Pulseaudio Sucks!

Either that, or Ubuntu hasn't implemented it well either on Karmic or Lucid. Many people complain all over the Web about problems like the ones I've experienced:

• Skips, skips, skips. Launch an apllication, skip; open a new page on the browser, skip; switch worskpaces, skip; do almost anything but stay still, skip.
• Moving the balance control changed the volume, and made the balance jump to wherever it wanted.
• The audio options in Skype were all Pulse Audio Server, which had me jump through hoops every time I wanted to set up an audio conference using my headset.
• Volume and equalizer settings got lost after logout.
• The equalizer worked or didn't at its own discresion.
• Etc.

The almost unanimous advice about how to solve to the above problems according to the Web is to get rid of Pulseaudio and make ALSA and ESound take over, so that's what I did... not without problems, because Ubuntu has been embedding Pulseaudio into the desktop the hard way:

• The volume control on the toolbar disappears, and System/Preferences/Sound stops working. To work around that I installed the GNome Alsa Mixer, and docked it to the toolbar. I haven't been able (haven't known how) to make the GNome Volume Control work again.
• No more equalizer. To fix that I ditched the Rhythmbox Music Player that Ubuntu installs, and started using Banshee instead. That not only gave me an equalizer, but also inter-song gain control, and randomization that works, all with an interface very similar to that of Rhythmbox, and with all the goodies.
• The sound is great.
• Skype keeps the correct settings for teleconferencing between sessions.

I'm running the first beta of the Lucid Lynx now, but the issues were the same with Karmic. The feeling I get after having had to work hard to get my audio the way I wanted it is that having distributions couple to one specific option when there are many is very much agains the freedom to choose that has always characterized Linux.

Contra la inamovilidad y en favor del empleo

Todo empresario, o quien por la razón que sea debe tener empleados, sabe lo que la "inamovilidad laboral" produce: un deterioro de la moral y la motivación individual y colectiva en la medida que los emprendedores y responsables hacen el trabajo de los holgazanes e irresponsables. Es un efecto nocivo sobre los emprendimientos individuales y sobre la sociedad.

Pero Cómo mantener el nivel de empleo y evitar los abusos que se producen los sistemas de mercado con Davids y Goliaths?

Esta mañana obtuve la respuesta de un programa en la radio por parte de Alberto Cademus, empresario, y presidente de la Federación Venezolana de Porcicultura.

Él está dispuesto a garantizar el mismo número de puestos de trabajo, con los mismos cargos, y las mismas remuneraciones, siempre y cuando le permitan, cuando sea conveniente, cambiar a las personas en los cargos, incluso cesando a algunos de vez en cuando.

En contraste, la única manera de salir de una persona irresponsable y rompe-grupo en la actualidad es seguirle pagando su salario para que se quede en su casa, y abrir una nueva plaza.

Como Cademus también dijo, todo es cuestión de sentarse a conversar para encontrar soluciones inteligentes.

Camino al 4,30

Hoy el BCV hizo una segunda oferta de bonos por US$50 millones. Los bonos no pagan intereses, son vendidos con un 16,25% de sobreprecio, (Bs.4,30*116,25% más comisiones da Bs.5,10/US$), y maduran a los noventa días.

Hoy el cambio paralelo cerró en Bs.5,42/US$ en la oferta (bid), un descenso de más de 12% en la semana.

En la medida en que el precio del dólar paralelo se acerque al del dolar "petrolero", el BCV, a través de CADIVI, podrá otorgar los dólares que las empresas registradas requieran sin repararar en que puedan ser utilizados luego para especular en el mercado de papeles.

Un efecto adicional es que la persistente indexación de precios en bolívares contra el precio del dólar paralelo podría llevar a que los precios en bolívares de muchos rubros importados se mantengan estables o incluso desciendan.

Es una política cambiaria adecuada, aunque tardía.

Update to Off XP and into Ubuntu

I decided to install the Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) beta, and crashed the machine due to my impatience. After a reinstall of 9.04, the upgrade to 9.10 went well. It took only a few hours (a similar attempt with Windows would have taken days).

Now the update:

Bluetooth

It works, both with my favorite mouse (what will I do with the new one I bought?), and with my cell phone.

VPN

PPTP to Windows servers works if the configuration is set up right, both in Ubuntu Jaunty and in Karmic (I should write a post about how I got it working).

Off XP and into Ubuntu

This weekend I managed to take care of the problems that have kept me from transitioning my main workstation from XP to Ubuntu. The details follow:

OS Version

I downgraded to the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty). I found no advantages in running at 64bit, and plenty of hoops to jump through to to get some stuff to run. My opinion is that 64bit Linux is not yet mature enough for a desktop.

Work

I still have projects that require Windows, and WinXP virtualized with VirtualBox runs great, indistinguishable from native (of course, the virtualized XP is pristine, and doesn't have all the crap on the original, three-year-old installation). VirtualBox complains that I assigned too much memory to XP, but Ubuntu keeps running well when the virtual machine is up, which only happens when I need to be in Windows mode. I used the "bridged" network connection mode for the virtualized XP, so I can access it remotely using RDP, netbios, or whatever.

The exercise of bringing TRANUS compilation up on the virtualized XP helped me debug some unknown dependencies on the way stuff in my old XP was configured.

Repartitioning

I found that Linux already has stable read/write access to NTFS partitions through ntfs-3g, so I decided to keep my NTFS partitions:

• On the first disk, the old Windows partition, for "just in case", and for copying stuff to the new virtualized XP (more on that later).
• On the second disk, the partition where photographs, music, videos, and downloaded installers are kept. It has only 32GiB of free space left, so I expect to fill it up by the end of the year. When it becomes legacy, it won't matter the format it is in.

I upgraded the Linux partitions (the main one on the first disk, and the auxiliary one on the second disk) to ext4.

Printing

Printing works great using Ubuntu printer sharing for Ubuntu machines, and SAMBA for (the two remaining) Windows machines.

Scanning

The XSane image scanner works great. I hadn't grokked it on the first try.

Email

Since a learning curve was inevitable, and almost all my email is routed through GMail, I decided to try the GMail Web interface. It took some time to get used to it, but it works great. I enabled offline GMail in case my Internet connection goes down. I still log into the old XP every once in a while to backup my emails locally to MS Outlook PST files.

Web

The beta version of Google Chrome for Linux is very stable. Oddly, it still doesn't support Google Gears well, so I have to launch Firefox to get my email backed up locally.

VPN

I still haven't been able to connect to a Windows PPTP server from Ubuntu, but I can do it from the virtualized XP, so I consider this issue dead, at least until Ubuntu 9.10 comes out by the end of the month. I only need the VPNs for maintenance of Windows servers, so...

Bluetooth

Still not working. I'll wait for Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I got a Genius wireless (USB) mouse similar to the Logitech bluetooth I had to deal with the mousing problem.

Remote Access

Oddly enough, remote access to my desktop using Ubuntu's Remote Desktop Viewer sucks big time, but RDP to the virtualized XP using Terminal Server Client shines. I tried xrdp, but it sucks worse than Remote Desktop Viewer. I may try with plain tightvnc later. Remoting single programs using plain XWindows works great, of course.

Office

OpenOffice is diffrent enough from MS Office than some pain ahead is for sure. My MS Excel macros don't work with OO Spreadsheet, but I took care of the most urgent need with the Hamster time tracking applet. MS Office documents, including invoices, print fine from OpenOffice, and that takes care of the rest. As I mentioned in a previous post, most of my writing is nowadays done on Web applications.

Razón, Fe, y Religión

Pienso que es buen momento para salir de este tema.

Aunque a algunos les cueste creerlo, me considero una persona sumamente espiritual (no digo religiosa por las razones que expongo luego).

Tan espiritual soy, que estudio las enseñanzas de todos los sabios y profetas, tengo sumo respeto por sus dioses (o la ausencia de los mismos), y abordo con curiosidad las conversaciones sobre costumbres religiosas.

De las religiones monoteístas he llegado a la conclusión de que Dios nos ha otorgado dos dones para aproximarnos a Él: la razón, y la fe. La razón para encontrar el camino hacia Él, y la fe para creer en que al final si hay un sentido para todo, y que vale la pena recorrerlo.

Ahora, ¿Por qué no religioso? Porque el don de la fe ha sido históricamente usurpado por personas e instituciones que han cambiado su significado al de sumisión y obediencia a ciegas. Es el tipo de fe que ha llevado a marginaciones, abusos, torturas, guerras, esclavismo, y genocidios, y al "si no crees lo que yo creo, eres mi enemigo".

Con la razón que Dios me dio, prefiero comprender que las iglesias y parecidos son instituciones imperfectas creadas por hombres imperfectos, y que ambos se equivocan, se separan del camino, y se corrompen. ¿Permitiría Dios que sacerdotes que hablan "en su nombre" abusaran de niños inocentes? (¿Permitiría Dios la censura?) La respuesta de fe es que NO. La de la razón es que los sacerdotes no son de Dios ni hablan en su nombre; son sólo personas, como uno, que decidieron dedicarse a tiempo completo a asuntos de religión.

Razón y Fe son nuestros dones, y si ocurre alguna vez un juicio final, como el Catolicismo predice, creo que seremos juzgados no por nuestra obediencia a ciegas a personas autonombradas como únicos intermediarios con lo divino, sino por el buen uso que le hayamos dado a nuestros dones.

De corazón, para mis lectores, Sin-Lam-Min.

The Exagon

Since the early days of software development we learned that there were some forces that were determinant for a project's success. We identified the triangle of scope, time, and resources (effort), and used to say to our users: "pick two".

Soon afterwards we understood that those three dimensions were not enough when we found that we could build software that met its scope, was done in time, and reasonably within the estimated effort, but was unusable because it was ridden with bugs and had an unbearable user interface. So we added a fourth dimension to the forces that drive software projects: quality. The typical depiction is a thetraedron because in it every vertex is conected to the other three, but a fully connected graph drawn as a asquare would fit the same purpose. We told our users and customers "pick three", and went on, failing to keep our commitments in about half of all software projects.

What we have found after a couple of decades is twofold. First, that it is never a matter of picking the constraints but of balancing them; agile development, for example, aims for a balance that delivers value earlier, even if it means a longer project and more effort in the end. Second, we found that the four dimensions were not enough, and that we needed to consider two additional dimensions to have a project that converges to closure: architectural design, and project design.

The issue is that it is not possible to build any moderately complex piece of software any way you want. The "best design" may be the one that dooms a project to failure, and a typical per-module process may make a project never ending. Both software design and project design must be flexible and thought out as to accomodate and balance the other forces. The what and the how must be included in the plan. A time-critical project and a quality-critical (or resource -bound) project are totally different beasts, and they must be designed and executed differently.

An example. We all know what an automobile must do functionally, and how much it should cost, more or less. But there are infinite designs to meet the basic requirements, and many strategies to build those designs. Only some of them will be sucessful.

The new criteria add up to the forces that interact and must be balanced to have a succesful software project. They are now: scope, time, resources, architecture, and process. A fully connected exagonical graph.