The Ringtail

I was going to reinstall ubuntu this morning. I’ve been playing about with openbox, kubuntu, ubuntu studio and others, and my system felt like it was getting a bit clogged up. Conky was showing odd behaviour on the CPU, RAM usage was high, and it generally looked like there were far too many processes running. Time to reinstall, thought I.

But no. Half an hour spent judiciously pruning software in Synaptic, and some minor config file tweaking later, and I’m back up with a lithe, almost pristine system. And with no time-consuming reinstalling and reconfiguring, not to mention the lack of stress I always get when I hit the continue button after repartitioning. Even if I know I’m all backed up and have done all I need to, I always suffer the heebie-jeebies after OK’ing that “You do know that all of your data is about to be destroyed? All of it?” dialog.

Long and short - I’m keeping on top of my game and actually quite enjoying not stressing about the system I’m using. I’ve also started to look at Linux home recording stuff ready to write and play some new songs. More on that anon.

We bought a dolls house on eBay for my daughter last week. Bit of a bargain, only £10 net, but probably around £60 gross when you take in the petrol and lunch on the seafront at Worthing. Cracking day out though - wonderful ham, egg and chips in the cafe and a bracing walk on the pier certainly blew the start-of-the-year cobwebs out.

Now I’m starting to get a little jealous of her new project and I’m starting to think what I can do as a new craft-based hobby. I do a lot of programming work, which I find very creative, and I still take a fair few photos, but I don’t do a lot with my hands. I’d like a good solid craft hobby that I can get started on, something involving some skill that will take a while to get good at, but I don’t fancy knitting or needlework or anything like that. Any ideas?

I had a problem last week. I had refactored TasksApp to be wholly object-oriented, and had just finished the second round of refactoring code - tidying up classes, moving code that could be reused into more sensible places, and generally tidying up ready to launch my project on the world.

I checked out a new working version to use with my live database and was appalled at how slow the app had become. Loading the home page with around 100 tasks was taking a couple of seconds on my local machine; much slower than it had been before I refactored. I did some quick testing and saw that the delay was increasing with the number of projects and actions displayed.

First port of call, make sure the database indexes were set up right. All looked ok, apart from a couple of indexes that were now useful with the query chanegs I had made. Fixed these, but no dice.

Secondly, set up XDebug to pump out some profiling information, and use KCacheGrind to have a look. Not much I didn’t know, but confirmation that the time was all being taken in instantiating and displaying project and action objects. A brief look didn’t show anything up so I decided to leave it and come back to debug the paths through the app in Komodo when I had a bit more time. Very annoyed that my lovely, modular, readable, extendable code was behaving badly like this.

This morning I noticed that a page on our intranet was really taking along time to load, and saw a message in the status bar about bit.ly. Hmm. A quick trip to the Firefox add-ons window, and one uninstalled plugin later - all is fine. The page snaps up in super-quick time, and all is well. Lesson learned - test web apps in Firefox with all plugins turned off, and have confidence that the code I produce is good-quality code.

Hello, my name is Nigel Green. I am a project manager and part-time PHP guru, currently managing a project for Macmillan Cancer, and working on an open-source task management application in my spare time. Welcome to my blog.

I have been wallowing in self-pity here for a while, wringing my virtual hands and boring visitors with tales of my computer-based indecision. All of which has distracted me from the business of actually Getting Things Done. We now move on…

I’ve been thinking about the whole FLOSS thing after my last few posts. I’d like to try and be a bit more rigorous in pinning down what is perturbing me. I think the issue stems from two sets of arguments.

Firstly:

1. I am using Ubuntu because that is what I have used for a while and it gave me a good route in to GNU/Linux and FLOSS
2. I want to ‘do the right thing’ and support free software.
3. I am concerned about where Canonical is taking Ubuntu (see this article and the follow-up post and comments for a better discussion than I could hope to give here).

Conclusion: Ditch Ubuntu, install a free distro and build up from there.

Corollary: I will, realistically, have to use Windows at work if I do this.

Secondly:

1. I’m lucky that my work allow me to use my own laptop at work, and that I can choose to use GNU/Linux on that laptop.
2. Ubuntu does everything I need to work effectively at work, except use Outlook for email.
3. The totally free distros that I’ve tried don’t, at least not without a fair bit of time spent configuring them (leaving aside issues of having to work with other folks proprietary formats and programs).
4. I can’t do the configuring at home as I need to be in the work environment to be able to check that the configuration actually works.
5. Time spent configuring is time spent not working.

Conclusion: I can’t work effectively enough with a totally free system, I should stick with Ubuntu.

Corollary: I can carry on using Linux at work if I do this.

Clearly I should keep using Ubuntu and be able to use Linux at work and home. I’m convinced this is the best conclusion, and it’s one I have come to before, but I still feel a nagging doubt that I want to go with conclusion 1. This is where the title of the post kicks in, and where my solution has made itself apparent.

I will offset my ‘proprietary footprint’ in the same way that people offset their carbon footprint. For every proprietary app I have to use, for every closed-format file I have to save, I will donate some code, write some documentation, or evangelise to one more person about FLOSS. It’s time to stop thinking of just me and my setup and to think about being part of the wider community. There are clearly lines to be drawn, and I will always choose the free solution over the proprietary one where I have a real choice. But where that choice is taken away, by IT rules, by having to collaborate where others use non-free tools and files, I will use the non-free, but try and give back to the free community as much as I take away.

This is more positive than being wholly-free myself but not giving anything back to the community, which is where I think I would have ended up if I hadn’t spent so long pondering this. Ideally I’d do both, but I don’t live in an ideal world - this idea feels like a step in the right direction.