The place where I work, b5media, is a business built on WordPress, which is based on the LAMP stack (where the “P” means “PHP”). Although my formal job title at b5 is “Technical Project Manager” and not “Developer”, the job titles aren’t rigidly defined, and I’d like to contribute my own developer skills at some point. Furthermore, I think that if you manage developers, you really should have some development skills and keep them sharp.

My preferred LAMP development platform is Mac OS X, which I feel delivers the best of both worlds: the functionality of a Unix-y operating system and the user experience — and dare I say, tasteful design — for which Apple is known and loved. In my former life at Tucows, I used my own PowerBook G4 as my primary machine, which is now my wife’s. Later, when I went to TSOT, they provided me with a 15″ MacBook Pro. When I left TSOT to join b5, the machine waiting for me was a Toshiba P200. For the first time since early 2003, my primary work machine was a PC running Vista.

It is possible to get work done in Vista, using it as a LAMP development machine feels a little awkward. While I’ve had no trouble setting up PHP under previous versions of IIS (in fact, I think my no-longer-existent docs for doing so on a Tucows site are pretty good), I have yet to successfully do it on the current version. I’ve had some success with installable LAMP stacks like Bitnami and WAMP, but somehow they still felt clunky. I also kept typing Unix commands at the DOS command line.

What I needed was a Unix I could run on my Toshiba.

A First Attempt at Ubuntu: Gutsy Gibbon

Installing Ubuntu on a desktop machine, even a “white label” one built in the dingy discount computer shop with lots of off-brand peripherals hanging on the walls, generally runs without a hitch. Getting Ubuntu to work on a laptop has typically been a completely different matter: there are generally incompatibilities galore and you have to do a lot of yak shaving in order to get a working system.

I first tried to install Ubuntu 7.10, a.k.a. “Gutsy Gibbon”, on the Toshiba. My experiences:

• The video card worked, although it wouldn’t go to the maximum resolution (1440 by 900) without installing xserver-xorg-video-intel 2.1.9.94, which is explained here.
• Sound didn’t work in the beginning, but once again, a little Googling found the fix. Since I use Skype voice chat in regular meetings with remote b5 developers, working audio is important. One downside: the speakers output audio even though headphones were plugged in.
• The webcam and card reader didn’t work at all. These weren’t dealbreakers, but they were annoying.
• My model doesn’t have it, but some versions of the Toshiba P200 come with a fingerprint reader. True to the stereotypes of the priorities of Linux people, the fingerprint reader is reported to work without any tweaking required.

I decided that I was doing more tweaking than working, so I decided to wait until Hardy Heron’s release, as it promised greater compatibility and a feature called “Wubi” that might meet my needs.

Installing Hardy Heron via Wubi

Wubi stands for Windows-based Ubuntu Installer that lets you install Ubuntu as if it were a Windows application. It doesn’t require any disk formatting or partitioning; the Ubuntu filesystem lives in a disk image within Windows’ filesystem. This setup allows Windows users to “try before they buy”, letting them take Ubuntu for a spin while still keeping their Windows applications and data.

Installation is dirt simple. You simply download the Wubi installer and double-click on it…

…which takes you to this window, where you enter just enough data to start the installation process:

You need only enter these six pieces of information to install Ubuntu using Wubi:

• The drive on which Ubuntu is to be installed
• The amount of disk space to allot to Ubuntu (up to a maximum of 30GB)
• Which desktop environment to use
• Which language to use
• A username
• A password

Once you’ve provided this information, click Install…and that’s it. The installer does the rest:

And soon afterwards, you’re greeted by this window, which prompts you to reboot your computer:

And soon afterwards, you’re greeted with this screen:

You’ll see this screen every time you boot up from now (or at least until you uninstall Wubi, which you do from within Windows; uninstalling Wubi is as simple as uninstalling any other Windows app).

Finally, you’ll see this:

I logged in and started checking to see if Ubuntu recognized devices on my laptop:

• Video: check! All resolutions right up to the maximum of 1440 by 900 were supported.
• Sound: check!
• Card reader: check!
• Wireless: check!
• Webcam: once I installed Skype, check!
• Volume dial: (It’s a hardware dial that sends volume-change messages to the system) check!
• Screen brighten/dim buttons: check!

I checked the filesystem and found that the Windows filesystem was accessible via the host directory, meaning that I could access any files on the Windows portion of the system. I set things up so that my home directory in Ubuntu had links to some of the folders in my user directory in Windows.

All in all, it was the least complex Linux installation experience I’ve ever had. If you’re a Windows user thinking about giving Linux a try, I highly recommend taking Wubi out for a spin.

The Audigy series of Creative Labs’ Sound Blasters lost some functionality with the release of Windows Vista:

• EAX: “Environmental Audio Extensions”, a set of digital signal processing presets that are meant to make sound in games seem more realistic.
• 3D Audio
• Sampling rate conversion
• Audio mixing

Creative’s story is that Microsoft removed “the ‘Vendor Extension mechanism from Vista’s DirectSound implementation,’ which is what Sound Blaster Audigy relied on to generate EAX effects and other audio processing.” Without this bit of code, Sound Blaster Audigy cards produce regular 2-channel stereo sound and not the supposedly more realistic-sounding, spatially-localized sounds for which people bought Audigy cards in the first place.

If this development wasn’t enough to upset Audigy owners, Creative stirred the pot last July by charging $10 for software called Creative ALchemy (that’s not a typo — the first two letters in “ALchemy”, when referring to the software, are supposed to be capitalized). Here’s the description from its page on Creative’s site:

Creative ALchemy (Audigy Edition) restores your Sound Blaster Audigy’s ability to process EAX effects, 3D audio, sampling rate conversion and audio mixing for certain DirectSound3D games in Windows Vista.

Quite predictably, some users were quite annoyed at being asked to pay for this software. In the words of this Gizmodo article, Creative was effectively “charging 10 bucks to fix something that should work in the first place.” A commenter in this CrunchGear article on the issue made a point that the charge could reflect the extra development effort required in making Audigy cards work under Vista, but also suggested that Creative could’ve eaten that cost “for PR purposes”.

For more commentary on Creative Labs’ charging $10 for what some saw as functionality that they had already paid for, see this ZDNet article titled Creative charging $9.99 for Vista EAX update?.

The Good Deed and the Punishment

In the comments for the Gizmodo article I cited earlier, there’s a reference to a free software workaround that enabled the features lost with a Vista upgrade. The workaround was posted to Creative’s forums and the commenter felt it necessary to note that the post “surprisingly, hasn’t been removed yet”.

It’s quite likely that the workaround in question was a solution posted by one “Daniel_K”. Here’s what a Gizmodo article posted yesterday has to say about it:

Developer, good-guy and all around hero, Daniel_K stepped up to the challenge, putting together his own drivers and asking for non-obligatory donations in recognition of his effort. Daniel_K’s drivers restored functionality, and added some extra features to boot.

You might think that Creative would be pleased: here’s a user with the will and the skill to develop a software fix that restores functionality to their hardware under Vista — essentially crowdsourcing at its best.

However, they were not pleased. Here’s a message posted to their forums by Creative’s VP Corporate Communication, Phil O’Shaughnessy. I’ve emphasized the part of the message that really grind my gears:

Daniel_K:

We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don’t have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.

Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.

Phil O’Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.

Simply put, Creative is saying that by fixing stuff that they’ve broken on purpose in order to gouge more money out of their customers, you’re stealing from them. It’s just another case of a vendor seeing its customers as “batteries for their Matrix”, or a Jay Michalski puts it, gullets that live under the end of the distribution system’s conveyor belt, where they gulp down products and crap out cash.

Oddly enough, there are a couple of commenters to the Gizmodo articles who come to Creative’s defense, one of whom brings up the fact that if Daniel_K did any reverse engineering of Creative’s drivers for Audigy cards, he broke the EULA. These people are the sort that Dante was thinking of when he wrote about that part of the 8th Circle of Hell reserved for evil counselors.

Links

• Creative Labs’ Forums: Message to Daniel_K
• Gizmodo: Creative Presents Cease-and-Desist Note to Developer Hero
• Wired: Creative: Fixing Our Crippled Sound Card Drivers Is “Stealing our Goods”
• Articles from July 2007 on ALChemy:
  • Gizmodo: Creative Charging $10 to Restore EAX Effects in Vista
  • ZDNet: Creative charging $9.99 for Vista EAX update?
  • CrunchGear: Creative Charges $9.99 For Enhanced Vista Drivers
• Want to email Creative Lab’s VP Corporate Communications, Phil O’Shaughnessy? He’s at poshaughnessy@creativelabs.com
• You can still get your hands on Daniel_K’s fixes — here’s a page featuring a torrent containing them.

1. New admin user interface. “By far the most comprehensive change in this release was the complete rethinking of how WordPressers do their administrative tasks. Happy Cog Studios was enlisted to do usability research and testing - with the emphasis being on usability research.”
2. New menu layout. “One of the first things you’ll notice is the change in the administrative navigation. It struck me as very Movable Typeish. I don’t know if the idea came from them or simply that Happy Cog had such thorough user research that it made sense. Either way… it makes sense.”
3. Changes to the way you add widgets to sidebars. “Another MASSIVE shift in philosophy has been in the Widgets page. Before, you could drag and drop widgets into position. You can still reposition widgets by dragging within a sidebar, however, WordPress is relying less on Javascript “bling” for this release.”
4. Dashboard overhaul. “…it is completely modularized, and though there is no “tight” way of adding your own, plugin authors can create their own dashboard widgets. The architecture is primitive at this point, but will improve offering a much easier way for plugin authors to do their thing without feeling like they are ‘hacking’.”
5. Improvements to the visual editor. “I don’t use WordPress’ visual editor, but I’m told it is a vast improvement over the older version. The TinyMCE team has worked closely with WordPress on this release as well.”
6. Flash-based image uploader. “For those of you using a lot of images in your post, the image uploader has been completely overhauled as well. Namely, you can uplopad and insert multiple images at once via a new Flash-based uploader. This will gracefully fallback to the original uploader if Flash is not installed, so never fear.”
7. Auto-upgrading of plugins. “By default, it will try to upgrade plugins that are already in the WordPress plugin repository by writing the new files out to the existing plugins. However, this is an inherent security risk as it would require your plugin files be writable by the world.”
8. Custom thumbnail sizes. “In WordPress 2.5, thumb-nailing became a whole lot more useful. You can not only set your thumbnail dimensions globally, you can also have a “medium” sized thumbnail, a la Flickr and an option to crop an oversize image instead of just resizing.”
9. New tag management interface. “It works like Flickr tags where tags can be added via a list of comma separated tags or via a “type, click, add” mantra. In addition, the UI has a tabbed interface which allows for the selection of tags by checkboxes and by most used tags, useful to say the least.”
10. Password strength indicator. A small enhancement, but a useful one for less security-savvy bloggers.
11. Bonus: New timestamp interface. A nice enhancement by b5er and WordPress contributor Mark Jaquith. “By default, a new post has no timestamp module. Instead, it’s a publish immediately, or you can click a link if you really do want to modify the timestamp. When editing a post with a timestamp, there is also no ‘Modify Timestamp’ checkbox that caused so much confusion for so many years. If you modify the existing timestamp, it’s assumed that you actually want to change the timestamp!“

So far, only Release Candidate 1 of WordPress has been released. If you’re feeling bold, you can download it from here and give it a try.