I Eat Rainbows

Some updates to HAL and/or dbus were posted to feisty-backports yesterday. After updating my system, I tried to connect my iPod.

No can do. dmesg spouted some random error I didn’t look too closely at. I had school, so I turned off the machine and left.

Reboots do work wonders, including broken automounting, apparently, so everything is fine on that front. On the other hand, seeing about 50 bazillionty thousand new podcasts waiting for sync in Amarok started me thinking.

I use my iPod primarily for podcasts. It seems rather … useless, to me, at this stage in my life, if it does not have fresh podcasts on it. I have formulated a rule describing this, even though this scenario is not the best application of it. Someone else has probably thought of this earlier as well, and it is entirely possible that I have read this somewhere and then forgotten I’ve read it.

Here it is: For any potentially-internet-enabled device, a seamless and usable connection to said internet increases the utility of said device by orders of magnitude.

It can be followed in stages, as with my iPod. It does not have an inbuilt connection to the internet, but it is able to sync with a desktop application, which does. This is near enough to seamless that it increases the utility of my iPod my quite a bit.

(The next stage is obviously built-in Wifi, like in the iPhone.)

My cell phone would seem to have done this, at first glance. However, EDGE networks = waiting ten minutes for wikipedia to load != usable. (It’s nowhere near seamless, either, but this problem is undershadowed by the EDGE).

This can also be extended to future items. Why shouldn’t cars have an internet connection, to automatically fetch fuel prices and traffic info? Why shouldn’t my TV be internet enabled, so I can watch pirated Youtube videos directly on it? Why shouldn’t our Extended Brain Memory Plus Enhanced Interface Embedded Chips (patent pending by Microsoft) be internet connected, so as to query Google whenever the answer wasn’t found in your brain?

I just had an experience, which I would deem to be typical of a large subset of “the average user”.
I was reading A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection (if you haven’t read it, and will have something to do with Windows Vista in the future, even looking at a box, do so. Now.)
Guy walks up. “What’re you reading?”
I show him the title.
“Vista? Yeah, I heard about Vista. Didn’t it fail, or something?”
“What do you mean, fail? Anyway… the point is that Vista by it’s very existence deliberately cripples…”
“What do you use? Oh, I know, you use a Mac, right?”
I shake my head.
“So you use use Windows?
Head shaking repeats.
Sputter. “But what else do you use then? I mean, you have to use Windows or Mac…!”
“I use Linux.”
“Linux! That sucks! Isn’t it free? So how can it be good?”

The conversation was cut off here by circumstances out of my control (specifically, the arrival of my teacher).

This sort of people, who have either never heard of open-source or have very prejudiced ideas about it’s capability, is very common, in my informal survey.

Linux needs to reach out to these people as well, I think. Education is a large component of reaching the masses, and nothing educates better than a few well-designed clips of viral video, methinks…

So I’ve been fooling around with svn for a while, but yesterday I decided to start my own svn repository.
This repo contains my project for ITGS, which is currently in a state the exact opposite of near completion (thank you, NTFS bugs when resizing a partition). I will be working on that majorly over the holidays, and I hope to have it in a pretty, usable, state by the time I go back to school. I’ve been reading the SVN book, which is actually available from an svn repo. They eat their own cake. Mmm, cake.
Anyway, the SVN book is very useful and interesting. SVN seems extremely powerful, though not limitless. (Branching and merging seem to be two situations where they could use some abstraction.)
Any of you know Draicone? I met him in real life yesterday. Um.. the difference between us can be expressed as ‘Where I [don't] lurk, he works’.
He pointed me to an interesting newfangled thing called jQuery. It looks very useful for AJAX-y effects, and I’m probably going to be using it now.
….oooh, slidy showing with realtime wrapping!

So, yesterday, I downloaded the new svn of beryl. Compiles perfectly, but when I run it, it spits out an error.

[some random part] is at version X, while beryl is at version X+1. Sorry, no can do.

Some googling tells me that the simplest solution is to delete everything with ‘beryl’ or ‘emerald’ in the filename, and redownload and recompile.
I get… enthusiastic, and accidentally sudo rm my /usr/bin and my /usr/include.
Now, being the idiot that I am, I haven’t taken a recent backup. The latest one is an Ubuntu 6.06 one (and me running Ubuntu 6.10 now). Some nice folk on ##linux tell me that by far the easiest method is to backup important data and reinstall.
Backing up’s simple from a live cd. Backed up /home, /var, and /etc.
I’ll finish downloading the i386 install cd about 7 hrs from now (I’m downgrading from amd64 (it annoyed me), and we have odd off-peak hours for bandwidth). Till then, I’m stuck using Windows.
Now, my point is, how easy it is, and how easy it should be, to trash a linux system given the root password? It doesn’t complain at sudo rm -fdR /* (I haven’t tried it, but I assume it won’t).
I understand the philosophy behind the root password and everything (oh, if you are root or have sudo access, you’re assumed to be intelligent and careful and all that jazz), but the simple fact is, humans make mistakes. It shouldn’t be that easy to trash your system.
Something as simple as some sort of clarification mechanism on system critical files would go a long way towards alleviating this.
e.g.

bash$ sudo rm -fdR /usr/bin
You are attempting to delete system-critical files (like /usr/bin/sudo). Are you sure you want to continue? (y|n)

One example should be enough. Without an example, the user might figure what he wanted to delete is the system-protected file.
Maybe this functionality already exists. One guy on ##linux mentioned sudo’s ‘bitch mode’. This might be what I’m looking for. If it is, at the least it should be turned on by default.
As a digression, Beryl is très awesome. Very annoying to compile at times, but 0.1.3 should be available for your distribution now.