A dear friend of mine read my entry yesterday and had the following to say about it on another network:

Uh, not quite. Windows is a toy car and its box is filled with ads for all kinds of accessories you can buy. Linux is an erector set that you can use to build just about anything you want to and your only limits are the set itself and your imagination.

People who want a toy car and only a toy car will find the erector set very frustrating and usually very confusing. People who want to create and build what’s in their imagination will soon tire of the toy car that’s only a toy car and nothing else.

To each his or her own. I really don’t know why all the emotional ranting. Just choose what you like, learn only what you feel like, and accept the consequences of your own choices. Is that really so difficult?

For some people: Yes. It really is that difficult. Myself included–I’ve used an entirely different OS my entire career; it’s pretty late in the race for me to be switching mounts. Besides, not all of us are super-talented software developers; you have a special, unique gift that affords you the insight and clarity to build whatever you want and need on top of whatever platform you choose. I don’t possess such a gift; all I can do is sing and use pre-built software. And so far, I’m having a very tough time getting Linux to do anything beyond totally frustrate me.

Some people love to tinker around in the garage, and I respect those people a lot (if you’re actually talking about cars, I am one of those folks who loves to tinker in the garage). Some people just want to get in the car and drive because they have to get to work and don’t have the time or inclination or talent to tinker in the garage and build their “dream” car.

In that regard I’m very much like the typical end-users I support: I have a job to do and I have neither the time nor the inclination to build anything from scratch. I want my PC and OS to be useful right out of the box. As clunky and horrible as you think Microsoft OSs software are–and they are, in a lot of ways–they are still very, very useful in the context of what I need to make it do, right out of the box, without expending a tremendous amount of effort building anything; and while the learning curve on Microsoft’s technologies isn’t exactly flat, it sure as hell isn’t practically vertical like 90% of Linux.

I’ll give a tremendous amount of credit to the Linux user community for taking Linux mainstream as a viable alternative to the ghastly cost of Microsoft products; however, I have noted (with no small sense of irony) that the harsh realities of the business world have become a real eye-opener to the Open-Source hobbyist crowd: Red Hat and MySQL both charge Microsoft-like amounts of money for support and patches for otherwise “free” products–if you need them supported in a business context–because even hobbyists gotta eat and can get sued just like everybody else that deals with the commercial world.

But what really, really bugs me is that the Linux crowd stubbornly clings to an outright refusal to compromise and make the damn thing easier to use and deploy–they want to draw in more users (and away from Microsoft), but only if they succomb and learn the insanely complicated incantations and dance moves it requires just to make Linux boot properly, to say nothing of making it do anything useful. And the attitude of the Linux user community whenever I’ve dared to ask for help has been nothing short of shameful hazing; condescending responses of “Well, if you’d just Googled your question a little harder, you’d have found the answer, n00b.” And it would seem that I’m not the only one who thinks so: even the almighty Slashdot has recognized that the Linux user community can sometimes be the biggest hurdle to overcome when one of the Windows crowd tries to break ranks. Granted, the Microsoft user community has much more than its fair share of assholes, too–but it takes a lot of chutzpah to create an absurdly complicated product, refuse to settle on a standard user interface, and then berate newcomers–particularly those trying to make the switch from Windows, the very people the Linux community is trying to convert–for not knowing the subtleties of making it work–and get snotty and snobby with them for asking for help! Learning Linux on one’s own is about as easy as becoming a Mason. Until that is resolved, the Linux community in general have absolutely no business whatsoever mocking a “toy car” operating environment that over the last twenty years has put food on my family’s table and clothes on their backs.

(Editor’s note: I’m as guilty of friendly hazing myself, consistently referring to the Linux contingent here at my office as “Tofu-eating Linux Hippies,” but never once have I refused a legitimate request for help–nor have I ever berated them or attempted to make myself feel superior at their expense–for their choice of platform.There’s the difference.)

Who knows. Maybe I’ll get to the end of this road and actually end up liking Linux. But right now, there really isn’t a whole lot I’m finding enjoyable about the experience. I read the instructions on the websites, and follow them blindly without knowing why they work or why they’re important, and worse, because I don’t know the theory behind the practice, I’m finding it hard to duplicate what few successes I’ve achieved thus far. I cannot recall a time in my entire career where I’ve been this frustrated and this unhappy with what I’m doing for a living.

Quite a number of months ago, I wrote a journal entry deriding Linux (no, Corsair, really? You? Deride Linux? Go on!); and several months before that, I’d written another one comparing Linux and Windows to hamburgers. I thought it was a really clever analogy, but for the life of me I cannot find that entry in The Corsair Journal–so, especially in light of the fact that I’m being forced to learn Linux in order to do my job, I guess I’ll have to re-tell the tale:

So what’s the difference, really, between Windows and Linux?

Imagine, if you will, having a craving for a burger, but not just any ol’ burger: you’re craving a good burger, your favorite burger. So you go to your favorite diner–a place where you’ve been many times before, so the staff probably knows you by now–and order your burger. Even if Flo the waitress doesn’t remember how you like your particular burger, it’s nothing to worry about; you rattle off your order, customizing your burger the way you want it. Lo and behold, several minutes later, out from the kitchen comes a steaming-hot burger, with fries on the side, cooked and prepared just the way you asked for it. You lean forward in your booth, grab that juicy pile of Nirvana and take a big bite, and find to your blissful delight that it is exactly what you expected, and boy oh boy does it ever hit the spot. Mmmmmmmm. And y’know what? Even if Flo (or someone in the ktichen) has had an off day and maybe forgotten, say, your cheese, you can always flag down Flo and she’ll be happy to bring you a slice, with a smile.

That’s Windows.

Now, imagine, if you will, having a craving for a burger, but not just any ol’ burger: you’re craving a good burger, your favorite burger. But you promised your buddy Mike (your good friend from Northern California) that you’d stop by his pad for lunch; he said “C’mon over, man; I’ll make you the best burger you’ve ever eaten. Guaranteed. And it’ll be natural and good for you besides, not all full of crap and fat and preservatives that you’d get at a burger from a burger joint.” Well, not wanting to hurt Mike’s feelings, you go over to his place. The first thing that hits you when he answers the door is the smell–it smells unlike anything you’ve ever smelled before; not bad, per sé, but very, very different. Here at Mike’s pad, you don’t get to custom-order your burger–you get whatever Mike puts in front of you. And what he puts in front of you is something… different; it looks like a hamburger, it more or less smells like a hamburger; there aren’t any fries, and there are sprouts on it. You gingerly pick it up off the plate, take a bite, and are greeted with many, many flavors and textures that are decidedly un-hamburger like in origin; you suppose that if you imagined really, really hard, you could pretend you’re eating a real hamburger–but you’re really not that good at hoodwinking yourself; you know that this ain’t no hamburger.

So you ask Mike “What is this?”

Mike replies “That, my friend, is a SoyBurger patty on a whole-wheat nine-grain bun with soy cheddar cheese, organic tomato, lettuce, broccoli sprouts, and garlic garbanzo-bean spread with organic ketchup and mustard. Like it? I grew it and made it all from scratch, myself, from techniques and recipes I got off the Internet that have been perfected by a huge community of organic gardeners and cooking experts! And it was all free!”

At this point you’re probably thinking that maybe Mike doesn’t actually know the meaning of the word “perfected,” because this what you are currently eating is not even close to your vision of the perfect hamburger. However, you’re a polite guest, so you manage to choke the thing down–and end up being sick to your stomach the rest of the day with a nausea that not even Pepto Bismol can put a dent in.

That’s Linux.

If you had Hippie parents and grew up eating that kind of food to the point your system became acclimated to it, that’s fine–you’d probably love LinuxBurgers; but for the rest of us, who ate real burgers at real diners growing up, only one word can sum up what a LinuxBurger tastes like:

Blecch.

And because the company that bought my business unit is heavily into Linux, I have to learn how to like (or, at the very least, tolerate) the smell, the taste, and  texture of something that is masquerading as a hamburger, but is clearly not a hamburger. I’ve relagated my WIndows machine to a backup/security-blanket role only, and have switched to using CentOS for my day-to-day operations just so I can get used to using it. It’s like being on a diet, and I hate it. I’m having serious cravings for my hot, juicy, delicious, familiar diner cheeseburger, and I can’t have one–and it’s making me mental.

Alright, I’ve been neglecting my poor, beleaguered journal for too long, and it’s time to get writing something other than technical documents to work the brain muscle some more. C’mon brain!

What better grist for my journalling mill than fresh rumors that the iPhone will finally break free of AT&T’s Cthulu-like exclusivity arrangement and arrive on Verizon Wireless’s network? Why, according to this PC World article here, the iPhone is coming to Big Red sometime in 4Q10 or 1Q11. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve heard it all before.

But this time, it’s serious.

According to yet another unnamed source–this one, apparently, with intimate knowledge of Apple’s supply-chain, has been saying that Apple has ordered quite a number of semiconductors from Qualcomm, the good folks who brought us CDMA technology in the first place.

Meanwhile, some of my friends have been conversing back and forth via e-mail about the relative merits and weaknesses of the new Epic and Galaxy, two new Android-based smartphones soon to be available on The Now Network™.

After doing an informal poll of my friends, here’s the breakdown, by their primary carrier (some use more than one carrier for work purposes). As an added bonus I’ve also included whether or not they have an iPhone as their primary phone if AT&T is their primary carrier.

The cellular networks my friends subscribe to

As you can see, the results of my decidedly unscientific, informal poll show that my friends subscribe to AT&T by a very wide margin. And of those who subscribe to AT&T, roughly 65% have an iPhone.

Regardless of whether the rumors actually prove themselves true or not, one day the iPhone will most definitely move to Verizon. And when it does, my gut tells me that you may see that AT&T slice become smaller and Verizon’s get bigger.

I switched back to the Storm. Android is simply not finished yet; it lacks some very, very basic features that I had gotten very used to on the BlackBerry.

Anyone who has had to endure the displeasure of struggling through a customer support call with a completely unintelligible customer service representative in Bangalore should be watching this legislation with interest: A new bill before the House gives outsourcing American companies a hard time. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) introduced a bill requiring that companies transferring calls to an overseas call center disclose that fact, and pay a tax of 25 cents per call transferred.

Hear hear!

I for one would be delighted to get those calls back to being handled in the United States, by native English-speaking and Spanish-speaking reps. I don’t even call tech support anymore unless I need an RMA because I rarely can understand the person on the other end of the phone. Even calls to American Express and other companies with other large customer-service organizations are being handled overseas, and not just by India anymore: Romania is a top call-center magnet in, and Sirius/XM has their call center in balmy Jamaica (ask me how I know).

In a complete fit of incredulity, in this article, TollFreeForwarding.com states:

“It will cost jobs while aiding the continued destruction of American wealth and influence. As an employer, it is prohibitively expensive to do business in this country, primarily because the talent pool is tiny due to our poor educational system. Even in a down economy, American technology companies have difficulty finding well-trained individuals who are prepared to work at the pace of international business.”

File that one under Oh Puh-LEEAZE!

Are you kidding me!? It’s America’s shitty talent pool? Really? Bullshit. You left out an important bit from that statement: …because the talent pool [who is willing to work for minimum wage and no benefits] is tiny due to our poor educational system. Yeah. Our educational system teaches kids to demand a living wage and health insurance, I guess that’s what makes it so poor. As a product of the American educational system–and as one who started their career in a BlueBehemoth call center, supporting OS/2–I find that quote highly offensive, and completely unfounded.

I realize that over in India it takes a Master’s degree from Bangalore U. to ensure one is qualified enough to ask someone if they’ve rebooted their computer (because that’s the next step on the script), but why don’t we give our American men and women a crack at it, ‘kay? I’m pretty sure they can handle it…

So AT&T is getting rid of their unlimited pricing plans, eh?

WelYgl it’s only been a fucking year since tethering was announced for the iPhone; now AT&T is poised to implement it–along with draconian pricing models to ensure that tethering isni’t at all useful to those who choose to tether. Their top-tier, most expensive plan, caps out at 2gb–down from 5gb on their “unlimited” plan.Plus, in a move in-line with their unmitigated gall, they did it as the iPad’s popularity is zooming stratospheric. You’ve got to admire the timing.

So rather than add capacity, the fucking slimebags at AT&T fixed the fact that they have the shittiest, narrowest-diameter data network of all the majors by crippling their data plans. Fucking brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that!? Some executive somewhere just got a big, fat bonus check for dreaming up that marvelous piece of marketing.

But Corsair, you use Verizon–and you hate AT&T anyway. So why get so bent-out-of-shape over this? It doesn’t affect you.

Oh, but it absolutely will affect me–and you, too, no matter what carrier you’re on. You see, when one carrier decides to do this sort of thing out in the open, it gives the green light to all the other carriers to do the same thing. It’s like collusion, but out in the open, and it’s just one more way for the telecoms to bend us over the barrel one more time for one more go-round.

I tether my BlackBerry Storm 2 under Verizon, and pay the oppressive $45/month + $15/month for the 5gb privilege. If Verizon follows suit, I’ll be pissed. Not pissed enough to leave them, of course–their service is still the best of the best–but pissed enough to write them angry letters and compose angry blog entries.

Big Red should use this as an opportunity to chuckle, shake their heads, and sock it to the Blue Bastards at AT&T–with an ad campaign that says: “Gee whiz, AT&T. It’s a shame that your pathetic network which can’t keep up with all the growth is so bad that you have to put usage restrictions in place. Can you hear me now? Oh–you dropped my call? Oops.”

Since I started taking Tri-Rail to work again, I have a big-ass commute–and I have the dubious distinction of having the longest commute in my office. If my office were playing Settelers of Cataan, I would so have the Longest Commute card–and the accompanying two points.

My commute

Total distance traveled: 54.1 miles.

The first half–A to B–is on Palm-Tran Route 40. I used to take Palm Tran route 62 to the Lake Worth Tri-Rail station, but the route was very crowded, and very stop-and-go. And the worst of it: the last bus left the Lake Worth station at 6:30pm, which meant that if I had to stay late at work, I was stranded. Eventually I started driving to the Lake Worth station, but that schlep back and forth from one end of Lake Worth Road to the other–a route lousy with traffic lights every few feet–got to be too much of a pain-in-the-ass and about summertime I stopped taking Tri-Rail altogether and drove the Turnpike to work.

However, a new development came along that made me revisit my commute: Palm Tran, in cooperation with the City of Wellington, built a 140-space Park & Ride behind Fresh Market on 441 and the Mall at Wellington Green. I got an e-mail about its opening in November, and decided to check it out. Turns out that Route 40 is limited-stop service from the Mall at Wellington Green (and the new Park & Ride) to the West Palm Beach Intermodal Transit Station (a.k.a the West Palm Beach Amtrak and Tri-Rail station).

There’s only one problem with commuting to work on Route 40:

Palm Tran route 40 rush-hour schedule

Look at how many westbound 40 buses serve the afternoon rush hour: One. One bus? Are you kidding me? That means if I take P634 from Cypress Creek, which leaves the station at a pretty reasonable 5:24 in the afternoon, I arrive at WPB-ITS at 6:15 (assuming the train is on time, a dangerous assumption nowadays) and have to wait an hour for the 7:15 Westbound 40–which would put me back at the Wellington Park & Ride at 8:10pm. Total commute time: a staggering 2 hours and 46 minutes.

No thank you.

Maybe adding one more on-the-half-hour westbound 40 bus will help: It’d have to leave WPB-ITS at 6:45pm, which isn’t really a big enough window for Tri-Rail P636, which is often ten or more minutes behind schedule.

If I want a reasonable commute time, my only option, really, is P632–which, because it departs Cypress Creek at 4:54pm. I have to leave work at 4:40pm to catch. And If I miss it, I’m screwed.

Maybe I’m too picky. Maybe I just want instant gratification. Maybe I should just be thankful that I commute in South Florida, and not New York or Chicago, where public transit is ten times as crowded, it snows, and hour-long layovers for connecting transit are commonplace.

Well, I must not be the only one, because here it is almost June–and the Wellington Park & Ride? Empty. A beautiful, nicely manicured, empty boondoggle. It sits empty every day, because nobody in Wellington with a car is interested in getting home fifteen minutes into prime-time.

I have a cadre of Linux developers in my shop, and I would routinely bust on them in retaliation for casting their noses decidedly skyward whenever anybody mentions that big evil company in Redmond. I used to call them all Tofu-eatin’, sandal-wearin’, pot-smokin’, mantra-chantin’, crystal-wavin’, Kumbaya-singin’, tambourine-bangin’, stickin’-it-to-the-Man beatnik Linux Hippies.

That is, until, I had to become one of them.

We’re installing a new phone system here that uses an open-source phone switch called Asterisk. In preparation, I have to install a box with CentOS on it (and before I get a bunch of uppity comments of how CentOS isn’t the very bestestestest Linux distribution to do the job, save it–I was asked to use CentOS by my boss).

I know my way around IRIX, HP-UX and AIX pretty well, but Linux? In my personal opinion, it is the very embodiment of the phrase “too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the soup,” like most open-source development ventures are.

Even worse is that I now have to go with my hat in my hands and beg for help from these very same damn Linux Hippies I’ve been busting on for years.

It would seems I’ve been hoisted by my own petard.

Rather than search the Internet for the answers to some of my newbie questions–most Linux snobs hate newbie questions anyway and tell most newbies to RTFMP and go pound sand (wonderful “open” community, eh?)–I thought I’d try to make amends for my past sins, extend an olive branch, and ask the help of my damn Linux hipp– er, I mean, Linux developers.

So I e-mailed one and asked how I grant my regular user account SUDO privileges. I got back this:

Ok.

Let goes to the magical recipe book. Here is what you will need:

1. 2 pork ears.
2. 1 bat wing.
3. The guts of a goat, sun-dried.
4. A very big pot.
5. Some exotic herbs that grow only in the Oceania islands.

…

visudo is the magic word you want. It’s a utility built on top of vi to edit the /etc/sudoers file. That’s where you define the sudo privileges for an account.

Now, if you ate more tofu, you’d certainly inherit all this knowledge by osmosis by sticking your had in the tofu box. All knowledge is contained in the conservative juice.

Ha ha. Damn Linux Hippies.

(I guess I had it coming)

I’m a highly experienced Windows guru with the chops to back it up. But now I find myself having to install, configure, and manage CentOS–all without the slightest idea how to do even the most basic system administration tasks in Linux, like managing users and groups, and managing drive partitions–or even what each partition is supposed to do. Under the covers, Linux is so fundamentally different from any other OS I’ve ever used (and I know a few others besides Windows), that I find myself forced to take my vast experience and throw it away and start from scratch, because it is almost completely irrelevant under Linux. There is very little (outside of my knowledge of TCP/IP) that I can apply from the Windows world to the Linux world.

What really, really bothers me about Linux is that none of the fucking Linux hippies I encounter, on the Internet or in person, has a fucking STRAIGHT ANSWER FOR ANYTHING!!! All I want to know is how to install GIMP under CentOS. Under Windows, it’s a breeze; click-click and you’re done.

I’ve googled the question: “Install GIMP under CentOS 5″ and I get 20,000 different answers from 20,000 different “experts.” And exactly none of them descripe a simple “click-click” install, which is what a total n00b like me needs.

I have a bunch of Linux people here in my office (and a friend or two) who resentfully turn up their noses at everything Microsoft and swear on their dead grandma’s graves that Linux is the greatest thing to ever be invented in the history of Earth, better even than the wheel or fire. Well, I got news for you Tofu-eating Linux hippies: Windows doesn’t make me RECOMPILE THE FUCKING KERNEL to install a simple graphics editor! These guys scratch their heads in squnty-eyed wonder why end-users aren’t flocking in droves to Linux. If the Goddamn learning curve wasn’t VERTICAL, I’m sure you’d get more users.

God help me when I try to install Asterisk and use this thing as a phone switch.

I took a hiatus for a few months while my division was spun off from my old company and purchased by a new one.

Wow. That was a lot of work.

I look forward to having time to write again.

P.S. I took that ridiculous CAPTCHA thing off my comments section.