<Glazblog/>

Votre serviteur sera interviewé ce jour par Radio Clapas, une radio associative de Montpellier, pour une émission sur les Logiciels Libres qui devrait être diffusée demain mercredi. Vous pourrez l'écouter ici, mais je ne sais pas encore à quelle heure cela sera diffusé diffusion à 12h30 mercredi 24 mai 2006.

1. desinstall an old linux distro that you don't need any more to increase the size of your full c:\
2. reboot
3. discover that your MBR is completely fucked up and you can't reboot your machine at all
4. try the repair console of your WinXP CD and discover your Admin account is locked (why the hell is it locked ? I never touched that) so you cannot repair your machine!
5. visit my good and old friend Jean-Claude Bellamy's web site and discover he has a solution to blank the admin password
6. burn the iso onto a cd and use that cd ; unlock the admin account and clear the admin password
7. finally use your repair console and call fixmbr
8. shout "yay!" and reboot
9. discover with horror you lost your data partition with your mozilla trees and work documents
10. use a partition editor able to restore a completely hidden partition
11. reboot, and start to breathe again, letting your adrenaline level slowly decrease...

If you've read Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, you know that the hard disk industry is a perfect example of a long sequence of disruptive innovations. Today appeared on one of my favourite online stores the last element in that chain of disruptive innovations : the flash-based IDE drive...

It's slow. It's expensive. It has a very limited capacity. But it's totally silent. It does not suck the battery. It will succeed. It's not a question of "if", it's only a question of "when".

Bon ben voila. Je suis converti. Pas encore dans les faits réellement, mais mentalement je suis prêt. Ce fut un long cheminement, une montée vers la lumière et la vérité. Un reniement de mes anciens errements également. Pour tout dire, je me suis fourvoyé tellement d'années que je me demande comme j'ai pu vivre comme ça. Pourtant, nombreux sont ceux qui ont tenté de me porter la bonne parole... Je n'avais jamais cédé. Et tout d'un coup, j'ai basculé. Un peu comme un Claudel derrière un pilier de Notre-Dame. C'est fait. Je me sens différent.

Je vais m'acheter un Mac.

If you saw me once give a talk about Free Software/Open Source, you probably already know what I think of the Gimp's UI :

• it's a perfect example of the worst of free software
• a geeky user interface made for geeks by geeks who just don't care if the rest of the world find their user interface too geeky
• it's so obscure than even a geek like me is lost in that UI...
• the Gimp's UI is the strongest factor against the success of the Gimp in front of other image editing tools, free or not. Because of its UI, the Gimp is a blocking factor to bring Linux on the desktop

And it seems I am not alone with that opinion. With my Nvu hat on*, I urge the authors and maintainers of the Gimp to :

1. DRASTICALLY simplify not only the general UI but also EACH AND EVERY FEATURE ACCESS.
2. Use Firefox's example : ask UI experts for a COMPLETE UI redesign. Drop the bloat, think usability, learning curve AND USERS. Stop the icons-everywhere fever. Oh shit after all, USE XUL !!!!!
3. Move to an MDI interface or at least choice between SDI and MDI at startup !
4. Drop the fuc**** gtk+ filepicker and its lame usability ! In my worst nightmares, I see Microsoft and Apple adopt the gtk+ filepicker ; ten minutes later, the final global nuclear war begins;-)
5. Do WHATEVER is needed to reach a good Linux experience on Linux, an Aqua-like experience on Mac, and a Win-like experience on Windows !
6. What REALLY MATTERS is not the toolkit but the USER'S SATISFACTION !

Sven, Mitch and Yosh : WAKE UP GUYS !!! I am ranting because I DO LIKE THE GIMP and I want to have a much better Gimp. I am devastated to see it unable to leave the geek's segment of the market because you are unable to accept the fact you're not UI designers. I am INCREDIBLY frustrated and upset each time I am unable to find how to accompish a trivial task with the Gimp, something that would take me half of a second to find on any other tool. If the Gimp is the best example of what you can do in UI design, then read me well : NO YOU ARE NOT GOOD UI DESIGNERS.

So please, please, PLEASE, keep focusing on the kernel, and leave the UI to others if you don't want to hear what we're saying.

Note: as always, comments are not allowed on this blog. Ping me by email if you want to reach me.

* I am not a UI designer myself. Fortunately, Nvu inherits from Composer, and behind Composer were a few excellent UI designers that constantly refused or reoriented our geeky suggestions. That's why today, an estimated two million user base use Nvu and find it easy and simple to use. We understood there are compromises you cannot refuse : use a native filepicker on every platform, use the native UI style on every platform, implement one-click features, and, more important than the rest, targert people with no technical knowledge. You guys just have to do the same.

Apparently, the meaning of the Sony Vaio logo is not immediately clear for everyone... Strange. And in particular if you're a geek, you have no excuse at all if you did not understand at first glance what this logo means:

• VA form the sine curve of analogical signals.

• IO form the one and zero of digital signals...

From my own perspective, it's one of the two best logos in the world. The other one is clearly AstraZeneca's. Just perfect logos very meaningful if you live in their world.

Il y a des fois, je me dis que l'association GNU/Linux + X ne fait clairement pas le poids face à Windows. Oui, je sais, c'est un troll, j'assume parfaitement. Je m'explique : je cherche, stupidement, à détecter l'état à un instant donné de la touche CapsLock de mon clavier. Je ne VEUX PAS le faire dans une boucle évènementielle genre sur un keypress, et tester à ce moment-là. J'ai besoin d'exécuter ce code à tout moment, indépendemment de tout évènement. Cela donne donc quelque chose comme ça:

  int fd;
  long int keysState;

  /* To use as the fd in ioctl(). */
  if ((fd = open("/dev/tty", O_NOCTTY)) == ERROR) 
  {
    close(fd);
    exit;
  }

  /* Value stored in arg. */
  if (ioctl(fd, KDGKBLED, &keysState) == ERROR) 
  {
    close(fd);
    exit;
  }

  if (keysState & K_CAPSLOCK)
  {
    // caps lock key is on
  }
  else
  {
    // caps lock key is off
  }

Mais ça, qui semble être la seule manière de faire, NE MARCHE PAS parce que X bloque l'accès non-root à /dev/tty ou /dev/console. Bref, sans avoir les droits de root, impossible pour un logiciel de connaître l'état de la touche CAPS-LOCK hors d'une boucle évènementielle. Est-ce que je me trompe ou c'est vraiment hyper-foireux/lamentable à ce point-là ?!?

Ah au fait, sur Windows, il suffit d'écrire ce qui suit, et bien entendu, pas besoin de privilèges spéciaux pour l'exécuter:

  SHORT st = GetKeyState(20);
  if (st & 1)
  {
    // caps lock key is on
  }
  else
  {
    // caps lock key is off
  }

UPDATE: solution provided by kolter in the comments.

Yet another email in my inbox asking why I don't like the GPL and the philosophy behind it. Since I am a bit fed up with that discussion, let me quote www.gnu.org here. What I deeply dislike is emphasized.

" For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.

[...]

This was despite the fact that they surveyed the developers on SourceForge, a site that does not support the view that this is an ethical issue.

Ditto. The GPL is not a license ; it's a political and societal tool. The goal is not strictly software, the goal is a better society. That's certainly a noble goal, but I don't like the libertarian ideology behind it. Not the world I want to see, sorry.

Free and Open-Source Software have considerably changed what a computer user can do with his/her computer. But it has even more impacted the Software Industry itself. FS+OSS have introduced an extreme agility that was virtually unknown in big organizations ten years ago. Even if FS and OSS are a potential threat for current software vendors, they are also a tremendous opportunity for optimization and productivity increase. Firefox is the live proof that ENGINEERS (developers, developers, developers !!!-) can develop a product from A to Z. That's entirely new in our world...

• Will software alternatives eventually kill pure proprietary closed software (PPCS) ? I don't think so. In fact I would not bet a single cookie on the final and global victory of software alternatives.
• Will software alternatives make PPCS vendors suffer ? Yes, clearly. In some niches, OSS and FS will succeed.
• Can PPCS vendors react and make OSS and FS developers suffer ? Oh yes they can. But only if they reinvent themselves and fight with new weapons that are not very common in the corporate world : flat and distributed organization, extreme agility, very fast decision process, break the almost hierarchical link between engineering and marketing, no bureaucracy, and so on.

A big army can fight a commando in two different ways :

1. massive attack with wide power and forces. It will take a looooot of time to succeed if it ever succeeds. The army will spend far much on this fight than the commando. New commandos can appear and re-ignite the war at any time.
2. form itself a commando far more agile and reactive than the whole Big Army. Of course, the structure and officers of the Big Army will shout a lot, think it's stupid, say a small commando is not the solution and this sort of things. Business as usual, nobody ever accepts easily an intruder...

PPCS vendors need commandos. Using a more corporate vocabulary, they need disruptions. They cannot start commandos entirely by themselves because they're total strangers to Commando Culture. They are not trained to think and act that way.To fight OSS and FS projects - competition and choice is good for the user AND the whole industry - PPCS vendors need to hire people able to introduce disruptions, people able to act completely differently, people able to form or join teams that look almost external to the company. And people able to drop all political correctness. Of course, the companies need to be prepared for those new very different hires or they won't stay long...

Opening a parenthesis here, with a few years old true story. The french guy is me, Ryan is not the real name of the other one.

• (everyone's talking) Excuse me, Ryan... I think you know I am French. Are you French ?
• (deep silence around the meeting table) Me ? Not at all ! Why do you ask ?
• Because you act like a French : we absolutely need a decision right now, you are terrified to take one and you form a committee to study - and delay - your problem. (laughs)

We all remember Apple's Think Different. The first time I saw an ad with that title in the streets of Paris, I stopped my motorbike and spent ten minutes just looking at it. I was working for EDF's R&D division at that time, and that was precisely what EDF needed. I even wrote it in an internal strategy note.

Time for big software companies to Act Different. Agility, agility, and only agility. Commando Culture is probably one of the new big keys to success in the Software Industry.