Linux fanboys are annoying

You know, as a long-time Linux advocate, I find Linux fanboys to be very annoying. The thing that is most annoying about them is that they are loud-mouthed, deluded, and have an irrational hatred of Microsoft. Linux Weekly News has been somewhat immune from the invasion of the Linux fanboys until fairly recently, probably because you have to pay or (like myself) wait a week before reading their news. However, this is changing; Here is an example of the fanboys being annoying on LWN. Here, the fanboys go on with their anti-Microsoft shills in an article about the Python programming language, of all things, simply because the linked article had a Microsoft ad in it.

Ugh.

They also spread nonsense like OpenOffice being just as full-featured as Microsoft Office. It isn't. Let me give you just one example: Microsoft Office, since at least Office 2000, has an easy way for you to assign special symbols to keypress combinations. OpenOffice doesn't. This is a known bug. The reason why MS Office can have this feature and OO doesn't is because OO doesn't have the manpower to add features like this. This is because you didn't pay for the software, so their isn't enough money to pay developers to make the software as feature-full as MS Office is.

Another example: I have installed Firefox on countless Windows machines. It was clean; in particular, since I am bilingual, I like to have its built-in spellchecker switch between English and Spanish easily, depending on which language I'm writing in. All I had to do in Windows is add Spanish, and the list can be quickly used, since it only has English and Spanish. In Ubuntu, Firefox had dozens of languages in it. There was no way, in the package management system (Synaptic), to remove these languages. I finally had to go in to /usr/lib/firefox/dictionaries and remove the dictionaries by hand.

Ugh again.

Now, Linux does have advantages over Windows. The price is better. The development and *NIX environment is a very productive environment for someone who knows UNIX's arcane commands. I really like the FVWM1 window manager, which was a fast and light window manager in 1995, and is today lightning-fast. But Linux isn't ready to be a end-user desktop. Not yet.

- Sam

MaraDNS 1.3.04 released; Chortle update

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I have just released MaraDNS 1.3.04. This has a number of bug fixes and improvments in the development branch of MaraDNS compared to the last last release. From the changelog:

• Remco pointed out that MaraDNS is not RFC4074 section 4.2 compliant. Fixed.
  
• Update of recursive server to make it more robust against certain DOS attacks.
  
• The port range that the recursive resolver binds to can now be changed in the mararc file.
  
• FAQ and SQA updates
  

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DjbDNS is harmful

DjbDNS is harmful to use because the code has not been updated for over five years. This, in spite of the fact DjbDNS has the following bugs:

• There are problems resolving some domains with DjbDNS' resolver. This is the 'akamai djbdns' problem.
  
• DjbDNS does not correctly periodically check upstream DNS servers to make sure a given domain has not moved.
  
• The list of root servers included with DjbDNS is out of date.
  
• DjbDNS can not compile in Linux without using a special incantation.
  
• There is a denial of service problem where a remote attacker can clear DjbDNS' recursive cache by sending a single "packet of death" to a dnscache server.
  

It is not feasable for a third party to fix any of these bugs because of DjbDNS' restrictive non-open-source license, and DJB appears to have no intention of fixing the bugs in his program.

In fact, MaraDNS has a better security record than DjbDNS. MaraDNS also has had denial of service problems. The difference between MaraDNS and DjbDNS is that the bugs in MaraDNS are fixed.

More information about DjbDNS' problems can be found in the MaraDNS advocacy document.

There is also a problem with the DjbDNS user base, who have all the fanatism of Jihadists.

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To be fair, here are some criticisms about MaraDNS that I added to the MaraDNS Wikipedia article:

MaraDNS has limited support for being a slave DNS server. While MaraDNS includes a tool that can receive zone files, this process needs to be automated via an external program, such as crontab, and MaraDNS needs to be restarted to load the zone in question.

While MaraDNS can resolve almost any site that other DNS servers can resolve, it does not resolve all names the same way other DNS servers do. CNAME and ANY records, in particular, are resolved differently.

MaraDNS spawns a thread for each recursive DNS request that is not already cached.

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I have updated the Chortle font, and have released version 0.21 of this font today. I'm hitting the point where I'm looking at this font too much and starting to second-guess myself. So, I'm taking a break from my embedded Linux project and will be working on MaraDNS (and my day job as an English teacher) for the time being.