My Bug Is Pidgin's Feature

Today while trolling around on Slashdot I came across this open-source development flareup tidbit:

Slashdot | Pidgin Controversy Triggers Fork "Pidgin, the premier multi-protocol instant messaging client, has been forked. This is the result of a heated, emotional, and very interesting debate over a controversial new feature: As of version 2.4, the ability to manually resize the text input area has been removed; instead, it automatically resizes depending on how much is typed. It turns out that this feature, along with the uncompromising unwillingness of the developers to provide an option to turn it off, annoys the bejesus of very many users.

Last week or so, I'd read about this Pidgin fork, somewhat lamely named Funpidgin, and I even visited the project's Web site to take a peek. I skimmed over the project page, didn't understand the point of the fork, chalked it up to wacky open-source developer intransigence and moved on.

As it turns out, I ran into Pidgin's new No-Input-Box-Resizing-for-You "feature" a few weeks ago while testing Ubuntu and Fedora. I was annoyed that I couldn't resize the input box as I'm wont to do in Pidgin, thought it was an obvious bug and ignored it, expecting that the issue would be fixed by the time that Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 shipped.

The Pidgin developers should listen to their users, plenty of whom have weighed in against the pointless resize-restriction. As for me, it's been a little while now since I've used Pidgin regularly, since I've taken to instant messaging through Gmail.

Gmail's IM interface isn't great--there's no per-buddy or per-group status-setting, it limits me to Jabber or AIM networks, and, just like Pidgin, it won't let me resize my input box. Unlike Pidgin, however, my chat logs get to live in the cloud, where they're accessible (and searchable) from wherever I am. Lately, I've prized that convenience over the customization options that a fat IM client affords.

Pidgin's newest "feature" tips the fat vs. thin calculus further in Gmail's favor.

Two Weeks with Fedora 9

Recently, I came across a blog post about how to install a LiveCD version of Red Hat's upcoming Fedora 9 release onto a USB stick, leaving space on the stick for data to persist between reboots.

Impressed by the persistent USB LiveCD fun and partition encrypting installer improvements, I chose to throw caution to the wind and load up Fedora 9 Beta on my main notebook, replacing the beta Hardy Heron install I'd been running--quite stably--for several weeks.

Read on for the testing details, but the bottom line for Fedora 9 is more or less the same as with previous Fedora versions: Fedora can indeed be used for anything, its primary purpose is to serve as a leading-edge development platform for Red Hat's initiatives. As Red Hat confirmed very clearly last week, providing a mainstream desktop/notebook operating system is not one of their product goals.

Exchange Interop for the Rest of Us

Apple's announcement yesterday that it plans to add support for Microsoft's Exchange groupware server on iPhone and iPod Touch devices has gotten me thinking about Exchange support (or lack thereof) on other platforms, such as Linux and, strangely enough, Apple's own OS X. It's possible now to link up pretty much any mail client on any platform with Exchange via IMAP, but in order to access all the non-mail data that makes Exchange worthwhile, you need to find another route.

My Own Experiment with Memory Remanence

When I read about the recent Princeton University paper on subverting hard drive encryption by fishing for encyption keys in system RAM, I got to wondering about the vulnerability of my own Ubuntu-powered notebook computer.

After all, support for out-of-the-box hard drive encryption is one of the reasons why I opt for Ubuntu for my primary work machine. Ubuntu inherits this capability from Debian, which introduced the security feature in its Etch release, and, surprisingly, Fedora and OpenSUSE still lack support for configuring hard drive encryption at install time (you may, however, hack your way to hard drive encryption on these or any other Linux system).

I was interested to find that the Web site at which the Princeton paper is hosted offers up an "try-it-at-home" experiment in memory remanence--which forms the foundation of the encryption exploit.

Can Nokia Become the Great Light Hope?

Wireless handset and infrastructure giant Nokia has announced plans to acquire Trolltech, a purveyor of application frameworks for desktops and mobile devices.

Armed with its new Trolltech assets, Nokia might find itself in the perfect position to deliver us the sort of next-generation computing devices we need to bid adieu to today's bloated client paradigm.

How Do You Install Linux Applications?

If you are a command line guru, you call upon your zypper, yum, conary, or apt-get from the terminal, and you awk sed grep your way to what you're after.

For me, unless I know exactly what package I want--and I often don't...

You Say You Want a Revolution?

Eyeing the trends around user-friendly Linux desktops, sub-$500 notebooks, universal broadband, and Web 2.0 office applications, my colleague Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols opines that we're on the brink of a low-end Linux revolution.

For my part, I'm not so sure.

Without question, Linux has matured into a effective, manageable, and low-cost solution for companies' and individuals' computing needs--I've been getting my work and play accomplished quite nicely since just after Windows XP went gold, in 2001.

However, I'm severely underwhelmed by most of the low-cost notebook machines that Steven cites in his column. The Asus eeePC, for instance, sports a paltry 800x480 pixel display at a time when dread horizontal-scrolling is becoming the norm on even 1024x768 displays.

What's more, universal broadband isn't seeming so universal to me, and I live and work in the ultra-connected city of San Francisco. As long as our government opts to parcel out spectrum for wireless data exclusively to cell phone carriers, I don't see this situation improving significantly enough to allow us to relocate our computing to the clouds.

Finally, while I'm an enthusiastic user of Web 2.0 applications such as those that Google offers, until Google and others nail the problem of offline access, most of us will have to stick to fat clients with plenty of storage.

Don't get me wrong, I want to see a revolution in mobile computing and connectivity as much as anyone else, and I believe that Linux, as an open and vibrant software platform, can play a significant role in such as transformation.

However, software is only one part of the equation, and we simply will not see the sort of thin, light, and well-connected hardware required to deliver us into this flexible computing future as long as we lack mobile Internet connectivity service providers that are satisfied to shelve their walled garden aspirations, get out of the way, and give us simple IP dial tone we need bring this future online.