LinLog

So what do you do when there's a pandemic on and you can't really leave the house?  Fix up the house, of course!

Actually, I had been planning to take a week off to work on my house before the pandemic hit.  Our floors were in very bad need of refinishing.  And since we had to sand them down for that anyway, my decided to stain them as well.  And since we were doing that, we figured we might as well paint the walls and ceiling too.

Unfortunately I can't find a good picture of the floor, but this one has a cat in it, so that makes up for it.  As you can see, it was that light, honey color.  What you can't see is that in many place the finish had worn completely off.

Here's the "after" picture of that same corner of the living room.  We stained it an "espresso" brown.  It was a slow job - two coats of stain at about six hours per coat to apply - but I think it turned out really well.  

The new paint is a brownish-gray color called "armadillo".  We also got some new lamps for the living room and put the "daylight" LED bulbs in them.  The old paint and soft lighting made the room very yellow.  The whiter light and new paint actually make it feel brighter.

Of course, there's always more work to do, but we're making progress.  Being stuck at home sucks, but at least we're doing something productive with the time.

As everyone continues to work from home, I figured I'd share what my workspace looks like.  As I mentioned in a previous entry, I've been using the desk I have set up in the basement that I've barely touched in several years.

Unlike one of my co-workers, who on the last day in the office brought home his mounted entire four-screen setup, I didn't bring back everything I had on my desk.  However, I did bring the important things: my laptop and my UHK.  After a day or two of working with just the laptop screen, I then proceeded to scavenge a couple of monitors to get back to a three-screen setup.  One of them is actually my main desktop monitor, which was still hooked up to the KVM switch that I used years ago when I worked from home for deviantART.

My work-from-home space, with improvised three-monitor setup.

So far this setup is working pretty well for me. That's a good thing, because it's going to be at least another two weeks - the state is still on "pause" until May 15th, assuming they don't extend the "pause" again.  And even then we probably won't go back to the office right away.

I read an interesting article on the drawbacks of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) the other day.  This comes on the heels of the news that Mozilla is rolling out DoH to all Firefox users by default. 

I'd never really thought too much about DoH.  In general, more encryption is usually better, so my initial thought was "it's probably a good thing", but that's about as deep as it went.  After reading a little more about the down sides, I'm less convinced.  I still think it's a probably good thing that DoH exists, but I'm note so sure that it's a good idea to push everyone toward it.

My main reservation at this point is that DoH seems architecturally wrong.  It introduces a way to do DNS queries that's not really compatible with the old way and it's not clear to me that it offers any really big wins.

Of course, I'm not saying that DoH has no benefits or use-cases.  There are definitely cases where it can be useful and add another layer of privacy.  But it kind of reminds me of PHP "security" features like safe_mode in the sense that it does solve a legitimate problem, and does so in a way that "works" (for certain definitions of "works"), but solves it at the wrong layer and in a way that can interfere with other legitimate things.

As this blog from the PowerDNS team discusses, DoH is not a panacea in terms of privacy.  Yes, it adds a layer of encryption, and that is definitely useful in some cases.  But it doesn't do anything to address the myriad other ways in which your online activity can be tracked.

Of course, that depends very much on whom you want to stop from tracking you.  Obviously it does zero to stop advertisers or website operators from tracking you - they do their tracking at a much higher level.  It also doesn't stop your ISP from tracking you - even if everything else is encrypted, you can't stop your ISP from knowing the IP addresses you visit.  I mean, that's just how the web works.  And from an IP address, you can usually determine the website pretty easily.  And, of course, your DoH provider still has access to all your DNS requests, so you better make sure you trust them.

For me, personally, the bottom line is that DoH doesn't give you anything that you don't already get with a half-way decent VPN provider.  Granted, the VPN provider is then your single point of privacy failure, so you better make sure you pick a reputable on (I like and recommend Private Internet Access).  But a VPN covers pretty much everything you can do at the network level, not just DNS for web requests.  Of course, you still need browser privacy plugins to block tracking at higher levels in the stack, but sadly that's necessary either way.

Author's note: This is based on some notes and links I started collecting in November of 2015.  The bulk of the commentary is actually relatively new - from last year, August 15th, 2019 - so it's not too out of line with my current thinking.

As might be clear from my review of Bertrand Meyer's Agile!: The Good, the Hype, and the Ugly, I've been rethinking the whole agile development craze that has swept the industry.

There are a number of good presentations online questioning the "agile" movement.  For a more provocative point of view, I recommend Erik Miejer's One Hacker Way talk.  Dave Thomas, one of the "pragmatic programmers", also has a good talk on the topic. There's also a good one by Fred George on the hidden assumptions of agile.

My current thought (note: we're back to 2019 now) is that "agile" has become pretty much a meaningless buzz word.  Pretty much everybody is "doing agile" now - or at least claiming they do.  It's come to mean "anything that's not waterfall".  And we all know that "waterfall" doesn't work, which is why everyone is doing "agile".  (Side note: Winston Royce, in his paper that initially described the waterfall process, actually says that it doesn't really work.  But, of course, that didn't stop people from trying.)

Not that agility is a bad concept.  It isn't - being flexible is a good thing.  Responding to change is almost a requirement in most shops.  The values in the Agile Manifesto are all good things to emphasize.  But none of that amounts to a process.  It's just a loose collection of principles and ideas that are useful, but aren't a road-map for how to build software.

That's why, in practice, most shops that "do agile" are using some variation on Scrum.  And while I have no problem with Scrum per se, it's hardly the be-all and end-all of development processes.  In fact, the main problem with Scrum is probably that it's not a software development process - it's more of a project management framework.  It doesn't have a whole lot to say about the details of how to code, how to test, how to manage defects and other quality issues, how to manage releases, etc.  It's up to each shop to figure that stuff out for themselves.

Of course, that's not bad.  Every business is different and you should expect that you'll have to adapt any process to a certain extent.  Scrum is useful in that it gives you a framework for tracking what needs to be done and creating a feedback loop to improve your process.  But you still have to actually use that feedback loop to improve your process, i.e. you have to do the hard work of self-improvement.  Simply going through the motions of what the "agile consultant" says you should do it's going to cut it.  As with everything else in life, there are no shortcuts.

Author's note: Welcome to another episode of "From the Archives". This is the stub of an article that I wrote twelve years ago, on April 25, 2008. At the time, KDE 4.x was freshly into stable release. I was a use and fan of KDE at the time, and there had been a lot of hype about how awesome version 4 was going to be. My initial reaction, however, was...not so great.

This is actually slightly relevant because I have resurrected the GUI on my "home desktop", by which I mean my "home server". This is the box sitting under my desk in the basement that runs Ubuntu 18.04 and runs various web and media server software. It does have a GUI installed, but I hadn't really used it in years - in part because GNOME didn't really work well on it. This isn't super surprising, since it's an old box with just the integrated graphics chip. But it's got more than enough memory and processing power for the workload I want it to do, so there's not really any point in upgrading.

Anyway, due to the current CONVID-19 pandemic I'm now working from home and sitting at that desk all day every day, so I decided to fix up my desktop. Part of my cleanup process was to axe GNOME and install the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). This is a project I just recently discovered and immediately fell in love with. It's essentially a fork and continuation of KDE 3.5. It's since evolved into its own thing, apparently, but it's still noticeably KDE-like, so I'm very comfortable in the UI. Just like the original KDE 3.5, TDE is powerful, intuitive, generally pleasant to use, and works quite well on my not-so-new system. It doesn't have the fancy graphical bells and whistles, but I never really cared much about that anyway. I would definitely recommend it to any old-school KDE 3.x fans.

Anyway, here are my thoughts from the time. To be fair, I haven't used "real" KDE to any extent since this, so I'm sure all of my complaints have been addressed. But then again, I don't really care. I'm happy with TDE. Enjoy!

Kubuntu 8.04 was released yesterday (note: again, this was twelve years ago). That means it's upgrade time for me again.

This time around, Kubuntu comes in 2 varieties: the "rock-solid" KDE 3 version, and the KDE 4 remix. I had been intending to get on the leading edge and install the KDE 4 version. However, just to be on the safe side, I decided to give the live CD a try first. And after messing around with it for half an hour or so, I'm glad I did.

Bottom line: I think I'm going to wait for KDE 4.1. Or maybe 4.2.

I just don't care for 4.0.3. It definitely looks different...but not better. I just didn't see any new features that looked even remotely interesting, let alone compelling. The splash screens were kind of nice, and the plasma widget effects on the desktop were pretty neat, but that's about it.

There seemed to be a lot more down sides. Of course, I'm not sure how many of these are KDE 4 issues and how many are Kubuntu issues, but I found them annoying either way. Here's my list:

1. The window style for the default desktop theme is unbearably ugly. It's too dark and too monochromatic. I guess somebody must like it, but it really bothers me.
2. Where's the control panel? I don't see it and the context-sensitive configuration panels don't have all the options in them.
3. In fact, where the heck are the other options?
4. What the heck happened to Amarok and the other applications? The UI is completely different and it feels like half the features are missing.

I could go on, but why bother? There's just no reason for me to upgrade at this point.