Welcome to Mishoo's home page!

New site in town. I decided to drop this old website and start a new one. I have a few reasons described here. This old website is going to stick around for some time—I mainly like the design, but not much more.. Anyhow, I'll probably only update only the new site from now on so you might want to adjust your bookmarks. :p

I just had some “fun” reading all the crap about why was the Philips Webcam driver removed from Linux. I don't like this Greg guy. Not sure who he is, but his “reasons” for removing a driver are quite childish.

Come on, some guy worked hard for 5 years to maintain a driver that enabled thousands of people to use such an webcam in Linux, and suddenly you remove it “because it has a binary part”? Oh, I got it: Greg only removed a hook that was essential for the binary part to run. Otherwise, the driver could have remained in the kernel. Problem is, the webcam was almost useless without the proprietary part, so the author demanded that the whole driver goes away. Rightfully, in my opinion. You do need to have some pride if you're doing software. Linus does, that's for sure.

Anyway... here's what Greg had to say and what I'd answer:

“I was really not aware of the hook, and the fact that it was only good for a binary module to use. I'm sorry, I should have realized this years ago, but I didn't. Recently someone pointed this hook out to me, and the fact that it really didn't belong in there due to the kernel's policy of such hooks. So, once I became aware of it, I had no choice but to remove it.”

Uhm, thanks, I guess Linux is a lot better now. This had to be done.

And WHAT is a hook anyway? It's a function that checks to see if some handlers are registered, in which case it calls those handlers. Otherwise, it does nothing. If no handlers are present, nothing happens. There's no performance cost.

I mean, come on guys, this is good for The Daily WTF. Too bad I'm quite late.

“That is what the original author (Nemosoft) wanted to happen. It was his request, and I honored it. Go ask him why he wanted it out if you are upset about this, I merely accepted his decision as he was the current maintainer and author of the code.”

Actually, I'd say you asked for it.

“Duh! What do you think all of the kernel developers have been stating for years, in public. Binary drivers only take from Linux, they do not give back anything. See Andrew Morton's OLS 2004 keynote address for more information and background on this topic.”

Gee, how enlightening! Don't you have any more hooks to take out, maybe you can find something to prevent ATI or nVidia drivers from working? I bet Linux users can't wait for it!

On a different note, I'm somewhat surprised that Linus agreed Greg. After all, what's a binary driver? How many users really care about this, so long as their hardware is running?

Maybe Linus doesn't have a Philips webcam... But I do. Unfortunately, after reading all this crap. :-( There's some hope to see it working in the next 3 years or so, using the Linux-UVC driver. Let's hope Adobe will implement support for Webcams in their Flash Player for Linux by then—but don't hold your breath: first off, we need to have some drivers...

I know, this is old news already and the whole planet is raving. 5 long years since the last major release, the new Internet Explorer doesn't seem to have anything particularly interesting from a Web developer standpoint.

There's a Web developer toolbar, which is cool—I can see the DOM without major JS tweaks. Also there is PNG support (as I mentioned somewhere at www.dropie.com, I think this was a 2 hours job and the fact that IE didn't have proper PNG support for so many years is simply inexcusable).

I haven't tested the thing yet, but according to this thread it's quite buggy. Oh well. Disappointing. :-(

I have had the most horrible experience with Apple software trying to create a DVD. I have a Sony camcorder that writes directly on mini DVD-s, and I wanted to make a normal-size DVD from 2 mini-DVD-s.

Boy, was that hard! Boy, was that SLOW! First off, iDVD can't read DVD data (VOB files) directly. That's the most stupid thing I ever encountered! In order to have iDVD read the original movies, I had to rip and encode them in a format that QuickTime/iDVD can read. This took forever. Then, iDVD took the resulted files (I encoded the movies in "digital video" format) and recoded them back to VOB viles. What? Do I have to wait 2 hours again just to have movies back to VOB but this time in iDVD's mind?! Grr, how I hate stupid software!

Well, after a few very very frustrating hours, the disc was ready and literally thrown out from the iMac's CD tray, on the floor. Nice.

The user interface of iDVD is quite strange to me, by Apple standards. It looks quite cool and seems fast, but you happen to drag something over and the cursor turns into the spinning disc for, err, 10 minutes? Does it still work? Is it frozen?

Turns out, it never freezes, but it never tells you what it does so you just have to wait. Forever.

Unfortunately, I found no decent DVD mastering software for Linux. QDVDAuthor looks promising, but it's certainly not useable at this stage (buggy, crashing, etc.). At least it has the decency to understand VOB files directly. That's a good start.

Leaving for vacation... 8-)

So, I'm quite happy to announce that I finally put Linux on my so-far-useless iMac. I succeeded with Ubuntu 6.06 (using the alternate CD). It has been quite a hassle, for which reason I'm going to put up a full story/howto soon. Boy, I had no idea this machine is so fast! OSX was absolutely slow, sometimes taking 10 seconds to do TAB completion (I guess Mac folks don't care about this as they don't use the command line all that much).

The sad part is Java. I badly need Java 1.5. That's one of the reasons why I switched from MacOS in the first place: Java 1.5 is only available for OSX 10.4, and I have 10.3. Tired of all that crap. I can't believe Apple couldn't put together a Java package for Panther; they just want to force developers buy Tiger. Crap. Well, I won't buy Tiger, same as I won't buy another Mac or other Apple hardware (maybe except for iPod-s).

BUT, it seems that Java 1.5 isn't available on Linux for PowerPC either, which makes me wonder what the heck is going on with the "write once, run anywhere" bullshit?! :-( Go open-source! -- seems that Blackdown is our only hope...

Update: look, sun.com is producing "Web 2.0 servers" ("The Web 2.0 Server is Here", like, "We're the Zero in Web 2.0"). What a useless marketing crap. Dear Sun, you'd be better off producing Java 1.5 for PowerPC, rather than Web 2.0 servers...