Related link: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_02_15.html#002569

Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, notes

As you’ll notice there on the left, the Chandler campaign has been advertising for about the last two weeks on this and a number of other blogs. The campaign budgeted about two grand for blog advertising. And my understanding is that by today they had raised close to $100,000 from contributors who linked through from those blogs on which the campaign was advertising.

In other words, they got roughly a 50-fold turnaround on their investment in the final two weeks of the campaign. And in case you’re wondering one hundred grand is a lot of money in a House race.

Big news, eh? I’d noticed these ads popping up on CalPundit, whose proprietor Kevin Drum noted on Monday

Boy, there sure a lot of congressional candidates advertising here all of a sudden, aren’t there?

I didn’t think to count at the time, but sure enough, today there are ads on his site for two candidates for the House and two candidates for the Senate.

Of course, Kevin Drum is one of the archtypically effective political webloggers (who lives in southern California, works in IT, and would have been a valuable and convenient addition to the Digital Democracy Teach-In), so it’s not surprising his weblog is getting these ads.

It’s also notable that, although the blog is called CalPundit, the ads come from Kentucky, Georgia, Alaska, and Oklahoma–four Democratic challengers (one now successful) in four Republican states.

Josh Marshall think this is a big-D Democratic fundraising method:

Democrats have always lamented how Republicans just have far better direct-mail lists than they do, and how the Republicans are just plain better at it. And they do have better lists and they are better at it. But I’ve always thought that it wouldn’t really matter all that much if the Democrats had high quality lists too. The truth is that direct-mail, for whatever reason, just works with folks who are apt to give money to Republican campaigns. And it just doesn’t with Dems, or at least not nearly as well. It’s a different demographic. For whatever social or cultural reasons, the technology or mechanism — in this case fundraising by mail — is just particularly well suited to one demographic and not to the other.

But the Internet does seem to work for Democrats. That was clear in the spectacular early success of the Dean campaign and now you’re seeing it in smaller ways in individual House races. That doesn’t mean that it won’t work equally well for Republicans; we just don’t know yet. But for the first time in a long time Democrats have a technology, a mechanism that is allowing them to raise large sums of money, not from a few well-heeled givers but from large numbers of energized Democrats giving $10, $50 or $100 a shot. It’s already starting to make a difference.

(Emphasis added.)

That would make it a small-d democratic (or egalitarian, if you prefer) fundraising method as well.

What to take away from this?

1. The Dean campaign was prescient in its internet fundraising for congressional candidates. That was a brilliant stroke for the Democratic Party, even if it turns out not to have been one for Dean. Whoever in the Dean campaign came up with this idea (I wish I’d asked this question of Joe Trippi last week) hit a home run.
2. The internet can empower people disenfranchised by gerrymandering and accidents of geography. There are congressional districts–heck, there are states–where members of one party might as well not bother showing up at the polls, so little do their votes matter. When your vote doesn’t matter, political disengagment follows. Now people in (for example) my home congressional district, Arkansas 3, who would like to replace the incumbent but who don’t have much chance of doing so, have a way of getting back into the game, nationally if not locally. Further, perhaps they now have a national lever with which they can get back in to the local game.
3. Maybe people from the right didn’t show up for the Digital Democracy Teach-In because they recognized the technologies and methods being discussed weren’t winners for them My first thought on this was an unworthy one–that people on the right just don’t care much about democracy, digital or otherwise. (Tell that to Phil Windley, whose panel on e-voting was one of the high points of the day.) Such partisan nonsense aside, though, maybe Republicans generally don’t find the internet to be the uniquely valuable tool for themselves that Josh Marshall suggests it is for Democrats.

Bonus question: Which one of the ads on CalPundit leads to a page with “Dear Fellow Bloggers” in the title?

Have I just given a new meaning to the phrase “partisan hack”?

Related link: http://www.cartercenter.org/viewdoc.asp?docID=1608&submenu=news

No, the first Presidential weblog is not Bush For America (though I wish them well in the bidding for whitehouse.com). Neither is it either of these erudite effusions (although I could make as good a case as that for Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. No, it’s this offering from that good and decent man, President Jimmy Carter:

I will send my “blogs” (Web logs) from Africa, sharing with you my experiences from Togo, Ghana, and Mali via the Carter Center Web site during the coming days.

Anyone who doubts President Carter writes these entries himself is invited to think again. Carter is, by any reasonable measure, the most accomplished writer among the forty-odd American president.

And what would he like to talk to you about? Why, a trip to Africa, just like Ethan Zuckerman and Joi Ito:

Guinea worm disease is contracted when people consume stagnant water, contaminated with microscopic water fleas carrying infective larvae. Inside a human’s abdomen, the larvae mature and grow, some as long as three feet. After a year, the worm slowly emerges through a painful blister in the skin, usually on the lower limbs.

Relieving the suffering caused by Guinea worm is as easy as educating people about the disease and providing them with simple solutions to make their drinking water safe. Health is a human right and can be a foundation for peace. The end is in sight. Working together, we can stop Guinea worm now.

As I reflect on this return pilgrimage to Africa, I feel a sense of hope for the children, women, and men I will meet along the way and look forward to the experiences that await Rosalynn and me.

Okay, so I led off with a cheap joke–still, isn’t it great to see a President of the United States talk about his weblog?

Over on Craig Pfeifer’s
site, I made the following comment a couple days ago:

It’s conceivable to me that within a few months time we might have an
entirely Windows-free home.

Craig responded with:

The whole "Microsoft free environment" I don’t completely understand.
To me it’s a big non-requirement.

In my house, technology doesn’t play politics.

Craig was right to call me on my statement. Holding up a "Windows-free
home" as a goal without any sort of reasoning behind that goal is nothing
more than a fashion statement on my part. I’m not really convinced in my own
mind that I have that as a goal either, but before addressing that issue, let
me explain the background behind my recent decision to experiment with Linux
on the home PC.

Experience is a great teacher

To start, let me back up some 20 years to the beginning of my professional
career, to talk about keyboard layouts. Bear with me. This does play into my
decision to try Linux, but not in the way you might first think.

In the early 1980s, I chanced to read two or three articles in relatively close
succession about the history and merits of the Dvorak keyboard layout. Until
then, I’d done all my typing in the QWERTY layout, and it had never occurred
to me that other layouts were possible. Curious about Dvorak, I decided the
only way to really learn about it was to try it, so I wrote a terminate-and-stay-resident
program (remember TSRs?) to reinterpret my keyboard, and proceeded to immerse
myself in the Dvorak layout.

Over the intervening years I’ve used Dvorak more often than QWERTY, though
I’ve had to switch back and forth a few times as I went from one job to another.
Using Dvorak, and having to switch back and forth a few times, has given me
perspective on the issue of keyboard layout that few others have. I’ve been
on both sides of the fence, I know what it’s like to switch, I know how it feels
to be using a minority layout in a QWERTY world, and I know firsthand what the
benefits of Dvorak really are, at least in my own experience.

Just as people debate Dvorak versus QWERTY, so do people debate Linux versus
Windows. There’s constant argument about whether Linux is "ready for the
desktop". I’ve always used Windows on my main desktop, except for a few
years when I worked with Macs, but many writers I work with, and also some coworkers
use Linux. One of the reasons I’ve just installed Linux on the PC used by my
wife and son is so that I can experience Linux on the desktop first-hand
in much the same manner as I experienced Dvorak first-hand. I want to know,
really know, what it’s like to live in Linux. I want to experience the subtle
drawbacks, such as somewhat slower Flash plug-ins, and I want to experience
the subtle advantages such as faster login times. I want to see web pages that
work, and those that don’t, and I want to experience for myself how much of
a problem that really is. There’s an awful lot that I can’t learn about Linux
on the desktop unless I live it.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m hedging just a bit, because I left my main,
work PC under Windows. No matter. I’ll still learn an awful lot from what I’m
doing. I’ve already learned a lot. I’m in a much better position today to intelligently
discuss the option of Linux on the desktop than I was even a week ago.

Curiosity doesn’t kill anybody

Another reason I installed Linux was that I was frankly just curious about
Sun’s distribution. I can offer no rational explanation for this. But curiousity
leads to learning, so I don’t see a problem here.

Money matters, so does convenience

There are some issues relating to money and convience that are leading me to
look away from Windows to Linux as a potential platform for all my PCs. On my
shelf I have upgrade copies of Windows XP Pro and Windows XP Home. These upgrades
represent over $300 of investment. Both are tied to hardware that is rapidly
nearing the end of it’s useful life. When I buy a faster PC for my office, and
I’m in the process of building one this winter, I’m not allowed to take that
Windows XP Pro license off of my old, slow PC and install it onto my new PC.
Not only do the license terms forbid my doing that, but, through product activation,
Microsoft can enforce that restriction. Likewise, the version of Microsoft Office
XP that I paid extra to have pre-installed on the Thinkpad I bought last year
is also tied to the hardware; I’m not supposed to install it on any other machine.
All this gives me pause. I’m investing a lot of money in software only to have
to throw it out when I replace the hardware. By contrast, I have a copy of SuSE
Linux 8.0 in my office, and SuSE doesn’t mind at all if I pull that copy off
of an older PC to install it on a newer PC. Not only can I move that SuSE license
around, I don’t need to call them up on the phone and kiss their behinds in
order to do it.

Another issue with Microsoft’s licensing, and especially with their product-activation
scheme, is that I can’t redistribute software amongst my various PCs as my needs
change. To some extent, this is a convenience issue, but it’s an important one.
I have two, nearly identical Dell PCs in my office. One runs Windows XP Pro;
the other runs Oracle atop SuSE Linux 8.0. I’d like to swap the machines. The
nicer of the two is currently running Linux, and I’d like that one to run Windows
XP Pro instead. Can you guess why I haven’t bothered to try the swap? You got
it. It’s that product-activation thing again. I’d likely need to call up Microsoft
and explain why I was installing my Windows XP Pro license on a different box.
Until I got it the second box fully up and running, I’d want to leave the first
box intact, so for a day or two at least I’d need to run the same license on
both boxes. I don’t want to go through the hassle of trying to explain all that
to Microsoft, and I surely don’t want to deal with them telling me "no".

All these issues go away completely if I move to Linux. In my work-life, there
is far less to tie me to Windows than in my son’s life. I write in a word-processor,
send and receive emails, read a few newsgroups, browse the web, and I run Oracle.
Windows is a distinct disadvantage when it comes to writing about Oracle. Recently
I got some pushback for using Windows-based examples in an article I wrote about
Oracle. When it comes to my bread-and-butter, Windows is becomming somewhat
of a liability.

There’s all that software

Sure there’s a lot of Windows software that won’t run under Linux, but the
reverse is also true: there’s lots of interesting software designed for
Linux (and Unix). New Oracle releases come out on Linux before they come out
on Windows. Other products that interest me include MySQL and Python. I know
both of those are available on Windows, but they are developed on *nix systems,
and I sure had an easier time of it installing MySQL on Linux than on Windows.

Related to this cornucopia of Linux/Unix software is the opportunity to learn
about it. Do you know Perl? I mean not do you know of it, but can you
write it? Many of you reading this blog entry are no doubt capable of
writing Perl. Not me. I couldn’t write a line of Perl code to save my life.
And why not? Largely it’s because somehow, in my professional career, I’ve never
been deeply immersed in Unix environments. Everywhere I look these days, I see
operating systems that are Linux/Unix-based. I sometimes think about how many
more marketable skills I’d have had I been using Linux day-in and day-out for
the past few years. If I were to go out today to look for a job as an Oracle
DBA, my lack of Unix-prowess would be a big strike against me. Running Windows
at home is nothing I can leverage in my professional career. Running Linux is
something I can leverage.

What is my goal?

So what is my ultimate goal? Is it really to get to a Windows-free home? As
I think about it, that’s not really a goal, it’s just a potential means
to an end. My goal is to have a computing environment that supports me
in doing my job for O’Reilly, that supports me in my writing career, that gives
my family the tools they need to do the things they want to do that are important
(playing a Bonus.com game is ultimately not important), that’s reasonably secure
from attack, and that’s cost-efficient. Right now, when I look at what my family
and I use computers for in light of the issues I’ve just gone over, I can’t
help but be motivated to take a hard look at moving away from Windows and towards
Linux.

I’m hearing lots of good stuff today, but there are things I want that I don’t think I’ll get. Here are a few of them:

1. More tools for local races. There is a lot which can be done at the local level.
   

   
   Voter canvassing, for instance, could be a whole new ballgame. Set an hour or two during every day of a campaign during which the candidate is available, and canvass during that period, with each canvasser able, when necessary, to connect the voter directly to the candidate. Currently, candidates have to find physical crowds of hands to shake–this creates a virtual crowd, not of supporters, but of voters. MeetUp has proven to be a success in gathering a candidate’s core supporters. It has not shown–nor should it be expected to show–an ability to gather uncommitted voters for the candidate to work.
   

   
   Right now, something very much like this is happening in (for example) Nevada, when the AFL-CIO has canvassers in the fields with Palms. Those candidates synch their information up with the campaign database every night. It’s probably not necessary to synch voter data up transaction by transaction–that’s amenable to batch processing. Live voter interactions happen in real time, and currently they are one-way.
   

2. 
   More attention to the processes surrounding voting. There’s more to consider than the insecurities of e-voting.
   

   
   The same tools which can be used during voter canvassing can be used on election day in getting out the vote. Traditionally, activity at the polling booths includes marking off voters known to be committed to a candidate; then, as the day goes on, an effort is made to bring voters not yet seen to the polls. Here we do find a use for real time transactional processing.
   

   
   Of possibly greater importance, at least in some areas, is tracking and, when possible, countering voter suppression tactics and questionable activities at the polling place. These borderline legal dirty political tricks sometimes have a decisive role–voter suppression by the Republican Party may have provided the margin for their win in the 2000 Florida presidential voting. While some activities–roll purging, deliberate confusion and intimidation about polling places–happen in advance, others happen in real time during the voting process. It’s not enough to expose these activities–they have to be countered and beaten back as they happen.
   

3. 
   Attention paid to tools for constituent services.
   

   Every successful politician that I know of does good constituent service. A few legislators, mayors and council members in larger cities, a few others have governmental resources to support constituent services. The rest are dependent on what resources they can bring of their own; this gets us back into the trick bag of money.
   

   
   What tools can we place in the hands of less well-heeled politicians, as well as in the hands of community groups and county committees of political parties, which can help them both in delivering constituent services and thus in building the credibility that established politicians have?
   

4. 
   Less concern about the completely new. More attention to augmenting existing processes. Fewer complaints about the existing order, particularly the media.
   

   
   Much as I’d like it to be different, people don’t change drastically, and human nature changes even less. I have no faith in the completely new political campaign.
   

   
   The question I’d've liked to have asked Joe Trippi is: Dean for America and UAW political education during the Reuther era: Compare and contrast. Discuss.
   

   
   There’s a reason for that question: That UAW program was one of the most effective long-term political projects in recent American history, one which reached into nearly every liberal project of the last few decades. I want to believe we’re talking about something with that level of impact–otherwise, I’m going to do something else.
   

   
   In particular, given that I’m not a Republican, and given that the Greens have clearly demonstrated they don’t have the skills to pay the bills, I’d like to know how to use these tools to build the Democratic Party. For instance, how can state and local party organizations be motivated to work with the national party in building the Demzilla data warehouse? Is it possible for this information–the lifeblood of political parties–to be shared, given the competition among individual Democrats? (There are similar questions Republicans and Greens may care to ask, and I encourage them to ask those questions.)
   

What am I missing? Am I just an old sourpuss?

Related link: http://www.jzip.org/jzip/archives/000876.html#000876

Up there is the link to the first session from today–you can go forward in time from those to the others, or just go directly to where I peddle my tawdry wares and look it all for yourself.

Copyedit me!

Recently, I installed Sun Java Desktop (SJD) on the PC used by my wife and
son. Today I want to talk about how that install went off. Some interpreted
my weblog yesterday, in which
I reported on my son’s difficulties playing games on SJD, as a bit of whinging.
That wasn’t meant to be the case. I’m just reporting on the results of what
I look at as an experiment. On their web
page for the product, Sun says:

The Java Desktop System is a more affordable, secure desktop that is designed
to thrive in a Windows-centric world.

That’s quite a claim. How better to discern how close Sun is to that goal than
to install Sun’s distribution for some people who have been living quite happily
in the Windows world? In this case, the Guinea Pigs are my wife, son, and my
son’s friends.

This experiment comes at an opportune time too, because my son and his friends
had loaded up our Windows system with so much cruft that I was at the point
of needing to either do a reinstall or a lot of cleaning. I’m rather hoping
that with Linux they won’t be able to go so crazy at the downloading.

Installation

The most difficult part about the installation had nothing whatsoever to do
with Linux. The difficult part was figuring out how to boot my PC into the BIOS
setup. Thanks to Google, I learned to hold down F1 at the beginning of the boot
process. I wish HP (my PC is an HP Pavilion) would display a reminder of that,
similar to the way that my Dell systems remind me to press DEL for the same
purpose. Once I got to the BIOS, I was easily able to boot from SJD CD #1.

Upon booting Sun’s installer, I discovered that SJD is a rebranded SuSE. Had
I known that, I might have just bought SuSE
9.0 to begin with. Presumably though, Sun has done some customizing of the
distribution.

I encountered four rough spots during the install process:

• Very shortly after the installer started, within about 10 seconds, it displayed
  a big, red dialog telling me that the install had failed. My only choice was
  to click an "OK" button by way of acknowledgment. Clicking that
  button took me to a window that let me install the software. From there, the
  install proceeded normally. I went through the install process twice, this
  fail first before installing happened consistently, and it was confusing.
  If it was something specific that failed, and that I need to worry about,
  the failure message did not even come close to making that clear.
• The installer automatically picked up on the partitioning scheme I’d used
  for a prior install of SuSE 8.1 on that same drive, and it ignored a fourth
  partition that happened to be on the drive. I had to manually adjust the partitioning
  scheme to use all the available drive space.
• The installer wanted to use 1280×1024 as my default screen resolution. I
  wanted to use 1024×768. When I selected 1024×768 as the default, the installer
  removed 1280×1024 from the list of allowed resolutions. The default resolution
  and the highest possible resolution are two distinct values that should not
  be tied together like they are in SJD’s install.
• The first time through, the installer hung at the 95% point on CD #2.

Other than these minor glitches, the install was the same as any other SuSE
install I’ve done. That fourth glitch I’m not so sure was real. There were many,
random pauses during the copying of files, and it’s possible I didn’t wait long
enough before assuming the installer was hung. I keep an open mind on that point.

One other issue, and I won’t call it a glitch, involves my printer. The installer
detected my printer, an HP 7550, and display the printer’s name. That lead me
to believe it had also configured the printer. However, that wasn’t the case.
I realize now that the installer displayed a message to that effect, but the
meaning of that message wasn’t clear to me at the time. SJD doesn’t directly
support the HP 7550. However, it does provide a driver for the HP 7150, which
is a close enough. I configured the printer manually, post-install, and was
pleased with how easily I could do that.

SJD’s User Interface

One of the things that attracted me to SJD was a screenshot on Sun’s website
of the SJD desktop showing a Launch menu. Here’s one,
and there’s also a smaller one on the main,
SJD page. The screenshots reminded me of Windows, and while some may not consider
that a good thing, it is, in fact, a good thing for Sun’s intended audience.
It’s good for my family and I too, because it eases the transition from Windows.

My reaction on opening the Launch menu is that it’s well-thought-out.
The top three entries are for email, browsing, and StarOffice, covering the
three most-likely reasons any business user would have for going to that menu.
A Preferences submenu brings you to a set of applications similar in
nature to Window’s control-panel, that let you adjust various aspects of your
system. For the first time ever in a Linux installation I am easily able to
change my monitor resolution. I was also easily able to define my printer, once
I realized that hadn’t happened during the install process. I don’t know whether
to credit Gnome, or Sun, but SJD is far easier for me to reconfigure post-install
than any other Linux system I’ve ever used. I should note here, that my experience
is limited to various SuSE distributions (7.2, 8.0), usually running KDE, and,
before those, Red Hat. It’s possible that all Linux distributions have made
strides in this area. I can only report on my experiences with what I’ve tried.

One note about monitor resolution. As I mentioned earlier, during the install
process, I chose 1024×768 as my default resolution. The installer also used
that as the maximum resolution, and, while I can change my resolution
on-the-fly, I can’t change it to 1280×1024. This linkage between two, unrelated
values offends my sense of elegance, but it’s really not much of a problem,
as my physical monitor is best run at 1024×768 to begin with.

Two other menus deserve some mention. There’s an Applications menu and
an Extras menu. The distinction between these two menus is lost on me,
since they both contain applications. Indeed, the very first item under Extras
is Java Applications, making me wonder why it’s not under the Applications
menu instead. However, after just a brief bit of exploring, my son and I have
had no trouble finding things under these menus. Under Extras, you’ll
find entries for such things as Image Editor, Image Organizer,
and Diagrams and Flowcharts. The underlying applications are gimp,
gthumb, and dia. I very much like the functional naming used for
these applications. I guarantee you, my wife and son will have a much better
time understanding Image Editor as opposed to gimp.

The Applications menu holds submenus for Accessories, Games,
Multimedia, and so forth. Most menu items are easy to understand. My
son found the Games menu rather quickly, and he very much likes the snake
game that ships with Gnome. He also found the speaker-volume control under Multimedia,
and was able to correct me when I mistakenly went under the System Tools
submenu to fire up the Volume Manager (for disks) to adjust the speaker
volume.

Configuring Applications

I like the applications that ship with SJD. Mozilla, the web browser, just
works. I didn’t need to configure that at all. Even better, my wife and son
are perfectly happy with it. Jeff, my son, especially likes Mozilla’s built-in
popup blocker.

Evolution is the email client, and it was as easy to configure as any email
client I’ve used. I fired it up, a series of dialogs asked me for my mail server
names, account name, password, etc., and I was good to go. Or rather, my wife
was good to go. She’s been using Forte
Agent, but her initial reaction to Evolution has been good, and she doesn’t
seem to mind at all adapting to it.

Sun’s choice of office suite is a no-brainer: StarOffice 7. I find one
thing to be rather weird about Star Office, and also OpenOffice, and that’s
that you need to install them once for each user. Furthermore, the choice of
installation options is confusing. I was given a choice between Workstation
Install and Local Install. I want both! I consider my computer to
be a workstation, and I want the software installed locally. The correct, and
completely counterintuitive choice here is the Workstation Install, which
is described as the install to use when running the StarOffice software from
a network location, except that I’m not running it from a network location,
I’m running it locally. Had I not already been through this a time or two in
the Windows world, I’d have made the wrong choice. In fact, under Windows, it’s
always a frustration to get OpenOffice configured so that it can be used by
multiple users, but I digress.

For awhile, I wasn’t sure what to give my wife to use for newsgroups. Then
I realized that Mozilla must handle those, and, sure enough, it does. I could
only wish for a Newsgroups menu item somewhere under the Launch
menu. Such a menu item would make it easier to launch the newsreader, and would’ve
made it easier for me to find the newsreader to begin with. I’ll probably add
that menu item too, just as soon as I learn how.

All-in-all, I’m very happy with Sun’s choice of applications. I also like the
fact that they seem to have included only one application of each type. Maybe
that’s not quite true. There does seem to be more than one text editor: gedit
and vim, but gedit is the only one accessible via the GUI. For purposes
of getting started, it’s easier not having to choose from a plethora of browsers,
newsreaders, and so forth. We have what we need now, and we can branch out later
if we want to.

Mounting and Unmounting

Yesterday my son bought himself a USB
Jump Drive to use instead of floppy-disks at school. He was pleased as punch
with his new purchase, while all the way home I was worried about whether it
would function under Linux. I’m happy to report that it worked just fine. He
plugged it into the computer, Linux recognized and mounted the drive, and put
an icon on the desktop for him to use in later dismounting the drive. Surprisingly
for an eight-year-old, Jeff didn’t have any trouble at all with the concept
of unmounting a drive before removing it.

The bad news is that there is a glitch here. Linux, or at least SJD, sometimes
gets confused and refuses to unmount my son’s USB drive, claiming that the drive
is busy, even when we’ve closed all the applications and windows. This
problem extends to floppy disks too. Several times last night we were unable
to "Eject" floppy disks. Linux would claim a disk was busy when clearly
that was not the case. For now, my son attempts to unmount his USB drive, and,
when that fails, he resorts to yanking it from the system. What else can he
do?

My son also tried the USB drive on Windows, and discovered that it’s easier
to use on Linux. From Windows, you need to shut down power to the USB port before
removing the drive. To do that, you need to click on one of these little, system-tray
icons in the lower right corner of the screen. On my system at least, the icon
you need to click is one of the hidden icons, so you first have to click the
little, "<" symbol to expand the list of icons. Then, quickly,
before the list collapses again, you must hover your cursor over each little
icon in turn, wait for the tooltip to appear, read the tip to see whether you’ve
got the correct icon, and the list will collapse on you while doing this, and
you’ll get frustrated. My son got frustrated, and he’ll tell you that his USB
drive is easier to use under Linux. Linux, or at least SJD, has it right here,
putting that big, well-labeled, hard-to-miss icon right on your desktop where
it’s easy to find when you want to unmount the drive.

Conclusion

I shouldn’t label this section "Conclusion", because the experiment
is ongoing. My son has agreed to give Linux a week. His reaction so far is mixed.
You should have seen him last night, standing there on the stairway, telling
me in his most cheerful voice that "they" should "smoosh"
Linux and Windows XP together, to make one system. To some extent, he’s anticipated
CrossOver
Office. He just doesn’t know that yet.

Reaction to the applications, email, browser, office suite, has so far been
positive. Games are the only issue. For Linux to win there, I don’t necessarily
need to get every Windows and Internet game to run. All I need, I think, is
to collect enough good games for my son to play. If he finds a few, good games
that he likes under Linux, he won’t want to give those up to go back to Windows.
At least, that’s my hope. We’ll see.

Last night, Saturday night, was the big night. Jeff (my eight-year-old son)
and I sat down to install Sun’s Java Desktop on the family PC in the dining
room. Almost four hours and a few frustrations later, we had a working, Linux
PC. Jeff was very pleased at the improvement of his login time from 2 1/2 minutes
under Windows XP to a mere 16 seconds under Linux. Wow! What does Windows do
that it takes 2 1/2 minutes to log a user in? After I showed him the snake game
that ships as part of the Gnome desktop, Jeff went to bed happy.

Unfortunately, things have taken a turn for the worse. As I began to write
this blog entry at the breakfast table, Jeff was trying to play some games on
his favorite websites, and with very mixed success. My eight-year old has gone
from happy to grumpy in the space of a half-hour. In fact, he’s downright mad,
says he hates Linux, and just stormed out of the room in frustration.

I took a look at his browser. It’s Mozilla, and identifies itself as:

Mozilla 1.4 for Sun Java Desktop System
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20031111

His problems begin when he goes to Lego.com,
and tries to sign in to his Lego
Club account. Mozilla clearly shows focus to be in the nickname field, the
cursor is blinking in that field, so Jeff looks down at the keyboard, types
in his username, and looks up to see, NOTHING. That puts him in a bad mood right
off. I sat and watched him click twice on the field before he succeeded in making
the focus really go there so that he could type in his username. It’s a small
glitch, but enough to frustrate an eight-year-old.

The Lego.com game he wants to play called The
Quest for the Golden Dragon. There are some serious performance issues
with this game under Mozilla. At first, the game appeared not to work at all.
The game window has a help button (a question mark) at the bottom, but hovering
over it does not change the cursor to a finger like it should. If I hover long
enough, and click enough times, eventually the cursor will change to a finger,
and I can click the help button. Much worse, from a playability standpoint,
there’s far too long a delay when Jeff clicks the spacebar to switch from one
character to another in the game. He clicks. Nothing happens. He clicks again.
Nothing happens. The clicks stack up, and all of sudden the game madly cycles
rapidly through several characters. Walking the characters around seems to perform
well-enough. The result is a game that is frustratingly close to playable.

Jeff also got mad when he visited Bonus.com,
only to find that none of the games that he finds simple enough to play will
run under Mozilla. I haven’t yet had a chance to look into any of those to see
what the specific problem might be.

I just asked Jeff whether he wanted Windows back. Here’s what he said:

I’m not sure yet. There are some things nice about Linux, and there are
some things not nice about Linux, and that makes me not know what to do.

So that’s where things stand in my grand, Linux experiment. Things are looking
frustratingly dim. StarOffice and Evolution will probably satisfy my wife’s
needs for email and word-processing, we like the fast login time, and I like
the faster shutdown time, but if Jeff can’t get his games to work, then it’s
back to Windows we go.

If you have any suggestions for improving the performance of that one Lego game, I’m all ears, or rather I’m all eyes.