Felipe Alfaro Solana

A raiz de los numerosos comentarios sobre la Web del Congreso de los Diputados de España, no he podido evitar la tentación de llevar mi navegador hasta dicha página. Y ésto es lo que me he encontrado:

Nótese el precioso error de SQL que aparece en la esquina superior derecha de la imagen:

An error occurred while executing the PL/SQL associated with the item.
ORA-01843: not a valid month
(WWS-30558)

No es sólo el hecho de que el error haga referencia a un mes inexistente o inválido — y es que, francamente, me resulta complicado entender cómo un mes puede ser inválido —, sino que el diseño es francamente feo, inaccesible — me pregunto si cumple con el estándard WAI — y poco atractivo. Para una Web que ha costado 200.000€ no está nada mal.

Así es como se ve la página bajo Camino:

El resultado es bastante mejor que bajo Safari, ciertamente.

Lamentablemente, se podrían haber ahorrado mucho dinero en licencias de Oracle y haber utilizado otra base de datos, como PostgreSQL que, además de ser libre, escala francamente bien y tiene un buen soporte.

Es una lástima que en España se siga malgastando el dinero púbico para obtener resultados tan lamentables.

These are the Top 10 new features in Windows Server 2008: Is this innovation? Maybe. Let me go through them all:

1. The self-healing NTFS file system:

   A self-healing NTFS file system sounds like a cool feature, but any modern journaling filesystem is pretty good at recovering from errors by replaying the journal (usually at mount time).

2. Parallel session creation:

   Parallel session creation sounds like a minor improvement to Terminal Services in Windows. Basically, the fact that a Terminal Server can’t concurrently create new user sessions seems like a big deficiency to me. NoMachine’s NX and the old and good X11 system allow for concurrent user session creation since basically there is no writable, shared state between users/sessions. X11 authorization cookies are created in the user’s home directory and the session itself is abstracted by processes and some IPC resources.

3. Clean service shutdown:

   To be honest here, a malfunctioning daemon could potentially slow down the shutdown of a UNIX system, so improving on this front sounds like a good idea. On the other side, how many times do you have to reboot a UNIX server? Hint: uptime.

4. Kernel Transaction Manager:

   I’m not entirely familiar with Windows kernel internals, but this sounds like a cool feature. I’m not sure what UNIX systems already implement this, if at all.

5. SMB2 network file system:

   It’s glad to know that the old, insecure and not very efficient SMB/CIFS network filesystem is being revamped. However, I am wondering what kind of changes is Microsoft introducing and how will they affect open source implementations like SAMBA. I don’t foresee any patent issues on this, though, since file system development (either local or networked) has stalled considerably during the last years, and even ZFS and Reiser4 only bring concepts but I wouldn’t call them revolutionary.

6. Address Space Load Randomization (ASLR):

   I don’t see anything fascinating here. The Linux kernel has been sporting this with the introduction of Exec Shield.

7. Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA):

   This seems very Windows-centric, so I don’t see any real innovation here. I would call this another privative feature of an already privative operating system.

8. Windows Server Virtualization:

   Nothing to see here. Xen support is extremely well integrated in Linux (read as in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS or SUSE Novell Enterprise) and NetBSD, and it offers support for paravirtualized and HVM-based virtualization. Xen has proven mature enough for production use, has lots of cool features and it’s open and free and has an exceptional performance. In fact, hypervisor-based virtualization had been in used by IBM’s POWER architecture for quite some time — IIRC starting with VM/370 — so no innovation here.

9. PowerShell:

   Although a nice addition to Windows, UNIX has always had powerful shells like tcsh, zsh, bash or even PERL for years and also new scripting languages like Python or Ruby are starting to be used to develop more complex scripts.

   A powerful shell scripting environment has proven useful for automating tasks and administering systems. PowerShell sounds like the same tune to me.

10. Server Core:

    Finally, it seems Microsoft starts to understand that useless and insecure features, like Windows Media Player, are only meant for desktop systems and not for servers. They cripple the operating system, increase complexity and bring nothing, so removing them completely is a good idea. It’s a pity, however, that it took Microsoft more than 10 years to realize what UNIX already had 40 years ago.

Conclusion

While many of the ideas and features commented here are good, I can’t seem to see much innovation here. I’m wondering how many patents did Microsoft file for such simple, tried-and-true ideas.

Today, while I was looking through my e-mails, I realized that one from the Apple iTunes Store had been sitting unread for a couple of days in my inbox. I usually don’t pay much attention to this kind of e-mails but I was bored enough to go and give it a try.

The e-mail was the announcement on the availability of iTunes Plus for the Spanish iTunes Store. I was so curious that I saw myself firing iTunes on Mac OS X up even before I finished on reading the e-mail. I looked around a little bit but wasn’t able to find any trace of any 1,29€ songs, anywhere. I searched for Paul McCartney, Coldplay and the like, but all I could find were the traditional 0,99€ songs. I felt disappointed, but after a closer look, I could find an iTunes Plus link on the Quick Links section on the main page, so badly placed to even not realize it is there.

I decided to give it a chance, so I clicked on the link. Next, I was presented with the typical incomprehensible use license, clicked Accept and jumped in to search for some music, specifically music from Enigma. I could see that all the songs listed 1,29€ under the price column plus a “+” (plus) sign besides it. I double clicked on “Return to Innocence” in order to hear a preview but iTunes was stuck for so long trying to connect to the server that I finally gave up and clicked on Cancel. I felt lucky so I clicked on the Purchase button. In general, the purchase process is identical to the one used by DRM-protected iTunes Store, except that it took unusually longer to complete. I don’t know the exact reasons for this. It could be because of iTunes Plus Store uses different back-ends servers that are not scaled up well enough for the demand of service, could be something else. In any case, I felt really happy when I told iTunes to display the file on Finder and saw the extension was “.m4a” instead of “.m4p” (typical of DRM-protected songs). The sound quality seems pretty good at 256kbps in AAC digital format and since MPlayer, Rhythmbox and many other open source, free players can play unprotected AAC songs with no trouble at all, it means this is big step forward in the right direction towards a DRM-free world (at least in the music world).

It was about time for the music industry to realize that DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is not the answer. Finally!