Technology is a market. As all markets, it's prone to the forces of supply and demand, of perceived demand, of risk, and hype, and potential revenue in the wide digits. But let's face it, far too much time is spent standing around wondering what the "next big thing" is going to be.

Phones

That's where Apple is different. They just say "We want this, so we're building this. To hell with everyone else." Now, if this were a tree in an empty forest (if it were empty, there wouldn't be any other trees, would there?), noone would know about their products. But Apple has this talent for attracting attention. They're so secretive, and they love to surprise you. So when they stand next to that new statue and lift the veil, the technology press feels obligated to clap and cheer despite themselves, because of the anticipation.

Now, in this market of ours, Apple creates an action, widely perceived. This sends all those drones waiting for "the next big thing" running out of the room to their labs. The action creates a reaction. Google says "We want to build a phone, also with a rich runtime environment, but one that *doesn't* make the owner feel like he lives in Guantanamo Bay." Would Google have created Android without the iPhone? Who knows, but the fact is they didn't. Along come other responses. Palm is getting in on the game now. And Nokia finally got to work on a Linux-based phone platform (what on earth have they been waiting for all these years??).

It's a strange thing. Now, all these companies are rolling up their sleeves to build better phones. So why the hell didn't they before? The same exact companies that have been selling junk for a decade are now trying to improve their products. Why? Because Apple got everyone thinking that there is a demand for this. Before the iPhone, all the companies kept stealing quick glances at each other, scrambling to deliver whatever new tiny piece of junk the other was selling.

Apple, despite the murkiest of intentions, have brought about a positive development.

Software

Vendors in free software don't spend a lot of time on marketing, it's not their game. And even if they did, they don't have armies of marketeers and astronomical advertising budgets, so it's a different kind of marketing. KDE4 might be the best example of that; they really made an effort to be heard. But they're not in a position to stir up the same kind of hype that Apple can do with hard cash on the table. And thus the role of free software is often that, not of actor, but of reactor.

Free software is often the re-implementor. It doesn't seem very glamorous, but it delivers a very important product. OpenOffice is clearly a ploy to replace Ms Office, but its users are nevertheless very grateful that it's there. Mono isn't a "new thing", but it does bring the rich .NET runtime to Linux. Linux itself is just a reimplementation of Unix, but who could argue it hasn't been a wonderfully positive force? And how much good has the Wine project done, enabling countless people to run their legacy apps?

Sometimes a reaction is just the thing you need to get what you want. Stallman spent a decade warning people about the "java trap". Now that java is free software, does that make the people who worked on Classpath, Kaffe and all the other free java projects feel stupid? I doubt it, because it was their response that led to a free java. Sun, who had been forever clutching to java like a kid to his teddybear, didn't want to give up control of java. But they realized that left unchecked, this activity in the community would replace java and they would lose all control over it. So they made it free. But someone had to make them do it.

So I'm researching .NET/Mono for an application I might be doing for Windows. There are two important constraints:

• The application shall not require installation privileges. (Or users in locked down environments might not be able to run it.)
• The application shall be maximally robust with respect to runtime environment. (So that I can leave it behind with the best possible hope that it will work for years.)

The first rules out shipping an install bundle of any sort, and the runtime environment is presumed to be a vanilla Windows install. At most I can hope for a .NET runtime since it comes with XP-SP2 (I think) and certainly Vista and onwards. As for the second, I've considered things like py2exe, which bundles code with .dlls for Qt and whatever else the python code actually uses. While this seems to produce a self sufficient bundle (without requiring an install), how do I know if py2exe is going to be around in a few years when I may need to rebuild? And the Qt libs for that matter, they depend on OS-level libs that may change over time, that I have no control over.

So .NET seems to be the best only choice. Now, I obviously want to be able to run it on Mono as well, if for no other reason than to run it myself. So I have to stay clear of .NET-only bits.

That means hello Windows Forms (WPF is out, Mono doesn't support it). Now, I should say first off the bat that I'm not a gui coder. I don't like gui, it takes too much work to produce a really good gui, and it's way more hassle than I like to put up with. Nevertheless, I've seen a few of them. And Windows Forms... it's something else. On the face of it, the .NET library seems to be stocked reasonably, with classes for gui controls (System.Windows.Forms) and for drawing primitives (System.Drawing).

But then you look at some example code and you have to pinch yourself cause it's so unbelievable. I should preempt here by saying that all the gui toolkits I have seen in recent history handle layouting the same way: with layouts. You create a container that is, say, a grid, and put some widgets in it. The layout takes care of distributing the widgets in the container in a particular way. This takes care of resizing, because the widgets scale to the size of the container (and the containers, in turn, to the size of the gui). Containers can be nested to produce panels and so on.

Far be it for me to say that I like coding gui this way. It's a huge pain to set all this up. And it doesn't make resizing work well either, you have to put in a lot of extra effort just for that part. But at least it's a reasonably clean solution, and it's how Swing, WxWidgets, and I'm pretty sure Gtk and Qt as well, work.

Not Windows Forms. In Windows Forms you have containers, but there are no layouts. Everything is positioned with coordinates. As in here is a button, put it 5 pixels from the edge of the container; here's another button, put it in this location I have computed manually based on the first button. This has implications:

• positioning is pixel based,
• dimensioning is absolute - no resizing possible,
• there is no rendering.

As it turns out, the gui form is basically a canvas you can paint on. Widgets and drawing mix freely on the same pane. But remember that Drawing api I mention? It's pixel based, no Qt or Cairo rendering for shapes or fonts. Neither does .NET have any kind of svg-based rendering that I know of.

The whole thing makes me feel like a time traveler. Remember that Windows Forms isn't a deprecated library, it's still actively used (and Mono just recently got done implementing it).

So why bring this up? It's good to remember sometimes that just because something is hyped a lot doesn't make it good. Remember, .NET 3 only appeared recently, in 2006. That makes Windows Forms the designated gui toolkit right up to that point. Swing, ugly as it may be to look at (and sluggish as it's always been) came out with Java 1.2 in 1998. (As a matter of fact, I think even AWT had layout managers in 1995.)

Steven Levitt, the economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, journalist, collaborate on this title that has become something of a household name. Freakonomics is the study of common phenomena through the lens of incentives and economic reality. Levitt takes on teachers inflating test scores when standardized tests are a determining factor in their careers. It's hardly surprising, but nevertheless few people seem to give it a second thought. Likewise, in every area of life there are interests and motives, and the powers that be wish to wield a certain amount of control over the situation. But the incentives they set are often not effective.

A compelling example is the study of crack dealers, based on field data supplied by Sudhir Venkatesh. There is a certain public perception that drug dealers wield a lot of power and consequently enjoy much wealth. In reality, it turns out, much like any corporation, the foot soldiers live on minimum wage level incomes, while only the fat cats cash in. But then why would people subject themselves to such high risk for little reward? The answer seems to be that this is the only career that seems plausible to their lives.

While Levitt's case studies are generally informative, Dubner's presentation is often dull and publication-like.

Audio in linux, how to put it into words? How about: oss, alsa, pulseaudio, esound, arts, portaudio, jack, gstreamer, phonon. :googly: Did I miss any? Embarrassment of riches? Or just embarrassment?

I will not rehash history any more than to say that between buggy/incomplete drivers for sound cards and the wonderful world of alsa I've never been able to understand how the hell audio works beyond getting output and, sporadically, input. I am the quintessential dumb user of linux audio, even though I have tried to figure it out.

But let past be past. Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid. Pulseaudio ready and everything, since 8.04. Why Ubuntu decided to plug in pulseaudio without setting up any gui controls for it is beyond me. All I know is that occasionally sound output will stop working (I get 2 seconds of output and then it stops) and then "pkill pulse" cures it.

Let's run through the list.

alsamixer

I've learned to use alsamixer to fix low level audio problems. It is reliable in that it gives me all the channels on my sound card, so I always use it to mute/unmute my microphone and to untangle the master/pcm/headphones/front speakers settings caused by mixers that only allow me to control the volume of one channel and apps that output on god knows what channel.

That's alsamixer on a Ubuntu 8.10 desktop with all updates installed as per today. Here's the same thing on my laptop.

Same distro, same version, all updates installed. And I have made no conscious choice for this to come about, all I did was install the pulsaudio gui tools. All of a sudden, alsamixer is useless as it only has access to a single "master" channel. It would appear now that pulseaudio is sitting between the sound card and alsa, but does that sound right?

pulseaudio gui

pulseaudio is here, might as well use it, right? Ubuntu ships a bunch of pa* packages that are gui tools for pulseaudio (not installed by default). This one is called pavucontrol. It lets you set volume per audio stream. I love this, I've wanted to have it since forever.

But then it comes to output and what do I see?

A single output device. Where is my master, my pcm, all my channels? What's more bizzarre is that pulseaudio says it's connecting to alsa while alsamixer says it's connecting to pulsaudio. Surely that way madness lies?

What's worse, pavucontrol is a gui app without any kind of systray integration, so much as I would like to use it as an easy-to-reach mixer, I can't.

kmix

I run kmix in my tray, it lets me set the volume by scrolling the mousewheel over the icon, which is exactly what I want. It's not a terribly impressive mixer, as it only lets me select one channel to control, whereas what I really would like is to be able to lock several output channels into one, otherwise I'm never really in control. So the best I can do is set the volume to max on master, and tell kmix to show me pcm. That seems to work well enough.

It appears I have two identical channels, but the leftmost is misnamed, that's actually Master.

Now, let's see. alsamixer doesn't show any of these channels, because it delegates to pulseaudio. So kmix connects to... god knows what, but at least I can access these channels.

gnome-volume-control

Gnome's volume manager is an interesting one. It has a combo box for devices. I'm showing here all the devices related to output and how channels are connected.

The good news is that the channels in the default mixer correspond to those in kmix (sweet sanity!). But then there is that bottom mixer with a channel of the same name as the single output channel in pavucontrol. And yes, they are the same (and the same as the single output in alsamixer).

But this channel appears to be some kind of composite output channel that has no bearing on any of the output channels in the top mixer (or in kmix). (Ie. while it might appear to be a composite pipe that aggregates the flow of all these standard channels, it's actually a pipe that sits after all of them. If pcm volume is 0, this channel won't receive any input, and will be mute no matter its volume setting.)

So neither can I effect the settings of master/pcm/etc with this channel nor vice versa. That means if I want to use this single channel as my master volume control, I have to make sure that absolutely no application can mess with the volume for any of the standard master/pcm/etc channels. Good luck with that.

A sane spec

I know this sounds crazy, but what's it gonna take to get a single server+mixer applet that

• captures every possible audio stream, no matter the audio server/api it's on,
• prevents applications from messing with master volume controls (eg. mplayer),
• has a single virtual channel controlling all the underlying output channels, so that I can have a single master volume slider,
• has per stream/app volume controls pulseaudio style,
• integrates well into the systray,
• integrates with laptop hotkeys

?

UPDATE: Ubuntu users can now vote on a proposal to unify sound systems on ubuntu brainstorm. Hopefully this idea and the related ones can gain some traction with Canonical to attack the problem.

Tim Parks's chronicles in the footsteps of Hellas Verona with the Brigate Gialloblu are well known to Serie A fans. I'm not one for books about football - I've never been so deeply interested as to study the history and try to find out absolutely everything, to me it's about what's happening in the present. But I thought I would give this one a try, after seeing it recommended by everyone who'd read it. I thought it would be an anthropological book, but it turns out Parks is Veronese: an immigrant who's found himself at home after 20 years in Verona.

His story is appealing on many levels. What strikes me first is the cozy nostalgia of Serie A in 2001. That Verona team had a lot of players who went on to bigger things. The Verona of Frey, Adailton and Mutu. With players who would make a career at Parma: Gilardino, Bonazzoli, Morfeo, not to mention Prandelli. With Laursen, who would sign for Milan. With Camoranesi, the oriundo, who would lend creativity and dribbling to Lippi's all winning Italy; and keystone of present day Juventus, of course. With Oddo, the most abused of all players, who allegedly had secured a transfer to Lazio in mid season and didn't seem to try very hard. With the Parma veteran Apolloni, his last season before hanging it up. With a young and hopeless Cassetti, present day Roma.

The Bari of Yksel Osmanovski and Daniel Andersson, and the very young Antonio Cassano. Luca Toni playing for Vicenza, long before his rise to fame. It was the start of Parma's sad demise, they had sold Crespo and Veron, brought in Ariel Ortega. They were still impressive, however, with Buffon, Thuram, Cannavaro, and a goal hungry Di Vaio. There were the lacklustre Inter and Milan, the latter would appear in the Uefa Cup the following season. Lazio, champions, had the most expensive squad in the world, way before their financial collapse. Eriksson had done it with Nesta, Nedved, Veron, Almeyda and Sergio Conceicao. Up front they had, no less, Boksic, Salas, Roberto Mancini, Kennet Andersson, Simone Inzaghi and Fabrizio Ravanelli. Roma had brought in Emerson, Batistuta and Nakata, and clinched the title.

And finally it was the Juve of Ancelotti, the man who came so close, but couldn't seem to win anything. Davids ruled the midfield with an iron fist that of Montero in defense. Conte would supply crucial goals when the chips were down, but the sole responsibility for offence was on Zidane's shoulders. It was Trezeguet's first season, after that golden goal at Euro2000. He made short process of Pippo Inzaghi, who was promptly sold. And it was still a time of struggle for Del Piero, who would strike up a golden partnership with Trezeguet the following season, in an improbably league triumph.

And so this is the world in which the story is told. Hellas was fighting for survival just as Chievo was on the brink of promotion to Serie A. They did stay up, but only for a year. Today we find Chievo in Verona's place, and Hellas at the bottom of Serie C1. How time flies. Parks sets out to write a book about Hellas, and the Brigate Gialloblu. Out of all the supporter groups in Italy, they are infamous for being the most racist of them all. By reputation, at least. As it turns out, they are not so much racist, complete with their monkey chants, as just plain antagonistic. But this is Italy, where everything is politicized. And Verona is cast as the racist town.

What matters, above all, in Italy is pretense, theater. It is not so much that rules are bent, they just don't exist as rules, merely as guidelines. And there are always grounds for appeal. In one incident, the police state in no uncertain terms that noone will be let into the stadium without a ticket. But then they are allowed in anyway. One must always be seen to play one's part, that is the crucial thing. On a different occasion, there is heavy rainfall during a match, and by half time the pitch is flooded. The rules state that the ball must be thrown up in the air and made to bounce on the surface, or else the game must be abandoned. But neither the referee nor the teams wish that to happen, so the man in black boldly goes around the pitch trying to get the ball to bounce until he finds a spot where it does. He repeats the test a few more times and now, clearly, a pretense to the rule has been made, the match continues. (Incidentally, that explain's Collina's Perugia in 2000.)

Parks gives us a broad description of Hellas. Both the supporter culture he participates in, and the inner workings of the club. He relays conversations with fans, players, coaches and administrators. What's really interesting is that it would seem everyone in that world, down to the president of the club, is victim of circumstance. The fans are the mercy of the management and the players. The players are at the mercy of the resources the administration has available, the coach, the fans, and public opinion. The coach is at once the most empowered person of all, deciding who will play and where, but then every single decision he makes will be scrutinized. And the president, supposedly all powerful, can do no more than to balance the budget by selling the most valuable players, while facing pressure from fans to spend more and spend wiser.

All in all, a book for a Serie A fan. Humorous in part, revealing to a point, but also padded with a lot of relatively boring storytelling.