I was looking for a decent PDF editor for Linux (Xournal is great, but doesn't seem to allow inserting of images) when I came across this thread. Ignoring the fact that this person was more-or-less trolling, he's also wildly incorrect.

From the thread, where a poster asks about a native linux app:

> Any linux-native alternatives?

Define "Linux native". Are the WINE libraries somehow less "native"
than the gtk+ libraries or Qt libraries or...?

He also attempts to make an emotional appeal to defend his position:

I'm afraid that if your criteria is "something that wasn't
specifically designed to run on Windows", you'll have to
give up [...] Firefox

Since potentially labeling Firefox as "non-native" would be too much for any Linux user to swallow, he feels he's proved his point. So much for rationality.

The problem with reasoning such as this is that it attempts to remove the meaning of words. You can rationalize almost anything until any word can mean anything else. We are all children of the stars, we are the moon and the sun. Yay. Fucking hippy-talk. Whether or not it's true on some metaphysical level is unimportant. What is important is that words have a particular, agreed-upon meaning that allows us to communicate without digressing into the wonders of existence every time we want to ask for a glass of water or locate a piece of software.

This boils down to the simple fact that "native" has an actual definition which we can look up, if we aren't lazy trolls:

Native: being the place or environment in which a person was
born or a thing came into being.

Oops.

Now WINE itself is certainly "native", but what about the applications that people run under it? Those are definitively not native, unless they were specifically written against the WINE libraries (some Google products come to mind).

In Oregon, we have non-native squirrels. Just because they thrive here does not make them native. Equivalently, just because you can run a Windows application under Linux does not make it "native".

My advice: buy a dictionary before you troll.

As I'm now working for Nginx Software, Inc. I'm opening a new blog that will focus on Nginx and related topics.

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.