Eric Lee

I haven't written much about Linux since early June when I made the switch over from Microsoft Windows, which I had been using since the early 1990s. But I thought that after 100 days, I'd write up a summary about how it feels and what I've learned.

First of all, there's not much new to report. Everthing just works. I have connected to my Toshiba Equium laptop (on which I installed Ubuntu Linux back in June) a number of hardware devices and every one of them works fine. These include:

* HP Photosmart 7550 printer
* Maxtor external hard disk drive
* Microsoft (!) wireless keyboard and mouse

The main software I run consists mostly of software which I was also running on Windows, so there hasn't been much of a learning curve. This includes:

* OpenOffice.org
* Mozilla Firefox
* Mozilla Thunderbird

At a certain stage I abandoned Evolution (the open source PIM) because I was having issues displaying some rich-text emails, and moved back to Thunderbird.

This compelled me to find solutions for my task list and calendar. I tried Mozilla Sunbird for both but didn't particularly like it, and much prefer to use gToDo as a task list. (Scrolling works much better in gToDo for some reason, the sorting by dates is superior to Sunbird's, and it's full screen, also allowing a display of notes for each task.)

I increasingly find that I can use gToDo as a calendar as well -- I mean, if we can use printed calendars and diaries as places to list tasks, why not use task list software to list upcoming diary events, appointments, and so on. Works for me.

I did try to use some web-based software for task lists and calendars (Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, TaDa, and others) but found that nothing works as fast and as reliably as software on one's own computer. In general, I am skeptical about webware, and hardly use anything that's web-based when I can do it on my own PC.

I was also using a web-based solution to track hours worked (as a freelancer this is important) and Harvest was quite good. But it did require me to be online and it's not free, so I eventually stumbled on KArm, a KDE-based time tracker tool, and it works very well.

I code raw Perl and HTML using Bluefish.

I've found Tomboy Notes to be very good for writing brief notes and keeping them visible.

I use gEdit for lots of plain text things, and initially used it, rather than Bluefish, for HTML editing.

The GIMP is my graphics editor, I use gFTP to do file transfers, and Grsync for backups. I should add that it's much easier to do FTP uploads and downloads in Linux when your server is a Linux server -- you don't have to worry (apparently) about ASCII and Binary downloads, and you can set the file permissions (chmod) on your own system first.

Linux terminal mode is great when I need to do SSH/Telnet connections to a web server (usually to work with the crontab file).

Skype works fine in Linux, though without videoconferencing -- yet.

Now let's compare this to the experience I was having with Windows --

I was paying for an FTP client, because the most popular one (CuteFTP) did eventually charge money. gFTP does exactly the same thing, bug-free, for nothing.

I had purchased Paint Shop Pro to do what the GIMP does for me now, for free.

I had a paid-for version of Coffee Cup HTML editor but now use the free Bluefish to do essentially the same thing.

I was using a paid-for backup system to work with my Maxtor external hard drive, but the free grsync does it just as well.

I've paid for PIMs (including Barca and the delightfully-named Time and Chaos), and for on-screen notes, and to track hours, and so on -- now all free.

And of course I was paying for anti-virus, anti-spam and firewall software. In Linux, this is either not necessary or free of charge.

My system is updated constantly, automatically, thanks to Ubuntu. I'm always running the latest version of all this software. (In Windows, at best you're getting the latest version of Windows -- but not all your other software.)

To sum up, this began nearly four months ago as an experiment, to see whether desktop Linux had advanced beyond where it was in 2002 the last time I tried it (and gave up).

It has.

I have seen the future, and it works.

Posted by Eric Lee at 07:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"Tigmoo" is one of those expressions that newcomers to the British labour movement will be unfamiliar with. It's an acronym for "this great movement of ours" which was one of the most common cliches used by union orators in the past. The term has been revived in all its glorious irony as the name of a new website which unites British union blogs and bloggers.

The website, located at http://www.tigmoo.co.uk, is constantly updated with material from more than 40 UK union weblogs -- among them those of the TUC's Brendan Barber and the general secretaries of the CWU, UCU and Napo, Billy Hayes, Sally Hunt and Judy McKnight. Other blogs belong to trade union branches (such as Coventry UNISON), or were created to focus attention on a dispute, such as the "Keep Burberry British" blog. Others are simply the blogs of individual members of unions in the U.K. Some of these are updated every day while others seem to have been abandoned -- sometimes not long after they were launched. The number of union blogs continues go grow.

The TIGMOO site was the initiate of John Wood, the TUC's webmaster, though the site is itself unofficial. Because of its unofficial character, and the very nature of blogs, it is far more lively to read than the average trade union website. It's also updated much more frequently. There were 17 news items in the last two days alone, and that number is sure to rise. No national trade union website in Britain including that of the TUC is producing so much content so quickly.

The site suggests a number of ways for British trade unionists to get more involved. Of course if you, or your union branch, or someone you know in a union has a blog, it should be added to the Tigmoo feed -- more details are on the site. (Basically, they'll scan your blog every hour for new content and add it to Tigmoo.) With only 40 bloggers identified so far, this is surely the tip of the iceberg -- there are probably many more.

They also encourage people to subscribe to the site's RSS feed, and if you don't know what that is, this is a good place to learn about it. People are encouraged to sign up to use the site, to put Tigmoo buttons on their sites, and to spread the word.

It's a great initiative and should be on the list of favourites (bookmarks) of every trade unionist in the country. Or should I say -- every member of this great movement of ours.

Posted by Eric Lee at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In his bestselling book "Archangel", Robert Harris creates an entire modern political thriller around Stalin's great secret -- which is revealed only in the second half of the book. And that incredible secret turns out to be ... Stalin had a son!

Um, sorry Robert, but for the those of us who know anything at all about the Soviet dictator, this "revelation" had something of the effect of Dr. Evil's demand that he be paid one million dollars not to destroy the world. In real life, Stalin had two sons, and a daughter.

Perhaps because of this disappointment, I waited a few years before trying another novel which revolved around Stalin's great secret.

Richard Lourie's book, though far less commercially successful than Harris', is far better written and reveals much greater knowledge of its subject than "Archangel". It seems, however, that nearly all the research for this book consisted of reading Trotsky's biography of Stalin, the writing of which plays a central part in the narrative.

Lourie seems aware of the likelihood that Stalin was at one time a paid agent of the tsarist police, but this is not his great secret. Nor is it the fact that he had children.

No, what this author comes up with is -- drum roll, please -- Stalin poisoned Lenin!

Disappointment again. Trotsky actually wrote this. He published an article about it. It's a very old allegation. (In Lourie's novel, Trotsky is essentially murdered in 1940 to prevent him telling the world about this. Of course, he published articles alleging the poisoning years before his death, so this is something like shutting the barn door after ... well, you get the point.)

Even though the "great secret" revealed here is common knowledge (and no, I have no idea whether he poisoned Lenin or not), it's not original. And more important, of all Stalin's crimes, the slow poisoning of his predecessor as leader of the Soviet police state is hardly the worst.

I recommend the book because it is well written, and it does to a certain degree get into Stalin's mind. (It gives a plausible impression of why Stalin would be so obsessed with Trotsky as late as 1940, for example.) But like so many of these books, the authors' imaginations fail them when trying to invent an historical secret.

Stalin did have a great secret and it was this: for most of his career in the revolutionary underground, a career that paved the way for his rise to power, he secretly served the tsarist enemy as an agent of the Department of Police (the Okhrana). And more important, once in power, he restored in Russia a regime which Marx had described as being "semi-Asiatic" -- only in a much more brutal and total form. The tsarist police spy had become a new and infinitely more powerful and brutal tsar.

Posted by Eric Lee at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)