Moody's Blues

Under the rubric of "Linux Sux Redux," ABCNEWS.com's Fred Moody has published a rather unflattering article about Linux. I took the opportunity to drop a note to ABCNEWS.com, and my ego will not allow me to simply let that note drop off into the bit bucket, hence I publish a copy of it here:

Fred Moody's post makes for pretty interesting reading, as it demonstrates the adage of being able to prove anything, if you can fabricate the case for the opposition. While I have found Linux to be robust operating system, I have never heard anyone make the kind of claims for it that Mr. Moody publishes, i.e, "an invulnerable perpetual motion machine, incapable of crashing or being infested..." Furthermore, to get the kind of numerical support he claims, Moody has to add the RedHat bugs to the Unix bugs, effectively counting each problem twice. In some jurisdictions, that's not really considered fair pool. Yet even if Mr. Moody's numbers were accurate, he misses a very important point with regard to vulnerabilities, and that has to do with the speed with which Linux vulnerabilities are quashed. Further, he is comparing a system with open source code with one whose source code secrets are known only to Microsoft programmers and skilled non-Microsoft hackers who, by all accounts, are not terribly interested in fixing Microsoft problems, but in exploiting them. What perhaps is most distressing is Mr. Moody's work-up to his finale: After listing a number of factors that affect the seriousness of the situation with regard to vulnerabilities, he states, "[a]ll that aside, one conclusion is inescapable." Wow. Almost as if the man understands his arguments are flawed, yet chooses to publish them anyway. In the final analysis, neither Mr. Moody's fatuous piece - nor this letter - will much affect the fate of Linux. I believe it to be valuable and a viable alternative to Microsoft's offerings, based on my experience as both a programmer and user in both Windows and Linux environments. Please convey my regards to Mr. Moody, and let him know I look forward to his future columns.

Cheers...

Winding down...

I unearthed a copy of the UNIX System Administration Handbook (a.k.a. `The Red Book') that I bought for Lee a while back. She thought she'd be interested in learning to do system administration, and it was her birthday, but to cut to the chase, it became one of those books that finds itself semipermanently in a box, as it's a pretty hard read.

I have to admit, when I bought it, the content was beyond my understanding, but historically, my reaction to such challenges has been to sit down and (try to) unravel the complexity. No so in Lee's case. Anyway, she's now about halfway through to getting her MCSE ticket and today was her first day on the job as a contractor helping British Petroleum undertake its mass desktop migration to Windows 2000. More power to her, though it means Galina and I will see less of her as she tries to balance both a job and school. But that's life, I suppose.

At any rate, I still find the Red Book intimidating, but in picking it up a couple of days ago, I notice with some small satisfaction that the level of intimidation is reduced. (Hell, I remember back when I started playing with Linux, my favorite method of "undoing" various reconfigurations, etc. was to reinstall the distro. Needless to say, I really didn't do much of interest in those days.)

Over this past weekend, I modified the source to the VenomBoard, which uses PHP and MySQL to implement threaded discussions, and it seems to work well, even on an old, slow 486 serving Apache. I put together a quick-and-dirty memo for the staff to encourage them to play with the setup, and a few of them have done that. There are a number of enhancements I'd like to implement, but time is at a premium, and, well, this ain't really my job, if you know what I mean! However, it'd be nice to have something working by the middle of the month.

First day back at work was fine. Met with some defense security folks in the morning (everyone is very export control conscious these days; can you say "Los Alamos"?) and then with Andra in the afternoon to plan out what we can say to MOD with regard to their requirements for future mission support.

On the home front, I am pleased to see things such as carpeting and wall start to emerge in my office/room. Of course, a lot of that has to do with the shelf that I put in Lee's room, which has allowed me to clear so much of this stuff, but still...

Cleaning out the file cabinet was a big help! And let's not forget the serendipitous appearance of a screwdriver next to the stereo; removing the side wall of the unit revealed that the CD player lens was coated with a significant layer of dust. Was this dust preventing the unit from playing CDs? You betcha! So now the whole system is on top of the bookcase, and I'm currently listening to Roy Orbison belt out It's Over.

Which kinda describes the status of this day. Time to turn in.

Cheers...