SL 6.1 (and I assume RHEL and CentOS 6.1 as well) has introduced an issue for building and running FreeSWITCH. Apparently a lot of stuff now relies on dynamically linking to libnss3. libnss3, in turn, depends on libnspr4.so, which depends on libplds4.so. Seemingly, this should not be an issue (stuff depends on chained shared objects all over the place), but somehow it is.

What happens is first you can't compile FreeSWITCH. You get complaints about unresolved symbols in /usr/lib64/libnss3.so. The solution is to run the following commands:

yum install nspr-devel
env LIBS="-lnss3 -lnspr4 -lplds4" ./configure
make && make install

This will get you a compiled version of FreeSWITCH. However, when you actually run it, you'll find that several modules won't load at runtime (including the ODBC driver, should you happen to be using it). The solution for this is similar. Assuming you are using an init script to launch FreeSWITCH, you can add the following line to the top of /etc/init.d/freeswitch:

export LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib64/libnss3.so /usr/lib64/libnspr4.so /usr/lib64/libplds4.so"

Voila. Everything works. Hopefully the FreeSWITCH devs get on RHEL6 support soon, but meanwhile this should get you by.

I've been a long-time opponent of Facebook, and social networking sites in general (my opposition started way back when Orkut was the cool thing). My reasons are simple: I value privacy and I feel these sites make too much information available to both civil authorities as well as corporations. My canned summary of this position was to ask: "Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?", quoting our infamous McCarthy, who would have absolutely adored Facebook, with its easy-to-navigate graphs of relationships.

I still feel Facebook should have never existed and is simply too dangerous.

So why did I join (and friend a lot of people)? The reasons are myriad, but at the end of the day it comes down to this: the genie is out of the bottle and can't be put back in. My wife is on Facebook, my friends are on Facebook. Facebook already knows who I am, and who my friends are. Despite the fact that I chose not to engage, I have to finally admit I'm already part of the system. At this point, I can either pretend this isn't the case, or I can choose to engage on my own terms, as best I can.

We are all aware of the abuses of Facebook and its complete and utter disregard for its user's privacy. But I've also seen Facebook used to empower people in ways previously unheard of. The turning point for me came a couple of days ago when I read this article, about a "flash mob" of 40,000 people who came together, mostly via Facebook, to protest against a wealthy neighborhood who wanted to keep them out. This is something previously unheard of, and really, previously impossible. The reality is that Facebook and friends are, like most powerful technologies, a double-edged sword; we can either allow it to be wielded against us, or we can wield it ourselves.

In any case, I've decided that Facebook (and social networks in general), are little more than the culmination of the Internet as a whole. Really, if we wanted to stop Facebook, we'd have needed to stop the Internet (and for many of the same reasons). At the end of the day, for better or worse, the world is now networked. Anonymity is over and has been for some time. While I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, I have a gut feeling that the only hope we have for privacy is to create such a glut of data that it can never be fully digested, that to parade our social networks is possibly the only protection we have left. After all, if they know my wife, my friends, my family, what good is my own anonymity?

Despite misgivings about Unity, I upgraded to 11.04 on Monday night.

Turns out my misgivings were entirely misplaced, since Unity won't even run (just hangs). Shrugging that off, I proceeded to switch to the "classic" desktop, spent an hour fixing all the settings that are required for Compiz to work properly without Unity (moving and resizing windows, etc). I finally got it into a pretty happy state and was set to move on.

Issue #1: suspend/resume broken. Oops. This worked fine under 10.04 and 10.10. Suspend works, resume doesn't. I figured I could figure out a quirk or wait for an update to fix this, except...

Issue #2: an update on Tuesday (not sure if it was kernel, compiz or xorg Intel drivers) seems to have permanently broken my desktop. Now I can only log in using "classic desktop (no effects)" or "safe mode". Fiddled with it for another hour, before giving up.

At the end of the day, I ended up reinstalling 10.04 and then upgrading to 10.10, where things are more-or-less sane again. 11.04 is an unmitigated disaster as far as I'm concerned. I'll stick with 10.10 until 11.10 or 12.04 is released, but if the next release doesn't improve their QA considerably, I'm thinking I'll be moving to Debian Mint.

SQL injection is one of the easiest security exploits to create and also one of the easiest to avoid. Today I got a notice like this:

Posted: 14 Apr 2011 06:54 PM PDT

Project: Joomla!
     * SubProject: All
     * Severity: Medium
     * Versions: 1.6.1 and 1.6.0
     * Exploit type: SQL Injection
     * Reported Date: 2011-March-12
     * Fixed Date: 2011-April-14
     * Description

Unescaped values in query leads to SQL injection vulnerability.

Okay, seriously. The year is 2011. Joomla is a major open source project. How the hell does something like this leak into a shipped version? If I worked on the Joomla project I'd be downright embarrassed.

I fully understand that security flaws will be introduced regardless of care. What I cannot fathom is how a SQL-injection flaw can be introduced. This is the security equivalent of picking your nose in public: there is no hurdle to overcome, you simply choose not to do it.

First, let me clarify the title: I think the touchscreen is in the future, I just don't believe that the future of computers is anything at all like the iPad. There's one primary stumbling block that lies in its way and I suspect it is an insurmountable one: the keyboard.

Can you type on an iPad? Sure. However typing on an iPad (I use the iPad as a specific example of this class of devices, but this applies to all tablets) is nowhere near as efficient as a traditional keyboard (never mind Dvorak et al).

When I consider the problems the virtual keyboard presents, I'm reminded of other fantastic technologies that got 80% of the way there, but couldn't get over the hump: OCR and voice recognition. Back in the 80's and 90's, everyone was certain that the last 20% was only a matter of more CPU power, incremental improvements to algorithms, etc, and that these would replace manual text entry in short order. Now they are considered... well they are rarely considered at all, except in highly-specialized applications.

So what would it take for the touchscreen and virtual keyboard (or some other touch-input method) take to get over this hump? When I consider the virtual keyboard, I have a single litmus test: could you write code on it? Yes, you could, but it would be akin to slowly dragging your knuckles across asphalt. You'd bleed and wonder why the hell you were putting yourself through it. So I look at the virtual keyboard and think: the day you can happily write code on one is the day it can replace a physical keyboard.

You might think to yourself, "well, you're a programmer, so of course you think this is the most important test", but this isn't really what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that typing is used to input much more than short messages and Google searches, and that program source code is a good bar by which to evaluate the capability of your input device. If you can easily input code, chances are you can easily input anything.

I can see a potential shift in programming itself to allow for developing code on touchscreens. Gesture-based programming languages seems a promising avenue, although I have difficulty imagining what one might look like or how it could be applied to problems that are inherently text-oriented. Context-aware text prediction might also help, although we already have something similar in IDE's that doesn't seem encouraging (another solution that can't achieve the last 20%). In any case, if some new way of writing code can be developed, the technique may find general application for touchscreen input.

In any case, when I consider the hurdles to achieving efficient text input on touch devices, I think we will be seeing hybrid devices for the duration. It's one of those technologies that seems so close that it cannot fail to reach the finish line, unfortunately the track it is running on appears logarithmic, so the goal is much further away than it might seem.