Chomsky, udev, and Configs

Well, I managed to confirm the earlier solution to the udev v. fb issue I was having (google rules). I’ve also added a link to Noam Chomsky’s Blog along the side. Last-but-not-least, on OS X’s “FileVault”: it’s the way encrypted disks on Unix should be handled in the UI. Certainly Linux has the potential to support this type of thing in 2.6 (my /home partition used to be encrypted, though I decrypted it to improve speed), but the UI simply doesn’t exist. A lot of the issues in Linux are related to the often broken path from the user’s UI down to the kernel and back. This is related to the fact that so far as the kernel is concerned, the command-line is the UI. While this idea is fine for the kernel, the use of it in the distro is insane. I think SuSE has the right idea, actually, keeping all the distro-level configuration in one place. At first I hated it, because I already knew the formats and locations of the RedHat flat files, and it’s not terribly useful for shell scripting and such, but a single system config in XML is no less scriptable, and much more useful to applications, especially now that we’ve had libxml into most modern system’s core requirements. Unfortunately, debian seems hell-bent on targetting server environments, what with it’s “webmin” config system. Unfortunately, I care less about admining a server than I do about having a just-works desktop that happens to run a server—which is why returning the laptop I’m using to type this is so hard ;-).