The lesser mabinogion

It seems to me that there are a large number of people in the world, who have nothing better to do with their time than tell other people how they should be spending their time.
I think that pretty much all of the OLPC critics fall in to that category.

Why is it that people who sit around and do nothing feel that they should be the ones telling those that are investing large amounts of time and money doing something that they’re wasting their time and it’s all going to fail?
The best way to ensure a project fails, is to never start it.
Before criticizing someone else’s project, how about you stop and ask yourself what you hope to achieve by your criticism. Obviously you have a right to your opinion, you even have a right to spew it out to anyone that will listen, but if you spent less time shouting the deficiencies of a project to the world and more time thinking about how you could contribute to make it work better – or even starting your own project – then maybe the world might just be that little bit more of a better place.

(OLPC is the One Laptop Per Child project, that is developing a cheap ($US100) laptop for the purpose of education. They’re not trying to create a general purpose computer, they’re not trying to solve world hunger. What they are doing, is trying to fill a gap. Maybe it’ll succeed brilliantly, maybe it’ll fail dismally, but I think they should be allowed to at least try)

gah. I’m trying out Ubuntu 6.10 just for something to do, and I wanted to copy a bunch of stuff from my (Windows) laptop to the Ubuntu machine, so I looked in the Administration menu, and there was a ’shared folders’ option, so I chose that, and was greeted with a wonderfully easy interface for installing and enabling Samba support.
I shared my home directory and enabled writing and switched to my laptop to try to copy the files.
I attempted to open \\stuart-desktop and entered my username and password at the resultant prompt. The result? Being reprompted for my username and password. So I try again in case I’ve typoed, but no luck, still the same result. The samba logs at their default log level give no useful information either
From researching the issue it looks like it’s a bug that’s been known about for a long time, it’s been reported upstream but there’s no resolution yet. It seems to me that if a feature Just Doesn’t Work then you shouldn’t include the feature – especially if you’re supposed to be a polished, user friendly distribution. It’s always rather depressing when the very first thing I try to do with something doesn’t work.

I could always just manually edit the samba config myself and run smbpassword or whatever else is needed to make it work, but that’s not the point. I shouldn’t have to.
The tool implies that all I need to do is add a shared folder and it will be available. I have no problem with it requiring authentication, in fact I expected it to. But I shouldn’t have to manually fuck around with adding separate samba passwords manually through the command line to do it. It should Just Work, otherwise what the hell was the point?

I’m in the process of installing the kubuntu stuff too (for unrelated reasons), so I’ll be curious to see if the equivalent KDE tool works any better.
(update, no, it doesn’t. Gah)