| Part 1: My replies to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Vision Survey |
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Monday, February 1st, 2016 06:13:30 GMT |
| Activism |
I had some technical difficulties sending in my responses to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Vision Survey at almost literally the last minute. Perhaps it was because my responses were so long.
Fortunately, I intended to probably post my replies on my blog anyway.
At least this gave me a chance to edit them a bit more and add some HTML. In fact, I'll probably even end up editing them after I post them, as I so often do with probably most things I post. (Edit, Feb. 1, 2016, 1:25 AM EST: Yep, definitely.)
I wrote so much that I'm splitting this into multiple blog posts.
multifiles-apmod.el is an Emacs add-on I modified/enhanced a lot:
GNU Emacs, multfiles-apmod, and various other add-ons have been making it tremendously easier and more enjoyable for me to make progress with my various programming projects.
Even my previous favorite text editors (Notepad++ and Geany) were really getting in my way and slowing me down - so, if I hadn't switched to Emacs, I think all my projects might've gotten substantially delayed, and I might even have given up on some of them.
Even though it took me almost 2 months of almost daily effort to get cozy with Emacs, I think it will save me quite a lot more time than that in the long run.
So, by 2020, I suspect I will have completed more projects and done a much better job of building them than I would have if I hadn't gotten cozy with Emacs, and hadn't enhanced the multifiles add-on.
I've been using VUE since 2010 already (or maybe even longer, I can't remember) to make notes, flow charts, etc. It's a great tool for brainstorming and trying to design software, and helps me get a nice, visual overview of things and how they relate to each other.
I plan on using it for publicly-released documentation in the future, rather than just my own private notes.
It might make ideas easier to absorb at a glance than conventional articles which might describe numerous complicated ideas in big blobs of text, without visually showing how different things link together or otherwise interact or relate.
A few months ago I heard about a program called Code Bubbles. I still haven't tried it yet, but, I think Code Bubbles is probably the closest thing I've ever heard of so far to my daydream of being able to use VUE to edit actual code.
So maybe my daydream would be easier to implement than I thought.
But VUE still wouldn't have syntax coloring and a ton of other nice features of a normal code editor.
I wish I could embed little Emacs editors inside of VUE nodes. :-)
I'm guessing Emacs probably already can run in the Java Virtual Machine somehow, and VUE is free, libre Java software, so, maybe that wouldn't be totally unfeasible. :-)
I still haven't done much with graph databases myself yet, but, I'm looking forward to eventually experimenting more with OrientDB and perhaps Neo4j.
The Neo4j website is currently offering free (as in price) copies of their O'Reilly book on graph databases:
Graph databases are another thing I wish I could use VUE as a GUI to work with them.
I'm greatly looking forward to reading Paul Graham's book On Lisp, which is legally downloadable from his website:
Maybe by 2020, I'll be primarily a Lisp programmer instead of mostly a PHP, Perl, JavaScript, MySQL, SQLite, and Bash programmer.
I'm working on making the kit more flexible and easy to update, though it already works remarkably well and has saved me a ton of time.
My Puppy Setup Kit makes it so I can go from a totally uncustomized Puppy Linux system to a system customized exactly the way I like it, in just minutes, by clicking a single script.
Though sometimes I need to adjust the kit a bit to make that work right, like when I switched to a laptop and then found I had to add some new stuff to make the touchpad work the way I liked.
But once I've finished any necessary adjustments, then, from then on, setting up my system is nearly effortless - I just have to click a single script, click a confirmation dialog box, wait a few minutes, and press Enter every once in a while.
(And it would be pretty easy to make some Puppy Setup Kit construction plans which require no user input at all beyond opening one script and clicking one confirmation dialog box.)
And I always absolutely dreaded having to open up my computer for any reason, such as to get the internal hard disk out so I could try to rescue any unbacked-up data.
But now, hard disks are optional for me. And if any of my computers ever totally breaks down, I can move to a different one almost seamlessly. I love it!
I never want to return to having to struggle to fix things like that. With my Puppy Setup Kit, all I have to do to get everything back to normal is just reboot, and run my setup kit again.
Probably lots of Windows and MacOS users are afraid of that.
So, I didn't try GNU/Linux until I found out about live discs, which I think I first heard about in 2006 because I was desperately searching for a way to rescue data from a broken-down Windows system.
But when I found Puppy was so delightfully fast, and so nice to use just from a live disc without even having to install it, I found I actually didn't even want to go back to using primarily Windows again.
Windows XP was actually reasonably fast on that computer, but Puppy was (and still is) so fast it made Windows seem annoyingly slow in comparison.
But the more sessions you have, the slower it becomes to boot, so, eventually, I decided, instead of saving minor settings changes to my disc, I'd just use some Perl scripts to adjust my settings.
Thus, my Puppy Setup Kit was born.
But, this is my favorite, most comfortable computer setup ever. I finally don't have to live in as much fear of my hard disk or computer breaking down, because it's so simple now to just switch to another computer and have everything be pretty much the same.
And Puppy, running in a RAM disk, is the fastest OS I've ever used. Even a 1.5 GHz single core laptop with only 2 GB of RAM running Lucid Puppy 5.2.8 version 004 seems tremendously faster than the single core 2.0 GHz 1 GB RAM Windows Vista computer of someone I know, which frequently gets stuck for minutes on end on things that Puppy does in literally seconds, like opening programs or going to certain web pages.
So, maybe I'll finally be able to persuade some of the more stubborn Windows and Mac users I know to try Puppy. And with the renovated Puppy Setup Kit, hopefully everyone (including me) will have a much easier time customizing our own Puppies to work exactly the way we want.
(I'd actually like it if the Puppy Setup Kit could work with any GNU/Linux live disc as well as Puppy, but, I'm not up to trying to build that just yet.)
Not sure yet how to do that, but, maybe if I store details about installable software, settings, etc. in JSON files, that will make the data accessible by most languages.
I think it would be good if people were less dependent on downloading precompiled binaries via package manager software.
It's always good to know how to do things yourself rather than having to depend on other people to do things for you. And it's also safer to compile things from source code rather than to just trust that the package builder and/or the repository are trustworthy/uncompromised.
Plus, things compiled from scratch conceivably might work better for you because of being tailored to your exact system, instead of the possibly quite different system of whoever built a package.
After writing the above blog post, I found out that Gobo Linux has a really cool "recipes" feature which already seems to do much of what I had in mind. (Haven't tried it myself yet, but want to...)
Gobo Linux's reorganized directory structure is quite interesting too:
And NixOS also seems to contain some interesting ideas:
...and thereby also make it possible for people to easily install and use the not-yet-complete renovated version of Astroblahhh Desktop, among other things.
The build-your-own-packages-from-source features will also make it possible for me (and/or others) to help popularize things like (for example) GNU Guile by making them extremely easy to compile from source and install.
I'd be very interested to see a list of cool cheap hardware gizmos which the FSF approves of.
One reason I haven't gotten a Pi yet is because in my experience, 512 MB of RAM is far too little to run Puppy Linux the way I want, with the entire OS and all my installed software loaded into RAM. On my 512 MB RAM computer, I can't install much software, and it's quite prone to totally freezing up with no way to fix it other than restarting. (But the same computer is capable of a lot of cool things with an OS installed on its hard disk.)
1 GB is a bit better (and even good enough to run a Windows XP VirtualBox reasonably well, at least if VirtualBox is almost the only thing you install), but that still forces me to make difficult choices amongst what software I want to install, and I have to reboot to install different sets of software and settings.
2 GB of RAM is sort of OK, but I much prefer 4 GB or more. The more, the better. So, I'd much prefer to get a small cheap Pi-like gizmo with a lot more RAM than a Pi.
I'm also very happy that Puppy Linux is also systemd-free and will hopefully stay that way.
(Quote from the survey:) Imagine it's 2020 and people are more free and empowered as computer users, due to the efforts of the free software movement and the FSF. Describe some things that we have accomplished to reach this point. (End of quote.)
And the VUE concept mapping software also continues to help me:
Sometimes I think things like news articles could benefit from being in a VUE-like concept-map format.
For a long time I've wished I could edit actual code itself (rather than just notes about code) using VUE.
I've been thinking maybe using XSLT on the XML source code of a VUE file might be able to transform a VUE file containing source code text into actually runnable (or otherwise useable) source code files.
One of the most exciting things I found out about in 2015 was graph database software, which is reputed to typically be much faster and easier to work with than conventional relational databases.
I haven't yet gotten deeply into learning Lisp, but, I still want to because of what I've read about it possibly being the overall best, most powerful programming language in existence.
Emacs, multifiles-apmod, other Emacs add-ons, and VUE have been helping me renovate my Puppy Linux Setup Kit:
My setup kit also makes it so I'm not so dependent on having to use a specific computer with a specific hard disk, since I can mostly or completely replicate my entire comfortably customized system in minutes on quite different computers.
In the past, when I used an operating system (Windows) installed on an internal hard disk, my computer seriously breaking down tended to be an incredibly stressful disaster, which sometimes took days, weeks, or once over a month to recover from, due to having to struggle to fix whatever broke, and sometimes having to struggle to acquire another computer and then reinstall everything from scratch.
I love it so much I won't even seriously consider going back to relying on any OS installed on a hard disk - not even a GNU/Linux! - because I find it far too easy to accidentally ruin even my GNU/Linux systems by installing things I shouldn't have installed.
One of the things that deterred me from even trying GNU/Linux for years was being afraid of accidentally ruining my Windows installation by installing GNU/Linux on the same hard drive.
I still didn't end up switching to GNU/Linux until 2011, though. I was pushed into it due to the fact that my hard disk was making odd little noises, which made me think, maybe I should use a Puppy live disc for a while so I can avoid making my hard disk work too hard until I can afford to get a replacement hard disk.
Before I made my Puppy Setup Kit, I used to use Puppy's really cool built-in ability to save your custom settings, installed programs, etc. on the Puppy live CD or DVD you booted your computer with just by writing additional sessions to the disc.
I think my way of using Puppy is probably still unconventional even amongst Puppy users (partly since I still haven't gone to much trouble to tell the world about my setup kit because I think I should renovate it first).
Once my Puppy Setup Kit is renovated, it will be a lot easier for me to share my current exact setup with anyone who wants to try it, and also for me (and hopefully anyone) to add to the kit to make it possible to easily install whatever sets of software and settings anyone wants to install.
I'd also like to make it possible to write Puppy Setup Kit scripts in any language, not just Bash or Perl.
Another goal of mine with the Puppy Setup Kit is to build something like what I was writing about package management around the end of this blog post:
So, I think it would be good if more people learned how to compile things themselves from source code, and also would be good if people had some partially automated tools to help with the boring, automatable parts of the process of compiling your own package from source code.
Having partially-automated build-your-own-packages-from-source capabilities in the Puppy Setup Kit will pave the way to me being able to easily release an update of Astroblahhh GLMP-GTK and Astroblahhh PH-GTK:
Recently, I was very pleased to hear about the $5 version of the Raspberry Pi.
And, after all the distressing things I read about systemd, I was very happy to hear about the Devuan project:
(The rest of my survey replies will be in future blog posts.)