Mind you, this is a kernel level issue. This is not a x.org bug, a nautilus bug, alsa bug or a bug in the opensuse package manager that I found within five minutes of using it. Moreover this is not a bug caused by distros modifying the vanilla kernel and introducing bugs. So we have the picture. The kernel has a bug that renders it to crash (very early in the boot process) on a commodity, off the shelf desktop used by millions (Okay maybe not millions, it’s a common desktop model, though)

Why is this so? Well the answer is twofold. Firstly, the final responsibility of the product is with the OEM that is the vendor of the product. Apple cannot say “You know BSD or Broadcom update broke my library, sorry go ask the upstream to fix it. The maker of the OS is the responsible party to the consumer. Where and how they manage their sources is irrelevant. Asus is responsible for their motherboards, and if a capacitor manufacturer has a defect in their product Asus can’t play ping pong with the user of the motherboard.

With commodity computers that you buy from a store the maker is the one who stands behind the product, including the OS and the apps. So, if you have a problem with Windows, you don’t call Microsoft, you call the OEM. If you buy a retail version of the OS and install it yourself, then MS is the one you contact. With Linux, you can get optional support that vendors like Red Hat, Oracle and Canonical provide. Other then that the distro maker gives no explicit warranty for their product. When something happens they point fingers to the upstream. Fine, but since almost all distros mod upstream packages, they ruin the entire advantage of open source in that everyone can use off the shelf software instead of reinventing the wheel. When distros make changes, they throw the responsibility on their shoulders because the upstream can’t look into every 300 distro which have numerous versions of their own and track their bugs and regressions.

In fact, I don’t understand what software warranty can mean in linuxland. Since Red Hat and everyone else just packages stuff from upstream, the best they can do is patch it on the spot or wait for the upstream to patch it, they don’t have control over the software, since they don’t make it.  The baker doesn’t make the cookie cutters. If the shapes have a flaw, he’ll essentially have to stop making the cookies and give people their money back. If I buy RHEL and pay for the support and my common HP desktop gets a kernel panic after three seconds of loading it, what the hell are they going to do? If they issued a patch that patch would have already been integrated into the mainline years ago.  The fact that I was getting this in 2010 means that they didn’t. So that means anyone who tried to use linux on that desktop just gave up.

Two biggest problems and how to address them

Lack of standardization and  lack of testing

The reason that Windows has such great hardware and software support is not just because Windows driver support is virtually mandatory for every piece of hardware. It’s also because it follows standards that make life easier. Azalia is a standard, so is AHCI. You essentially write a generic alsa driver and call it good. The one shipped with Windows Vista and up works 100% of the time.  With linux, not so. The mess that is ALSA, pulseaudio, and gstreamer causes endless problems that would vanish simply by following standards.  The same goes for generic video support. I can put XP on my mac mini, a ten year difference between the software and the hardware, and the video would load without a hitch. It won’t be the full driver, but I’ll at least get a GUI. Linux drivers use KMS by default, and that is broken on many GPUs (mine included). Linux development model is like a C student bringing the wrong book in an open book test.

The fact that Linux gets less developer attention is unfortunate. That means that hardware support is not going to be as good because the hardware vendors are not going to put as much effort as with Windows. The same goes for software vendors. But what makes things much worse is the lack of standards that needlessly create bugs. The same exact intel gpu driver works on one distro but bombs in the other. So the solution is to stay as close to the main upstream as possible and make it so that the patches are only extensions and don’t actually “change” the package itself. In other words, nautilus has bugs, don’t make new bugs by your stupid customizations.

One of the few problems I had on my desktop at work was boot failure due to ubuntu changing the drive naming and hence messing up the mount points in fstab. This is retarted. It is known that kernel updates often change the naming scheme for devices. The comments section in fstab even tells you that its better to use UUID. And yet the default install just merrily uses drive name mountpoints without warning the user. Clearly the designers of Ubuntu don’t understand software safety.

On the fly fallback is another thing. There are known bugs that effect common hardware (I’m not talking about some weird audio codec used by pigmies during animal sacrifices.  95% of computers use common hardware. If the bug is known, the kernel should auto-detect the hardware and work around it. KMS does not work for 320m nvidia. It loads scrambled garbage. Why the heck can’t the kernel detect that I have that chip and just disable KMS without me typing nomodeset. Windows proves that you can load an OS without driver support. Get it done. Lack of driver support is not an excuse for a X.org crash when starting in a virtual machine. Cmon guys, stop goofing around.

Lack of Testing

The level of lack of testing for Linux is truly breathtaking. The fact that new versions of Ubuntu break sound or X.org (can’t use the “we don’t have the drivers” excuse anymore) is notorious. What’s crazier is that the hardware breakages are on hardware that is used by millions on people. Either the distro makers don’t fix the reported breakages or the breakages are not reported. What’s obvious is that these guys don’t test their stuff before shipping. I’m talking about out of the box breakages, not “when the planets align” breakages. About a year or two ago Ubuntu shipped a release where the sound stopped working on one third of all netbook models. I’m also guessing these netbooks had the aforementioned Azalia sound chips. This is moronic.

The lack of testing of the software is also endemic. Not only are there constant hardware breakages but the pure software components also suffer from out of box bugs. When you load Opensuse 12.1 and download a package from the built in browser, the package manager gets called and then says not found. Really, that took me five minutes of testing. I had to install the package by hand from the terminal. I tested Debian today to see if the long release cycle and testing that they do pays off. Nope. Nautilus has a bug where your network mount points are invisible to other programs. This is a Gnome bugs from years ago, Debian was released in February 2011. When you want to mount from the command line it gives an error about block devices. You need to install smbfs. If you can’t handle virtual folders don’t effing do it. At least give an option to mount in a real location. Again, this is not an obscure function. It’s a common thing that can be found by only light testing.

So, here is a simple solution. Don’t ship until all the critical bugs are fixed. Start from small. Test your release on all the popular mac models. If you get an out of box breakage go and fix it. Basically, test your software on the most commonly used computer models and then work to the less common. You can’t have no sound on the most popular sound chips.

There should also be out the box testing for pure software components. If I can find a critical bug in ten minutes, then you  have failed at basic testing. Linus advocates should be honest and admit that Linus is neither reliable nor stable. The hardware support is buggy and the software components are also buggy. When I say buggy I don’t mean that the compiz rendering is jerky, I mean a piece of software has a glaring broken function that was missed by testers. The stupid claim that Linux works on servers for years without crashing is deceptive because servers are baby sat by ITs who patch bugs and run repetitive workloads on one set of hardware. They are running apps headless, so no GUI framework or toolkit bugs. Servers are just dumb behemoths, they are highly optimized to churn data. Making a better server OS is not going to fix the issue of closing a window crashing x.org and losing all your apps or your wifi signal being dropped or even a usb driver bug causing a kernel panic. I was watching an Oracle dev give a talk that since Oracle run thousands of machines on diverse workloads, bugs cannot slip through easily. They are optimizing XEN or btfs or whatever. The fact that grub, the effing bootloader that the entire free unix ecosystem depends on, has bugs because of lack of manpower doesn’t concern them. Today I tried CentOS, the “stable” linux distro. It loads a broken framebuffer. The fact that an nvidia chip used by millions of people doesn’t work with their stable release doesn’t make them feel guilty. It blows my mind that any developer would waste even a second of their valuable time on snow effects in compiz when grub or samba has serious problems.

Play to your strength

Commercial software needs to maintain many branches of their software in part because people are not always willing to pay for the latest software. Excluding the cases where the user simply doesn’t want to migrate to the new branch and wants to either stall migration until it becomes unfeasible or is a grandma type who is still using win98 because the utter unwillingness to relearn a few things.  In other words, many people don’t want to be early adapters and want to wait a little for the software to mature. So you need to maintain multiple branches for at least some period of time.

Many stand alone apps don’t have this. The creator of VLC is not going to waste time backporting features and releasing bug fixes for older versions when the user can just update to the newest one. MS Office, on the other hand, has a pretty long support cycle for multiple branches (2003, 2007, 2007, 2010). Apple is actually pretty breakneck in terms of dropping support. It would come as a shock to many that 10.5, released only in late 2007, receives no new updates. But the fact remains that no sane person actually wants to use Vista instead of just using 7, (actually Vista sucks balls quite hard compared to 7) the issue is not upgrade hurdle, its that people don’t want to shell out two hundred dollars.

With free software I don’t see the point in keeping long support for old software. It requires a lot of man hours. This is especially true for point releases. If I’m using KDE4 I would want the latest one, say, 4.8, over a patched version of KDE 4.3. Distros should make it that certain components are set to a rolling release system instead of locking the user to that branch. Since backwards and forwards compatibility is crappy on the linux desktop anyway, it should be made so that people can easily upgrade from point releases. One can argue that they want to use Mate instead of gnome 3, but who the hell says that they want to use 2.6.2x instead of just getting the latest kernel? I don’t. The other option is to make it so that one can upgrade easily from distro release to distro release. But that takes a huge amount of effort to actually pull off and hithero the only company that has pulled this off is Apple. Right now the software that is released with each distro is locked in to that version. So you are forced to upgrade your distro to get the latest firefox or libreoffice. The bug I was talking about in gnome 2 that debian uses is fixed in gnome 3. Gnome 2 does not receive any new updates, so it would behoove developers to enable users to upgrade more easily. Kernel updates are a no brainer. Almost everyone wants the latest stable kernel, they also want the latest app stack.  As of now this involves resorting to upgrading twice a year.

Who butters your bread

If you look at the linux kernel and the surrounding open source technologies the features list is jawdropping. IBM, Google and Oracle pour millions to make virtualization and scalability stellar for their enterprise machines. So in essence, Linux has amazing enterprise features because people with deep pockets pay full time devs to make these things happen. Desktop support sucks balls because no company has incentive to make their hardware or software support better for linux. It’s actually amazing that vendors spend money on writing Linux drivers at all. Linux only has a 1% marketshare, so who cares if my wireless driver is going to blow chunks? Linux is very lucky that things like sound, ide, sata, usb and firewire use generic standards. If every chipset needed a custom usb driver Linux driver support would have been abysmal.

Fearing of being hacked and scrutinized for this blog post I plea to you before you hack me and call me a racist or an extremist, please read the post. I am not in support of anyone or anything. Please just read before you comment.

Today, Thursday December 22, 2011, “France’s lower house of parliament has approved a bill making it illegal to deny a genocide, including the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks.” source

There has been incredible Turkish, political and non political, reaction to France’s passage of this bill. “Turkey, which denies the genocide, has withdrawn its Paris ambassador and frozen military ties.” source

I would like to share my comments on this issue. For the sake of fair discourse, I am disclosing that I am of Armenian ethnicity living in New York USA and am an American citizen.

One of my main concerns with the denial of any genocide is the harboring of future denial. The situation in France is overwhelmingly political and multi faceted. This has been one of the accusations of Turkish politicians. “There are some half a million ethnic Armenians living in France and their vote is considered important in next year’s presidential election, our correspondent notes.” source

According to Wikipedia there are 300,000^[1][2] to 330,000^[3]  individuals identifying themselves as Turkish, living in France. The reason I state this is to address the point of political gain for President Sarkozy. I do not see Sarkozy gaining a majority of French Armenian votes based on this bill. The reason for is that I have the opinion that French Armenians will not vote solemnly based on this bill. The reason for this is that other french politicians will also support this bill because not supporting means allowing the denial of genocide in their sovereign country. Just as Turkish politicians will never say the word genocide, it is simply political suicide. In the same logic European politicians are putting themselves in an interesting position when they are asked about genocide. They are in an interesting position because there is huge political pressure from Ankara concerning the killings of Armenians and others during WWI. I think this is dangerous since, it opens the risk of other countries interfering or pressuring a domestic decision of a partner nation. This is dangerous for everyone.

I would like the readers of this post to understand my position. That politicians will do everything to gain support. In the same spirit international countries have ratified the killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during WWI as genocide, Turkish politicians have opposed it. Additionally I believe that it has become a requirement for Turkish politicians to strongly oppose and take actions against other countries who mention Armenian Genocide. I do not think this was the case when other countries passed similar laws as France wishes to in the past. It is only recently in the last decade that Turkey has taken the strong position to commit resources and willpower to influence foreign politically or historically motivated actions that have anything to do with the Armenian Genocide.

Why? Why is Turkey so committed to this foreign interference. I do not think decisions made by France or any other nation concerning laws that deny genocide naysayers will in anyway impact Turkey.

On a frank note, holly shit people, it is in the freaken lower senate, no one has passed any thing yet, what is all this commotion for. I only see it hurting Turkish international recognition when they go all out Defcon 1 whenever anybody proposes anything that has remotely anything to do with the Armenian genocide.

On the note of genocide. I personally believe that the historical, post WWI, actions taken by the winning European countries concerning the killings of peoples in Turkey during WWI, lead, to the Holocaust. Now this has nothing to do with modern Turkey. I do not want to get into a history lesson because I will be accused of cherry picking or being mislead or being misleading. I am simply sharing an opinion on genocide.

I repeat.

Please readers, understand genocide should not be taken lightly. It is the most disgraceful act that a human can take on another human. It is beyond all crimes. It is the crime. Every action taken by every nation to deny genocide or to circumvent passages of recognition of genocide fuel and support future doers of genocide. Please as human beings undertand this.

Now I will share a story concerning reactions or actions or situations that have arrose due to the denial or the recognition of the killings of Armenians in Turkey.

About me meeting a graduate student in my school, he was an international student from Turkey. Upon finding out that I am Armenian he took no action to discuss or to mention anything to do with history of that period. Nor did I take any action or have any intention to do so. This first example is of not sharing your opinion. Both he and I call each other friends and we just do not discuss history. We are designers what right do we have to discuss it. Yes it is our freedom of speech granted in America to discuss whatever we choose to. However it is also our decision to not discuss a topic that may hurt another individual or create a confrontation. Many Armenians will scold me for this and many Turks have scolded him for being friends with me. Why I ask? Why do we have to open each others wounds? This is the notion of pessimism. And I say I am a pessimist when it comes to this topic. The reason for this is that most modern Turks that I have come in contact with in America do not make it a point to tell me, hey you know by the way there was no genocide. It is not a threshold to being friends or accountancies that they have nor do I.

—

In summery of the story and what I am trying to convey.

All nations have the right to the freedom of speech. That is to say on an international level all nations, give or take, have the ability to share their opinion about other nations on a political level in the general assembly and on a consumer level through international news outlets, etc.

This said, the laws of a country which one is in, is the laws that one must follow when in that country. These laws, in general, are the accepted laws by the population of that country. One should respect another countries laws when they are in that country. I hope you agree with me. We are in such an age where political asylum is possible for most individuals. If you are not in agreement with a law of a country than maybe you should leave that country.

In the case of France. Yes France is a Christian nation, however they are a very tolerant nation. I believe that cultural identity of a nation is very closely related with its major religion.  This said most nations are very tolerant towards other cultures and religions, as in the case of France. Entailing, that it is because France is Christian and anti Muslim that they are passing a bill to condemn the denial of genocide is absurd. Turkey is muslim yet it recognizes the Holocaust, so why can’t another nation do so too. And equally all nations should have the ability to deny anything they want, it is their own international suicide they are risking. As in actions taken by Turkey against France for France’s domestic political decisions is international suicide and there is no need for it since it will not yield any benefit other than short political gain for Turkish politicians and many peoples feelings and sentiments putten into strain.

The stupidity of the notions stop me from finding any comic relief in their stupid situation, even the lack of tasteless japanese porn does not move me to pity. The episode touches upon racist american beliefs as much as it touches upon the stupidity of the american government. Overall the idea of the internet being a perishable good does not seem intriguing, in actuality it has such tendencies already. Additionally the concept of the internet being a router that needs to be restarted succeeds in displaying generic misuse and lack of know how concerning electronic devices.

Class is cancled on November 22, 2011. I want you to produce a small blog talking about thse three inventions. These are three ideas that I have had over the years that I have since abandoned.
I would like you all to critique them on how creative you think they are and how well they fit the idea of a design patent. Keep the whole thing short, maybe a paragraph.
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the ball drop
this was an idea that I had back before the turn of the century. I thought that a clock that used an ornamental design in order to count down to New Year’s for the turning of the millennium might be a hot seller. The idea that there is a clock underneath the 10 and when it hits 11:59:50 it starts the top clock to do a countdown and then the ball on the top would drop just like it does in Times Square.

Critique
Its use is only once a year, for a holiday that is not celebrated by all. At best its a contemplation of nostalgia and lack of access to the real thing. However uncreative it is, it can quite easily sell if it was not the year 2011 going to 2012. These days a screen with a recording of the event would sell better. As a design patent it would be questionable since its a miniaturization of a already designed mechanism.
———————————————————————————————————


the airplane spoon
this is an idea that I mentioned in class a few times. You know how most parents play the airplane game to get their children to eat. Open the hangar and let the airplane land. Over the summer I came up with the idea of making a spoon shaped like this. So that it would be creative and somewhat fun for parents to engage with their children using a spoon shaped like an airplane.

Critique
Unlike the design above, this one is actually unique, to my knowledge, I would not be surprised if it has not been doen already. However lets humor the idea, its actually pretty cool, it serves function and it might also be able to entertain the child. Creativity wise it is not mind blowing, it is a combination of two very familier objects/ideas.
———————————————————————————————————

this last idea is a design for a tool that would work as a starter for drilling holes in a printed circuit board. This tool would act like a tap and die and would allow little holes to be started so that a drill could be used to make the full holes that are needed in a printed circuit board.

Critique
The visual image does not display its function fully, however I am not one to judge, having no idea how circuit boards are made does not help. Its description seems that it would be a tool to provide a certain type of function on under certain conditions. But since I have not heard of a similar tool, it seems creating enough, just not creative in its design, it does not say that it speeds up production or how it is used or why not using is worse.


A bad image is almost impossible to shake off – so is sometimes a good reputation. During the time Linux first came about, it boasted professional class features that Windows did not have. The UNIX heritage was more inclined towards security, science and academics, while Windows was a single-user OS with a very poor security design. Advanced features such as protective memory, pre-emptive multitasking and access controls did not come to Windows until NT and for Mac until OS X (actually Apple had other UNIX based projects before, but OS X was the first mainstream one).  People still make stupid blue screen jokes; since most computers run Windows, its problems are more visible to the public.

Linux inherited the image of stability from UNIX. You can often hear claims of impressive uptimes and rock solid stability from many people. When Apple debuted OS X, it also marketed the “rock solid UNIX” monicker.  The claim that Linux runs many supercomputers and servers also fuels the public image of grandeur. Sadly, this image of outstanding reliability can no longer be boasted compared to commercial offerings from Redmond and Cupertino. The reasons for this are multifaceted.

Firstly, the quality of the OS depends on its ecosystem- app developers and hardware manufactures play a huge role in supporting the platform. Without quality support and a large userbase a platform is dead.  Linux suffers from missing and incomplete hardware support (this is more evident on laptops) and a shoddy app library. The quality of the software written is in most cases more buggy and incomplete with many apps in a constant alpha/beta state. The Linux desktop itself is many times more buggier than commercial offerings. Gravely serious errors are left uncorrected because of lack of manpower to test and fix bugs. Only the kernel can boast quality code. The majority of the stack is more buggy, than even Vista or ME ever was. The sound stack, x.org and drivers, window managers, desktop environments like GNOME and KDE, even the freaking bootloader are not ready for consumer usage.

With Linux distributions, the user gets a half-backed, buggy, and poorly supported platform. The level of integration between various parts of the system is abysmal compared to Windows and OS X. There is a serious lack of testing, standardization and integration. Geeks’ darling of reliability had been shipped with a broken Pulseaudio and KDE 4.0 release. Even alpha Windows builds are not as flaky as Fedora and Ubuntu releases. The open source model is not even adequate to allow thousands of individuals to fix the bugs that are reported, let alone catch up in terms of innovation.

So please stop blabbering about uptimes and rock stability. An X-less server is pretty stable. But the Linux desktop is seriously behind in features and reliability. That said, it is 100 times more flexible than Windows- you can choose between dozens of window managers, command shells, text editors, desktop environments, sound systems, file systems and kernel builds.  Linux is useful to millions and I use it at home and work. But it is simply not reliable enough.

People can make a $10 donation by texting REDCROSS to 90999. Their donation will go to support relief efforts for the earthquake in Japan and tsunami throughout the Pacific.

1. go to Admin -> Settings -> permalinks – The permalinks page fires $wp_rewrite->flush_rules(); each time the page is visited, so it’s not even necessary to save.
2. save than delete your .htaccess file

i bet you have done all of this already,
well i have found a fucked up problem which i did not think of, one of my projects uses many custom post types,
if your custom post type initilization name containes capital letters this update will lend you on 404 pages
does not matter how many times you rewrite your permalinks

this is what i did

i backed up my database, opened it in a text editor, than just did find replace on all the instances of the capitalized custom post names,
than i did a find and replace on my functions.php file,
than i replaced my databse with the fixed one and replaced my functions.php file,

all works now,

also make sure you have ’rewrite’ => array( ‘slug’ => ‘yourcustompostname,’with_front’ => FALSE),

in your args array for the register_post_type(‘yourcustompostname’,$args);

hope this helps

Since WP 2.9, the get_the_post_thumbnail has been wildly/widely used, its awesome, enough said.

But there is not get_the_post_thumbnail_title, or get_the_post_thumbnail_excerpt.

So here is a quick solution,

<?php
	$attachment_ID = get_post_thumbnail_id($id);
	$v_thumb_id = $attachment_ID;
	$v_thumb_get = get_post($v_thumb_id);
	$v_thumb_title = $v_thumb_get->post_title;
	$v_thumb_excerpt = $v_thumb_get->post_excerpt;
?>

All we need to so is find out the id of the thumbnail, than we can just use get_post function to retrieve the database record for that post. This works because attachments are essentially posts, and the get_post function does not segregate between post types.

Uses:
Well you can simply echo it out.

<?php echo $v_thumb_title; ?>

or

<?php echo $v_thumb_excerpt; ?>

Links:
get_post
get_post_thumbnail_id

Video by Jenny Skavlan