So, the cause of death was a typo when trying to set up the dropboxd daemon to start automatically on boot. I’m not running nautilus so couldn’t use one of the prepackaged releases, and it’s completely my fault that I made a mess of installing the vanilla x86 build.

After making the fatal change and rebooting, the system would only boot up to a blank black screen with a default X mouse cursor. This is because the system was trying to run my broken command, failing, and therefore never getting to the main desktop.

In the world of normal linux, there’s all sorts of ways of dealing with this, but despite plenty of googling I couldn’t find a way to use run-level 2 or 3 on an Aspire One, and the Ctrl+Alt+F1-F6 key combos for switching away from X to a terminal don’t work either. There seems to be no way of preventing the system following the same doomed process over and again if you break X.

Frustrated, I thought about using the restore disk, but that’s a nuclear option – it re-paves the whole machine, so bye-bye data. That seemed a bit drastic when all I needed to do was edit a single text file to fix the system.

Ironically, this was happening as a result of me trying to install a file sync system as a simple backup. Grr.

Still, like countless thousands before me, I was saved by a live linux distro – in this case, a USB bootable one (since the Aspire One has no optical drive). Following the instructions^[1] at pendrivelinux I created a bootable Feather Linux USB drive, and booted the netbook from it by hitting F12 on the post screen and selecting to boot from the USB stick.

At the boot prompt, I used ‘knoppix 3′ to boot the system up to a command line, mounted /dev/hdc1 as an ext2 filesystem, and fixed my typo. Reboot, and tada! Everything was working again (well, after hitting Fn-F7 to reenable the touchpad, which I had accidentally disabled whilst mashing the keyboard in frustration at the sight of a blank screen about an hour earlier, heh).

^[1] Note that I had to use a newer version of syslinux than the one referenced on pendrivelinux. This one worked for me.

A bit of googling suggested that the problem lay with the upstream debian package, which contained a build of libghc6-x11-dev that was compiled without xinerama support. This left me with a choice of either waiting for the package to get sorted out, or to do the build myself again. I decided to do my own build rather than live without xmonad, but rather than mucking about with tarballs I could at least now get the source from the package repository.

The appropriate steps, for anyone interested or having the same problem, are:

1. Make sure libxinerama-dev is installed
2. Recompile libghc6-x11-dev and install it
3. Recompile libghc6-xmonad-dev and libghc-xmonad-contrib-dev against the new X11 lib

The apt-get incantations are:

sudo apt-get install libxinerama-dev
cd /tmp
sudo apt-get source --compile libghc6-x11-dev
sudo dpkg -i libghc6-x11-dev_1.4.1-1_i386.deb
sudo apt-get build-dep libghc6-xmonad-dev
sudo apt-get source --compile libghc6-xmonad-dev
sudo dpkg -i libghc6-xmonad-dev
sudo apt-get build-dep libghc6-xmonad-contrib-dev
sudo apt-get source --compile libghc6-xmonad-contrib-dev
sudo dpkg -i libghc6-xmonad-contrib-dev_0.6-4_i386.deb

A quick alt-q restart, and all is well.

I only mention all this because it’s so easy in this day and age to take something like apt for granted, and every so often it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate just how spectacularly good it really is. Where I work, deployments are an endless source of headaches and grief, yet the complexity of those deployments absolutely pales against the task of updating literally millions of systems, all slightly different to each other, thousands of times a day. It’s just a joy to be able to say to apt “hey, go get me everything I need to build package x, then build package x, then install it for me. And get it right first time!”.

In most cases, it does just that. It’s an astonishing piece of software.

history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort
-rn|head

I won’t bother repeating the inevitable warning about the dangers of executing random shell scripts you find on the Internet, because I’m lazy and mean. Anyway, here’s the results from my webhosting box:

231 ll
171 vim
132 cd
50 screen
43 cat
39 tail
34 ls
34 cls
32 exit
31 wget

‘ll’ is an alias for ‘ls -l’, and ‘cls’ an alias for ‘clear’. No real surprises otherwise – I use vim for development over ssh, I tail my logs occasionally, and live in GNU Screen.

Here’s the output from my home box:

254 ll
181 cd
148 sudo
123 rm
123 ffmpeg
86 screen
83 ls
75 cls
72 vim
60 find

Quite similar actually, guess I’m set in my ways. The ffmpeg count is a bit of an anomaly, since I used it a lot recently to re-encode a bunch of Futurama rips for my mobile.

Not sure what to do with this remarkable intel, however. Perhaps I’ll use the data to generate an Identicon and use it as a favicon? Or, perhaps not.

… you buy something from Amazon, you are protected by the fact that evil black-hats can’t find the prime factors of your encryption key fast enough to steal your credit card number (OK, bit of a generalisation, but that’s the gist). …

into this:

… you take something from Amazon, you are secure by the fact that important black-hats can’t connexion the matureness factors of your writing key alacritous adequacy to advise your assign calculate sort (OK, discernment of a generalisation, but that’s the gist). …

Let’s review the highlights. ‘Buy’ replaced with ‘take’, ‘evil’ replaced with ‘important’, ‘steal’ replaced with ‘advise’? Someone’s book of synonyms is bound in human hide with a skull on the front.

Aside from his very visible mastery of sci-fi, however, there is much to remember Clarke for. He is responsible for popularising the concept of geostationary orbit, which is very important for practical global telecommunications. When you watch the Olympics on TV this summer, you can thank Clarke for the fact that you haven’t had to go to China to see it.

Perhaps best of all, though, is his now-infamous Third Law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke’s Third Law has been quoted, referenced, and paraphrased copiously since he coined it, and it is almost axiomatic for many technologists. As a software engineer, I get a wry enjoyment from Gehm’s Corollary, i.e. “any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced” – a sobering thought when confidently hacking away on the next big thing!

If your users don’t think your software is magic, then you have room for improvement. I believe Clarke would have approved of that sentiment. R.I.P.

Naturally, in order to gain these responsibilities I have gone through a number of required HR ass-covering exercises in which it was drilled into me that I am legally forbidden from asking questions about sexuality, marital status, family-planning, and anything else which might lead me into rejecting a candidate on grounds our beloved government considers discriminatory.

Never mind that I have never shown the least inclination to discriminate against someone because they might want to possibly think about maybe taking some [mp]aternity leave in the next 30 years, or (gasp) prefer the company of their own gender, or whatever; I have to go through all this training so that the company can throw me to the wolves if a candidate claims to have been discriminated against. “Not our fault, guvnor; we explained the rules”.

Still, fair enough I suppose; we live in litigious times, and not being a bigot I have no particular fears of transgressing.

But what if the rules are changed? And what if they’re changed in horribly unexpected ways? A recent article on the BBC News site contained, quite without fanfare, some shocking intelligence.

Previously standard questions about age, length of experience and religious views are now illegal, [Which?] points out.

Wait, what? Length of experience is now a forbidden topic? So if I’m recruiting a senior developer or team lead, I now have to waste valuable time interviewing fresh-out-of-college tyros who haven’t written a single line of commercial code or spent a single day working in a professional team?

I can kind of see what is trying to be achieved here, but it is an unavoidable fact that experience is a vital attribute for many senior roles, and needs to be taken into consideration when trying to fill those roles. It’s not just me either – a quick trawl through the endless agency emails I seem to get every day (despite telling them I’m not on the market) reveals that most tech jobs are still specifying n years of experience; this seems somewhat pointless now that candidates can’t be asked about it. I wonder if they know?

Even more interesting is the fact that many contract positions are still paid at ‘rates negotiable on experience’. Hah, how does that work when experience is a forbidden subject? If I were graduating from university this year I’d be whoring myself around the City applying for £500-per-day contracting gigs and suing any bank that dared ask me to justify my rate.

Rob Grant’s novel Incompetence just became slightly less hysterical.

Article 13199 of the Pan-European Constitution: “No person shall be prejudiced from employment in any capacity, at any level, by reason of age, race, creed or incompitence (sic).

But the real reason is that it simply isn’t important enough to override everything else.

Certainly, for some things you want the freedom and reliability of open source. I write my essays in OpenOffice, I use Vim as my text editor for all programming languages other than C#, and I write maths papers with LaTeX. I want my personal output to remain usable and not at the whim of some company somewhere, I agree with all that.

But do I need my MP3 player to be open? No. My videogame console? No. My phone? No. My movie editor? No (though only because I always archive the source material). The irony is that people do indeed care about freedom – the freedom to choose, and the sad fact is that there is a certain type of zealot who only espouses freedom as long as it’s their type of freedom. And that isn’t freedom at all.

Now, as it happens, Linux is my operating system of choice. I don’t own any Apple computers, though I do have a first-gen iPod Mini, which is distinctly showing its age. I use Vista for .Net development, but I don’t think anyone could reasonably call me an Apple zealot or an anti-freedom capitalist whatever.

But you won’t catch me criticising Apple for their closed platform. If it results in a decent product, I’m all for it. I used to have a G4 iBook and liked it a lot. When I’m in the market for an ultraportable later this year, I will give due consideration to the Mac Air.

A Mac is a product – calling the hardware nothing more than a dongle is a ridiculous argument. You can run Linux on Mac hardware, and OSX on non-Mac hardware (suboptimally, granted). Would you call a Ferrari Enzo a dongle because you need one in order to run the Enzo engine management software?

And it should be said that Apple isn’t quite as closed as some people suggest – I can still install Firefox, Thunderbird, and other open source tools if I want to tackle the hostile internet with a trusted armoury. And OSX comes with things like Apache and SSH installed out of the box.

So do I give a crap about freedom zero? Only in as far as it suits my needs. If a piece of closed software does a better job, and the risk of losing data forever is within my tolerances, then sure I’ll use it and I won’t let ideology get in my way.

On the flip side, I care about interoperability, and I contribute or donate to a few open source projects, and will strongly oppose anything – legal or technological – that attempts to muscle open source out of existence. An open source tool deserves the right to compete. I use Amarok not because it’s open, but because I like it more than iTunes. Conversely, I use Visual Studio not because it’s proprietary, but because I prefer it to SharpDevelop.

Use the best tool for the job.

So imagine my surprise when I finally got round to watching this week’s Top Gear last night and found myself with goosebumps at the end of Hammond’s F1 segment, where the Renault engineers hook the car up to a laptop and get the engine to belt out the national anthem.

So, what the hell has to be wrong with someone to be unmoved by 80,000 fans singing, but filled with national pride when a bloody car does it? The engine isn’t even English, it’s French!