Dear Oracle:

You don't know me, so please permit me a brief introduction: I'm Joanie. By day, I'm an assistive technology specialist working with individuals who are blind or visually impaired. By night, weekend, and holiday for almost four years now, I've been a GNOME community contributor working primarily on the Orca screen reader, a project led by Sun's Accessibility Program Office.

Working with the engineers at Sun, both inside and outside of the APO, has been an honor for a variety of reasons, not least of which is our shared common belief: Access isn't a privilege; it's a right. Towards that end, Sun Microsystems strived to ensure that ALL users have access to software and information.

Does Oracle plan to do the same?

Sun Microsystems believed that these things shouldn't be denied to those who aren't employed, or who don't live in the "right" country, or who don't speak the "right" language, or who cannot afford to purchase thousands of dollars' worth of access technology.

What does Oracle believe?

Through its significant, ongoing contributions to the GNOME desktop, Sun Microsystems has made computer access possible for many individuals with disabilities, from all walks of life, all over the world.

Will Oracle embrace the opportunity to continue this important work?

My assumption was yes. In fact, I was feeling quite hopeful. After all, the past few years have been hard on Sun. But with Larry Ellison's promise of increased investment in the Sun brand, and Oracle's strong commitment to accessibility, things would finally be turning around: If one under-funded APO could accomplish everything that it has, what could the two combined and properly-funded APOs achieve? At the very least we'd be able to finally get a handle on all of the accessibility challenges facing GNOME 3.

I was wrong.

Last week, Oracle laid off two more members of Sun's already-decimated APO. One of those let go happened to be both the Orca project lead and the GNOME Accessibility project lead, Willie Walker. I truly hope this was an oversight on Oracle's part, and one that will be rectified very soon. Because if it is not, and if no other company steps forward to continue this work, the accessibility of the GNOME desktop will become the open source equivalent of an unfunded mandate, doomed ultimately to fail.

Oracle's decision threatens to leave many individuals with disabilities around the world without access to a modern desktop environment. I find that tragic.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're running Ubuntu. Some take us forward, they're running OpenSolaris.

Sorry Jeremy, I couldn't resist. And my apologies to you as well, gentle reader, if you came here looking for the current state of affairs on OpenSolaris vs Ubuntu. One of these days I should write up my personal perspective on where things stand. Unless, of course, I can convince some folks to do an "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC"-style smackdown, which would be infinitely more entertaining. Assuming that will not come to pass.... For now suffice it to say that while we're not quite "there yet" with OpenSolaris, every day brings me a bit closer to concluding that my bastardized quotation ain't so far from being the truth.

But that's not what this entry is about. It's about time, plain and simple. Or, rather, not so simple as I discovered.... With a hat tip to Rich who always concludes each of his technical exercises in frustration by sharing what he's learned for the next poor soul who floats in on the same boat, I present to you what I've worked out thus far about time in a dual-boot Ubuntu/OpenSolaris environment:

1. Ubuntu insists on setting your hardware clock to UTC. It doesn't matter if you didn't want your hardware clock set to UTC. Nor are you asked if you might want to switch away from the local time in favor of UTC -- unless, you happen to be using the alternative installer. Sadly, odds are that you are not: If you're using the user-friendly, graphical, "live CD," you are NOT using the alternative installer.
2. Theoretically, the Ubuntu installer looks to see if you're in a dual-boot environment. If it concludes that you are, it is designed to not engage in its default time "correcting" behavior. This would suggest that installing OpenSolaris prior to Ubuntu would solve the problem. Alas, it does not. Trust me.
3. I have been informed that "UTC=yes is the correct and sane default" If you're wondering what the advantage of it defaulting to yes happens to be, as I was/am, I'm afraid I couldn't tell you. (UPDATE, see below.) I truly believe that there is indeed a good reason -- feel free to add it in the comments for my edification -- but the fiat was all I got. Well, that and the fact that Ubuntu detects dual-boot installations ("albeit not always quite as often as you'd want." Indeed. See previous item.). Oh, and the suggestion that I "can always change it." Which brings me to:

4. How DO you change whether or not the hardware clock is set to UTC or the local time post-installation? You'd think (or at least I thought) you would be able to do so through the Time and Date Settings dialog, part of gnome-system-tools. Were that the case, there'd be a uniform (and hence more user-friendly) way to adjust this option in Ubuntu and OpenSolaris because both use the GNOME desktop and, therefore, both include g-s-t's Time and Date Settings dialog.

   Of course, you could bypass the whole UTC vs. local timezone issue and use g-s-t to set up synchronization with an NTP server in both Ubuntu and OpenSolaris.... That's actually what I wound up doing last week. BUT what if you don't have a network connection at the moment? Besides I wanted an answer; not a workaround.

   I was going to open an RFE against g-s-t -- I'm envisioning a "My clock is set to UTC" checkbox -- but someone beat me to it. Two years ago. It hasn't been closed as WONTFIX, but no action seems to have been taken either.

5. So how do you change it in Ubuntu then? Well, some googling led me to the answer: Edit /etc/default/rcS. Just set UTC=no. Once you know this magical tidbit, it's all good: A few seconds' worth of editing and Ubuntu stops stomping on the time, OpenSolaris doesn't keep having the time changed on it, and you cease to send email to folks from four hours into the future. In other words, if all you want to do is cause your blessed environments to stop waging war over what time it is, this is all you need to do. And there was much rejoicing. Yea.

6. But what if you want to change it in OpenSolaris instead? At this point answering this question was/is admittedly merely an exercise to satisfy my curiosity. That said.... After some more googling.... It seems that you can use rtc for this purpose:

   pfexec /usr/sbin/rtc -z UTC

   is all you need. Once again, Ubuntu is happy (this time because it can continue stomping along on its "correct and sane" path ), OpenSolaris is happy (because its time now jives with the hardware clock), and your friends no longer have any reason to suspect you've mastered time travel. At least not until you adjust the timezone via g-s-t. Doing so causes /etc/rtc_config -- the file you corrected via rtc -- to be updated and you're back to Ubuntu and OpenSolaris fighting again.

   Should g-s-t be modifying /etc/rtc_config?? I honestly don't know, but life seems like it might be easier if it didn't, so I filed a bug against OpenSolaris. *shrugs*

Now if you would be so kind, answer me this: Why is it so much work to (figure out how to) configure something as simple and trivial as the time in a dual-boot environment? Shouldn't it JustWork™?

UPDATE: This morning Colin Watson began addressing the bug I filed regarding the Ubuntu Live CD's installer failing to set UTC=no in a dual-boot Ubuntu/OpenSolaris environment. He even took the time to provide me with a useful reference/link:

If you're unfamiliar with the reasons why keeping the hardware clock in local time is a bad idea, please read:

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/mswish/ut-rtc.html

Thanks Colin!

BOSTON, Mass—February 27, 2008 — The GNOME Foundation is running an accessibility outreach program, offering USD$50,000 to be split among individuals. This program will promote software accessibility awareness among the GNOME community as well as harden and improve the overall quality of the GNOME accessibility offering.

The program is sponsored by GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google™'s Open Source Program Office, Canonical, and Novell. This is the second in a series of outreach programs coordinated and run by the GNOME Foundation.

"I'm excited about the GNOME accessibility outreach program because it continues the promotion of compelling accessible design as part of the mainstream developer culture. We believe the set of tangible and achievable tasks outlined will help improve the already good accessibility offering of the GNOME desktop," said Willie Walker, Senior Staff Engineer of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility starts accepting applications on March 1st and will run towards the end of the year. There will be two tracks to the program: In the first track accepted individuals will work towards accomplishing one of the major projects nominated for the program, earning US$6,000 and can take up to six months to complete the task. The second track will reward contributors US$1,000 for fixing five bugs out of a pool of accessibility bugs nominated by the program judges.

Individuals interested in participating in the program should check out www.gnome.org/projects/outreach/a11y. More information about the program may be found at the same location.

Read the full announcement at:
http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/gop-a11y.html

According to Wikipedia:

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey; rather, it is a metaphor for an abstract device that produces a random sequence of letters ad infinitum. The theorem illustrates the perils of reasoning about infinity by imagining a vast but finite number, and vice versa. The probability of a monkey typing a given string of text as long as, say, Hamlet is so tiny that, were the experiment conducted, the chance of it actually occurring during a span of time of the order of the age of the universe is minuscule but not zero.

My proposed re-write:

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a computer keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely create a particular operating system, such as Linux or OS X. In this context, "almost surely" is a euphemism meaning "one could only hope," and the "monkey" is an actual monkey. Attempting to prove the theorem illustrates the perils of equipping actual monkeys with actual computer keyboards and then unleashing what they produce upon unsuspecting consumers: The probability of a monkey creating an operating system of a quality akin to that of, say, Linux or OS X is so tiny that when the experiment was conducted the result was Windows Vista.

So what if I:

• Regularly have blue screens of death
• Can't get the Assistive Technology I need to use for work to actually run without hanging
• Can't get the supposedly "unified drivers" for my brand new videos cards to co-exist together
• Must re-encode ALL of the videos I'm producing for work using Windows Media Encoder because apparently Vista is so protective that it won't automatically install the needed codec like XP would, which means our users won't be able to view the content, which rather defeats the purpose of producing the videos in the first place.
• Just spent the majority of my entire workday on the production of a single three-minute video due to the above issues

At least I have transparent title bars. "Wow" indeed.

I was thinking about getting an Amazon Kindle. Now I think I'll wait until it doesn't suck quite so badly.

Watch Scoble's how-do-I-hate-thee video review and/or read his write-up.

Michal Pryc has come up with a working GUI tool for Project Indiana's Image Packaging System (IPS): Imagine. Michal includes a 10-minute video demonstration on his blog, but to be honest it's not necessary as using his prototype is pretty self-explanatory.

We're getting closer and closer to a Solaris for "the rest of us." Awesome!

Last night I was in my local CompUSA and saw the cutest little HP. While I really don't need yet another computer (2 PC desktops, 2 PC laptops -- although one *is* for work -- and 1 iMac), I had been thinking it might be nice to have a dedicated OpenSolaris box both for development and testing of Orca and just to get myself more familiar with Solaris.

I know what you're thinking. Yes, I do have multi-boot systems; yes, I do know about virtualization. I just find that if I have a dedicated system, I'm more likely to interact with the OS in question than I am if I have to reboot or launch a VM. Plus, when all of your OSes live on one box, a single "bleeding edge" install gone sufficiently awry can take out the whole pack.

Anyhoo... This tiny box might be perfect -- if it's compatible with OpenSolaris. The store associates were perfectly fine with my downloading and installing the Sun Device Detection Tool, but it turns out the tool is not compatible with Windows Vista. Given that any PC you find in the store now has Vista installed, it would be very cool to have a Vista-compatible version. Please Sun?

I might still get that HP anyway. It is awful cute, and I could put Ubuntu Gutsy on it and make my office desktop the dedicated OpenSolaris box...

The one thing I have found lacking in Linux is a OneNote equivalent. Zoho Notebook seemed like it would fill that gap, but it was in private beta for so long.... Now it is in public beta. Finally. Be sure to check out the video on the Zoho blog as well as Robert Scoble's video on PodTech. I had read somewhere that Notebook was "so much more" than a web 2.0-style OneNote, but I didn't fully get that until I saw the PodTech demo.

Time to start populating my Notebook. Woo hoo!

TechCrunch broke the news that Google is buying Feedburner. I guess I need to subscribe to my own feed now and be on the lookout for the inclusion of ads. (I HATE ads.) After all, Google has to recoup that $100 million somehow....

A ChangeLog is the great equalizer: It elevates the most trivial bug squashed and the simplest enhancement request fulfilled to the same status as those critical bugs and much-needed enhancements whose solutions took hours to implement.

A ChangeLog is not a time sheet: Its chronology fails to include the effort invested in working with developers of other products helping them identify and triage the bugs which impact the accessibility of their product and/or convincing them that these bugs are indeed important.

The problem with ChangeLogs is that -- as their name suggests -- they only tell you what has changed. Perhaps more accurately, the problem with users reading the ChangeLogs without the benefit of the above perspective is that their view of the team's priorities and time allocation is distorted thus leading them to conclude that

The team sometimes tends to serve the pie before they have served the beef; I prefere (sic) the other way.

never realizing that serving the "beef" occupies 95% of the team's time. To extend this user's metaphor a bit further: After looking long and hard and at long last finding the cow, haggling with the farmer over the price, finally convincing the farmer to sell it to us, getting the cow home, bringing about its untimely demise, turning the carcass into a decent meal (for those prone to carnivorism) which we then hand deliver to the user's home, the response we get is that we shouldn't have wasted our time stopping along the way to purchase that store-bought pie.