual technical manual type of book.

Hardcover only right now though – I’d say it’s not worth the price of admission unless they do a soft cover.

Apache and BeTips

BeTips is now running Apache, rather than Robin Hood. Forget about Xitami. Have done a bunch of benchmarking, and Xitami is slow as molasses compared to Apache and RH. Maybe Xitami does well on single-threaded platforms, but on a dual-proc BeOS machine, it’s all about multithreading, and single-threaded just doesn’t cut it.

Learning a lot by learning to configure Apache. I’ve never had the opportunity to do it before. Not difficult, just brand new territory for me. Enjoying the changeover. Now have everything working but SSI, and that seems to be an acknowledged problem. We’ll lick it.

Have been using Microsoft’s Web Application Stress Tool for the benchmarking. Pretty sophisticated. Did an 8-hour run against Apache last night, requesting alternating HTML and CGI pages as fast as possible. Did nearly half a million overnight. Would have been a lot more, but running through the slow pcmcia network card in my laptop, and my CGI pages do a lot of work. Apache also comes with ab, so I can do stress testing on the local BeOS machine without having the network in the way — huge difference.

Xitami

Cool – Rob Judd just compiled the Xitami web server for BeOS, so I’m running betips on xitami rather than RobinHood now. RH is great, but there are some things it doesn’t do, like output standard Apache log format. Xitami does, so I’ll finally be able to parse my traffic logs with analog.

I’ve also wanted to see whether frequent server stoppages are a result of BONE or RH. Wanted to test with Apache, but was never able to get Apache to compile under BONE. Anyway, this test is going very well so far. Spent a couple hours configuring last night and all is good.

Already reported one bug last night, and Judd sent me a new binary by this morning with the problem fixed. Wow – a responsive developer!