Comparing Linux and Windows XP

For the first time in years I’ve been using Micorsoft Windows regularly. The Linux client for Skype is unusable, and I need to use Skype just now. At the same time, some hardware became available, so I’m running Windows XP on what has become my primary desktop. My Ubuntu Linux installation remains is use for LaTeX and related work. It isn’t the fault of Linux that Skype can’t or won’t release a functional client, but if Linux won’t let me do what I want, I have to run something that will. Some observations:

• The difference between Linux and Windows is less dramatic than it was, at least on the home pc desktop. Laptops, netbooks, smartphones, who knows? Not me. Maybe Windows improved because they faced competition from Apple (and to a lesser extent from Linux). Maybe Linux development has seen a decline in activity and interest, at least on the home desktop. Maybe the home desktop is a dead-end platform, or isn’t going anywhere for a while, as all the smart kids play with their netbooks and phone-like gizmos. Anyway, Windows XP has been perfectly stable and usable so far.
• My Linux install is robust; my Windows install is fragile. If anything serious goes wrong, that’s pretty much the end of it, unless some kind of virtualization or emulation is possible.
• Windows online documentation is surprisingly good.
• Linux is still more secure and more free (as in speech). Potentially it’s entirely free, if you install it that way.
• In Linux if my hard disk starts spinning or there’s a burst of network activity, I can find out why and stop it. With Windows, who knows what it’s doing?
• In Windows, I can’t easily try out snippets of LaTeX if I see one that looks interesting. I could in theory install and use MikTex, but no way I’m going there.
• Windows clipboard behavior is annoying. I’m tired of typing ctrl-c ctrl-v.
• I don’t want any essential tools to be proprietary software. Inevitably some creeps in. There’s gmail, and after all Skype is proprietary (very). But I want as much as possible to keep everything open, and to not get locked in.
• It’s great that the Vim text editor works across platforms. I would not want to learn Word to get work done. Of course, people who use Word would not want to learn VI.
• Linux, even a heavy distribution like Ubuntu, works better on old hardware.
• Remarkably, the Linux printer driver for my HP Deskjet has more options than HP’s driver.
• Linux is free (as in beer). Some people add “if your time has no value,” but I’ve already spent the time.

So. I prefer Linux and run it when I can, but Windows is okay.

UPDATE: Dropbox is handy for keeping files accessible to both machines.

Webmail privacy

Basically, the law doesn’t protect mail left on Gmail’s or Hotmail’s servers as carefully as it protects email moved from a mail server to a mail client.

“A coalition of the net’s biggest online service providers, including Google and Microsoft, are joining with the top internet rights groups to demand Congress modernize the nation’s privacy laws.
…
“For instance, when the law was crafted, e-mail was almost always downloaded from a central server to a user’s computer. Any messages left after 180 days were considered abandoned, so the law allows police to obtain any e-mail older than six months simply by issuing a subpoena — meaning no judge is involved. If those e-mails had been downloaded to a user’s computer and removed from the server, the police would need a search warrant, based on probable cause, to get at them.
…
“With the announcement, Google and Microsoft are tacitly acknowledging that their services, combined with the deficiencies in the law, put their users at risk. However, there’s no mention of these problems in their respective privacy policies. There’s no option to delete all documents and e-mails older than 180 days. And there’s no reminders to users about the holes in the law.” –
Google, Microsoft Push Feds to Fix Privacy Laws

Gmail’s searchable archive is convenient, but I’ve wondered lately if email should be ephemeral by its nature. Don’t keep it forever – deal with it and delete it. Write a memorandum if necessary. Not that I’m prepared to start doing that, but it’s something to think about. If I am going to keep every email forever, it would be better protected (in some ways) if I download it to my own hard drive.

Recent service interruptions

The management regrets any inconvenience

I host this weblog myself on a collection of junk from the thrift shop. Mostly that works quietly and well enough, but yesterday and today I’ve had trouble with odd noises. First from a case fan, then from the power supply. I’ll see what I can cobble together, but I know about all I want to about ten-year-old consumer pc hardware. Having an accessible server always on is handy but not essential. If keeping it running becomes more trouble than fun, I’m just going to move to free hosting, maybe at WordPress.com.

Advice on buying a laptop

What laptop should I buy? Short answer: A Mac. Otherwise, it depends. The linked post is a good survey of what it depends on. The author is not a raving Apple partisan. Linux is also a possibility. Windows XP remains an option, but it has become clear that Microsoft shot itself in the foot with Vista.

Comments

At least there has been no spam

It seems comments have not been working for some time. Someone mentioned this to me a few months ago and I thought I had fixed it. I never got a huge number of comments, and I haven’t been writing as much lately. I figured nobody had any more to say than I did.

Anyway, I have turned off Spam Karma. I’ll see how it goes, and maybe make some configuration changes in the future. I have been fooling around with OpenBSD and Mediawiki on my internal network. Maybe I can do something with that. Comments on older posts are closed, and I have to approve all comments manually, but you should be able to leave one if you have something to say.

Xargs

People learn Unix one epiphany at a time. I had never really understood the command-line utility xargs until Michael Stutz made it clear in UNIX tips: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits: “In its simplest invocation, xargs is like a filter that takes as input a list (with each member on a single line). The tool puts those members on a single space-delimited line.”

The man page says that too, right up at the top. My problem, I think, was reading tutorials describing how to use xargs with the find command, which obscured what xargs was doing. Unix commands have lots of options and can be combined into powerful utilities, but in isolation they do one simple thing. If a command seems very complicated, find that one thing.

Mister Stutz then goes on the recommend using grep with the -c[ount] option instead of piping the output to wc. His own reasoning, and his warning about what can go wrong, seems counter to his conclusion. No doubt there is a time to use -c, but I would usually pipe to wc and hang the extra milliseconds. Of course I routinely cat things and then pipe to grep, which infuriates some people, so you can go wrong either way I guess. And to be fair he is also quite right that it is better to change the path than to move the archive. That is a minor epiphany itself, and also cryptically zen-like. I look forward to working that one into a conversation.

I remember listening to my father and his friends talk for 90 minutes about the intricacies and hidden pitfalls in operating the Spicer transmission. I’m going to stop now before I drift further into incoherent shell-speak.

Religion and politics, and PC vs Mac

Cord gadget

This power-cord box looks like it might be handy, though maybe not fifty-five dollars handy.

Apple reviews

George Wiman has a couple of solid, considered reviews of Apple computer hardware and software, written from the view of an experienced Windows guy. These would be good reading for an IT guy integrating Macs into a Windows enviornment, or a PC guy thinking about buying a Mac.

Change and decay

I need to read more about this and follow the links, but initially it looks creepy and disturbing:

“We try to maximize the church’s resources to fulfill our mission, and one way we do that is by legally minimizing our income tax burden.” … Any statement interpreted as either endorsing or opposing a candidate is against IRS guidelines, regardless of whether a name is mentioned.” … “It does not matter if the activity is in the pulpit, fellowship hall, the vestibule or newsletter.” … “It also does not matter whether the person doing or permitting the endorsement on behalf of the church is the pastor or a member.”

Maybe it bothered me because I had just read there are 32 CCTV cameras within 200 yards of George Orwell’s London flat.

Using Vim

I use Vim for my text editor and I like it, but it is not without challenges.

The first thing to know about vim is how to get out of it. The bad news is there is actually a webpage, How to quit vi. The worse news is those instructions will not always work. I started to write a better how-to-quit page, but it turned out to be harder than I thought to cover every possible case. Maybe later. For now, hit escape and then :q! to quit without saving. Here is a good Vim Commands Cheat Sheet.

If I get too deep into it I start writing mini-programs in my head. I wrote ‘amature’ for ‘amateur.’ How best to change one to the other? ex3hp? Or is there a better way? Other than just retyping it, I mean.

A means to an end

To get the most out of Vim it helps to be always looking for shortcuts. If I find myself doing anything a second time, automate it. For example suppose I have a list of people as Firstname Lastname, and I want to switch to Lastname, Firstname. If it were only to be done once, it would not much matter; A, ^[0dw$p – append to the end of the line a comma and a space, escape, go to the beginning of the line and delete one word, go to the end of line and put the word I deleted; or whatever other way occurs to me. Highlight, cut, and paste; I could even use the mouse, but I do not want to be that guy.

If I were going to do this same edit several times, I would turn on macro recording before I started, and assign a macro to the letter “a”. Then on each line type @a to make the edit. Better, end the edit with a command to go to the next line. Then invoke the macro with @a on the first line, and re-run it with @@ for each line in the file. In effect, hold down the @ key and Vim zips through the file. Still, I do have to hold down the @ key. Better (or maybe overdone) would be to script it.

How to do that? First, search Google for “vim run macro on each line”. That turns up a reference to g//normal @q which I adapt as :g/^/normal @a

This works, except it adds a comma to the end of the file, but that is good enough for now.

Review of Windows Vista

Not from me; I don’t have any hardware that will run it. But Decrepit Old Fool does, and has written First impressions with Vista. It reinforces my unoriginal view that Microsoft did their best work with Windows 2000.

Spam Karma

I’ve been getting a massive amount of comment spam lately, so I installed Spam Karma. There’s a link at the bottom of the page. It seems to work quite well, but if you can’t leave a comment, be sure and let me know.