…is by far the stupidest piece of legislation that I’ve ever come across. Or maybe not, but in that case, the authorities handling the practicalities of the law are obviously incompetent.

How else would you explain this? (In case you wonder but are too lazy to follow the link, some bright young mind now wants to patent XML. The question of prior art has obviously not come up yet, or we wouldn’t have to bother. Or has it? Can they really be this stupid?)

If they do manage to patent XML, I guess I won’t have to bother trying to find a decent XML editor for Linux. Now that’s something.

Speaking of XML editors, my favorite, hands down, is XMetaL. It’s user-friendly, fast, and easy enough to customize. I’ve written tens of thousands of pages with it, and if I had a choice, I’d continue using it without a second thought.

Unfortunately, XMetaL is only available for Windows. There’s no Linux version, no *nix whatsoever. This is probably not going to change, either, because BlastRadius insists on coupling XMetaL Developer (the version you need if you want to customize the product) with Microsoft Visual Studio. This is probably the single most limiting business decision they’ve imposed on the product: none of the developers I know likes the Microsoft IDE. In fact, most avoid it as the plague. Believe it or not, there are far better IDEs available.

Also, XMetaL doesn’t work in Wine, the fake Windows environment found in Linux. I’ve tried, but I can’t make it work. Most of the lesser XML tools work, but not XMetaL.

It’s about time someone developed a decent XML editor for Linux.

A friend and I tried a couple of XML editing packages for Debian Linux the other day. They ranged from the totally unusable to unusable and buggy.

Why is this?

I can live with the “buggy” part; I run Debian unstable and get my share of bugs and early alphas so it’s OK. I can wait. (Even though I do think that early alphas should at least survive through a File->New…)

But I don’t get the “unusable” part. All of the editors we tried were useless for actual editing and the user interfaces ranged from the messy and the ugly to the utterly pointless. In many cases it was even difficult to enter text; you had to bring up a dialog to do this…

So what are these editors for? Is there a use for XML that we’ve missed? Is it too much to ask for a text editor that you can actually use for editing text?

Unfortunately, then, there’s still no decent XML editor available for Linux, apart from nxml-mode for emacs that really isn’t an XML editor more than it is a kitchen sink.

2001, the pitiful 35mm print Warner insists on distributing instead of a proper 70mm print, was depressing. Yes, the film is still good, yes, the transfer from 65mm negatives was sometimes decent, yes, moviegoers of today deserve to see this timeless classic, and yes, it’s a fact that there really aren’t that many 70mm installations left. Even though I have one in my garage.

But.

It’s not what Kubrick wanted, is it? If Warner Brothers had actually respected his life’s work, his legacy, they would have presented the audience with that 70mm print whenever and wherever possible. But they don’t respect Kubrick, they never did, and they don’t care about his old films. The guy’s dead, after all, so he isn’t complaining. Warner Brothers care about money, and there’s money to be made even from old films if you’re careful not to spend too much.

This is why cinemas are dying all over the world.

…is a silly, silly pair of words that gets even sillier when authors use it as an adjective without the hyphen (object oriented instead of object-oriented).

How can you trust these authors to show you how to write code, when they mistreat their first language like that?

Drag me, drop me, treat me like an object (as a friend used to say).

I showed another Kubrick film yesterday, Spartacus. Unsurprisingly, the print was a new-ish 35mm print with optical SR stereo. In other words, the 70mm print of this classic film was left to rot in the Swedish Film Institute’s freezer.

Now, admittedly, the 70mm print doesn’t have much colour left (and yes, the 35mm print yesterday does; colour-wise, it was very nice), but for crying out loud, Spartacus was shot in 70mm (well, 65, if you want to be picky) and the restored version has been shown to the rest of the world in that format. With new prints.

Why not Sweden?

Of course it is. It is on *my* desktop.

So there.

The title says it all.

I found a rather long article by Kim Bauters, a 20-year old computer science student, about Linux on the desktop. Her conclusion is that Linux isn’t ready yet (and, between the lines, that it’ll never be ready). I won’t bother you with details, but one paragraph near the end stood out:

Lastly, I would once again encourage those who evangelise Linux to start using self-criticism. To tell you the truth, Linux has not made any advancements when you compare it to Windows. Windows has gone forward with leaps and bounds towards becoming a secure and productive system. Linux hasn’t made such advancements. Linux has only made some small steps, and there can only be hope that one day, Linux will actually start to make some leaps. Windows is a lot better than Linux because in the past, Windows has learned from their mistakes. Linux hasn’t. And OS X, well, they play in their own league.

“Windows has learned from their mistakes”? Really? Let me tell you a story, Kim. I have Debian GNU/Lnux (which I’m using as I write) and Windows XP installed on my PC. My Debian installation is of the “unstable” flavour which basically means that everything in it is bleeding edge. The very latest software Debian has to offer, and thus not always very stable. I use it for lots of things, from work to play, from programming to writing, yet the OS itself has yet to crash on me. No kernel panic, no blue screens of death.

The Windows installation, on the other hand, is an XP Pro with all the service packs, patches and such that Microsoft has made available. It should be “stable”, in other words. Now, I tend to use XP less than Debian but when I do, it’s for about the same stuff. Work and play. Programming, writing, and, of course, gaming, which is the one area where XP is better. Or rather, the availability of games is better.

Anyway, some months ago I thought it would be a cool thing to run BOINC, the Berkeley client software that uses your computer in screensaver mode to find aliens, the cure for cancer, and a number of other tasks suited for distributed computing. Not long after, inexplicably, XP started to try to shutdown itself, and whatever software that happened to be running, when emerging from screensaver or standby mode. It turned out that my particular version of BOINC was causing this so the cure was easy enough: once an update to BOINC was available, I installed it and voilà, the problem vanished.

But BOINC never was the real problem. Windows was. What kind of OS allows an application, a screensaver at that, to access such core functions as system shutdown or killing other processes? I’ve had my share of unstable applications in Debian crash on me, simply because they are of early alpha quality, untested or simply not very well designed. But none of them ever managed to bring the OS down with them. And none of them ever tried.

Why? Because a well-designed OS separates user space from kernel space, sees to it that the running privileges of any given piece of software never interleaf with the privileges of another, independent piece of software that happens to be running on the same OS at the same time. Yet, in the Windows world, the mix-up of user and kernel spaces is a time-honored tradition, there from their very first attempts at a multi-tasking OS. They’ve learned to hide the mix-up, yes, but the basic design flaw is still there and often readily apparent.

Considering her age, Kim Bauters probably wasn’t using that many computers when the first versions of Microsoft Windows appeared (or, for that matter, the first versions of MS-DOS), but I can assure her that the kind of thinking that allowed BOINC to try to shutdown XP was there, just as it is now. In this respect, Microsoft has learned very little. Linux, on the other hand, has never had this problem (and thus no reason to “learn” from its past) since its solution is not that hard and is present in just about every *nix version ever designed.

But Kim Bauters is entitled to her opinion, even though I wonder what they teach to computer science students about OS design these days.