* Posts by Damon Lynch

14 publicly visible posts • joined 7 May 2009

Plex gives fans a privacy complex after sharing viewing habits with friends by default

Damon Lynch

I had the problem of bizarrely misrecognised media too. Thankfully, Jellyfin provides a robust mechanism to identify movies and shows, by embedding a metadata provider ID in the file/folder name, e.g The Castle (1997) [imdbid-tt0118826].

Entering these values aint much fun, so I wrote a small FOSS program, Modest Movie Metadata, to automate the donkey work. Details are in the Jellyfin forum.

ZFS comes to Debian, thanks to licensing workaround

Damon Lynch

On GPL vs BSD, I like what Pieter Hintjens has to say:

http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#The-Importance-of-Contracts

Miguel de Icaza on his journey from open source to Microsoft: 'It's a different company'

Damon Lynch

Re: Miguel de Icaza is a great coder, and will always be so

> I'm one of the people with a stable enough character to tell you face to face what I'd post anonymously because I do not consider anonymous equivalent with being unaccountable

You think advancing the FOSS desktop includes hating people individual coders who you think of as traitors, and then spreading that hate online. Fear, anger, insecurity and resentment seem to be an important part of your life. That's sad. It does not lead to stability of character -- not for you personally, nor the other de Icaza haters.

It's also sad because in this poisonous atmosphere it's impossible to have any kind of rational discussion about anything. I'm checking out of the discussion, and getting back to bug-fixing!

Damon Lynch

Re: Miguel de Icaza is a great coder, and will always be so

Your name shows up as "Anonymous Coward". Mine shows up as "Damon Lynch". My code is all online, all Linux desktop related, and under the GPL - and yours?

Your "facts" about Microsoft include the claim that it is "one of the most freedom-hating corporations in existence". More freedom-hating than Monsanto? Blackwater/Academi? Koch Industries? Saudi Aramco? Freeport McMoRan? De Beers? What indicators of freedom are you using to compare? Do you have good knowledge of the history of these companies, what they do and how they go about it? If not, can you reference a study by experts in the area?

I myself greatly dislike some Microsoft business practices, but I try not to go around making stuff up about them. That's just dumb.

I don't go around spreading hatred towards individual coders, for many reasons. How many de Icaza haters here know that the full-time maintainer of an important free software project, exiv2, used to work for Adobe, and now works on exiv2 in his retirement? If the Adobe employee been the object of hatred directed at him by members of the FOSS community, do you think he'd have taken up the exiv2 role?

The hate exhibited here towards de Icaza and others harms the free software movement. Period.

Damon Lynch

Re: Miguel de Icaza is a great coder, and will always be so

I'm not posting anonymously. I'm using my real name.

There is a difference between not liking Microsoft's business practices, and hating Miguel de Icaza the human being. Do you unequivocally condemn the vile hatred towards him vigorously advocated by so many here? If you do, then I'm delighted to stand corrected in your case. If not, then sorry but yes I'm tarring you with the same brush as the rest. Your "facts" about Microsoft remind me of Ballmer's "get the facts" about Linux -- pointless, overly emotive, one-sided, and destructive.

Damon Lynch

Re: Miguel de Icaza is a great coder, and will always be so

>> I have to wonder if these are the same people who attack prominent women coders.

>And where that came from?

Of the 34 (and counting) people who upvoted the first comment to this interview, we can be pretty certain that among them are are at least one person who harasses and threaten women coders anonymously. Read this week's story about Jessie Frazelle if you missed it.

What is far from certain is that among those 34 there is even a single FOSS developer who has actually contributed any code anyone cares about it. Show us your code "find users who cut cat tail", and let's see if it is even one thousandth of the FOSS code written by Miguel and Nat.

Damon Lynch

Miguel de Icaza is a great coder, and will always be so

I'm in the FOSS community and I don't hate Miguel de Icaza. On the contrary, I respect him extremely highly. His technical skills are beyond question. He, Nat and others did the hard yards with C and Evolution, and based on their experience, decided C wasn't up to the task, hence the need for something with the capabilities of a C# type of language. So they did Mono. Personally I love coding in Python, but hey, they prefer C# and there is no way I'm going to second guess their technical reasoning.

I was disappointed when Miguel gave up working on the Linux desktop, but to his credit he shared his reasoning. Personally I think the Linux desktop world lost one of its brightest stars when he made that decision, but there will always be others ready to step up. For those of us who still believe in the Linux desktop, we just need to get on with it.

What I don't respect is rubbish spouted in the first two comments -- the kind of slanderous, ignorant hate that tends to come from anonymous posters who may never have contributed any code of any real substance to anyone. I have to wonder if these are the same people who attack prominent women coders. Get a life, guys.

A perfect marriage: YOU and Ubuntu 16.04

Damon Lynch

Re: SO,

It took me less than a day to get used to the Min/max/close being on the left of the title bar, and I've been using PCs since the days of the venerable Intel 8088. Moreover I use Windows too, and there is no confusion mixing and matching my daily use between Unity and various Windows desktops. Your brain gets used to it very quickly and it's nothing to worry about. Really. There are plenty of things to worry about with computers, and window control positions are not one of them.

Learning to touch type in Cyrillic when you're not from the region and you're not a young nipper -- now that's hard.

Crypto cadre cloud-cracks SHA-1 with just $75k of compute cost

Damon Lynch

> No, it is done, and has been done, repeatedly

The post was highlighting that by pointing out that NSA originally said MD5 was super secure.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: Great changes, but sssh don't mention the...

Damon Lynch

I regularly use both Ubuntu and Windows. After a little practice the placement of the window controls becomes second nature. I never think about it.

I've been using desktop linux since 2001 and overall I think Unity is enjoyable. I prefer it to Gnome 2 and KDE. It has some rough edges, but every complex program or system I've ever used does.

Ubuntu desktop is so 2013... All hail 2014 Ubuntu mobile

Damon Lynch

Re: Microsoft's failure is Canonical's failure.

Okay you don't like Unity. I wish you well on whatever interface you do like. But have you used Unity? It's absolutely wrong to suggest it's not easy to use with a mouse and keyboard. Hold down the windows / super key and you'll see an impressive number of genuinely useful keyboard shortcuts.

Damon Lynch

It's coming along

I installed Mir on my desktop yesterday. It's worked well for me so far. Ubuntu Touch is a work in progress but it's not too far off. A powerful yet flexible computer in your pocket is an awesome vision, and I hope Ubuntu Touch itself takes off.

Personally, I can't recall a time since the early 90s in which there has been this much disruption and innovation in user interfaces. No doubt some paths will be the road less travelled, but hasn't it always been thus?

Pictures of Ubuntu: Linux's best photo shots at Windows and Mac

Damon Lynch
Linux

Why Lightroom?

Bibble Pro works very well indeed, and for some years now has had features built-in (like one click lens correction) that Adobe is beginning to catch up on. Furthermore, Bibble is much faster, and it's much cheaper to use year in year out (no need to send money to Adobe every 1.5 years).

Intel playing virtual silly buggers

Damon Lynch
Linux

Bios support is another big gotcha

Like some other readers, I have a CPU which supports virtualization and is 64 bit. However the Sony SZ laptop it is found in supports neither. The BIOS doesn't support Intel's virtualization instructions, and for some reason, a 64 bit OS cannot be loaded. Furthermore, only up to 3GB of RAM is recognized. All this on a mid 2007 premium laptop worth well over US$2,000 at the time. It makes me decidedly wary of ever buying a Sony laptop again.