Unbootable? Replace It

I have not found a solution to this one.

I have an old HP desktop, purchased about 7 years ago. I long ago wiped WinXP off of it in favor of Linux. I was running Gentoo's 2008.1 version, until the hard drive crashed. Now I need to give you some history. I originally installed the old RH8, because anything newer had problems. I eventually found a Mandriva Free version that would install--but it had only 128 MiB of RAM, so their KDE-based GUI was so slow as to be unusable. I then tried Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, and Mepis. In each case, GRUB could not boot after installation. Finally, I tried Gentoo, where I was able to use LILO, which worked well.

Fast-forward to the past couple of weeks. After working in Missouri for seven months, I come home to find my print server's hard drive has crashed. I had another EIDE drive, so I just put it in and started to install. If you've ever installed Gentoo, you know that you don't just throw in a CD and come back in an hour. You follow a long and detailed step-by-step process that lasts hours or even days (640 MiB made it much faster now than it used to be). Before you get to the first reboot, you install a boot loader. Knowing that GRUB doesn't play well with a lot of older hardware (I had other computers that were unbootable with GRUB but worked with LILO) I made sure to install LILO, as usual. Only this time, the reboot wasn't successful.

Turns out that the hard drive is /dev/hda during installation, but /dev/sda once you go to boot the system. LILO doesn't allow setting itself for that situation, and GRUB requires you to get into a shell (sometimes inaccessible once it caroms off, looking for now-nonexistent drives and partitions). So I am stripping it down for disposal now. I realize that I could fix it if I fiddled around enough, but what happens when the next kernel update is installed? Am I going to have to redo it?

Update: 2009-NOV-06 I decided that it wasn't worth it to try and keep the 2002-vintage machine in use. OfficeMax or Office Depot or "office whatever" had a sale on a Windows Vista computer because Windows 7 was coming out the next day, so my new "print server" has more than double the RAM, a faster, dual-core AMD processor, and the weirdest form factor I've ever seen. It only has to last until next Summer, because I'm planning on building a couple of computers then.

Because I no longer needed LILO to boot the computer, it now runs Xubuntu 9.10 x86_64. Best of all, setting up CUPS the way I wanted was much easier and quicker. The LaserJet 1018 printer is now shared with every computer (MJ's Mac required a long and difficult configuration, because it wanted to print thumbnails instead of full pages, but getting foo2zjs directly from the site (and the correct PPD file, together with Ghostscript and Foomatic) works well. Of course, the first step is to install the development tools off the setup DVD. Nothing works if you don't do that. I now officially hate Mac printer setup. Every time I do it, it takes as much time as setting up the Linux and Windows computers combined.)

As for the HP, it will join two other computers (dating back to 1997 and earlier) at my town's electronics waste collection site tomorrow.

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Users, Developers Agree: GPL Best Software License

Why Apache is not the bottom of the open source incline | Open Source | ZDNet.com

Any code you write is proprietary to you. No matter its license, you feel a proprietary interest in it. You may want contributions from others, but you also want protection for your rights as an author. You don’t want someone going around behind your back and turning your open source code proprietary with a tweak here and some marketing there. You want your interest in improvements protected.

If this is your attitude, an attitude both common and natural, then you will likely prefer the GPL to Apache licensing. Under the GPL your interest in getting improvements is protected. The power of others to fork your code and turn it to their profit is limited.

In a short post, Dana Blankenhorn explains why GPL-licensed software is just the thing for users, even if it isn't exactly right for large corporations.

Matt Mullenweg explains it this way:

Not Lonely at All — Matt Mullenweg

It’s user freedom that the GPL was created to protect, just like the Bill of Rights was created to protect the people, not the President. The GPL introduces checks and balances into an incredibly imbalanced power dynamic, that between a developer and his/her product’s users. The only thing the GPL says you can’t do is take away the rights of your users in your work or something derived from a GPL project, that the user rights are unalienable. You are free to do pretty much whatever you want as long as it does not infringe on the freedoms of others. (Sound familiar?)

That’s what software freedom means to me, and it’s something I believe in strongly enough to fight for and defend even when it’s not the easy or popular thing to do. (Especially this weekend as we celebrate the original “fork” of the US from from England.)

Personally, I seek out and prefer GPLv3 and GPLv2 software before "less-restrictive" open source licenses, and will generally only buy / use proprietary software if there is nothing else available. This is a choice I make because I am a user of software who is very concerned about the intrusiveness and anti-user orientation of EULA-licensed software. One example is "Genuine Disadvantage", whereby Microsoft inspects your computer each time you start it to see whether your software licensing is valid. Another example is software that loses functionality after a license period expires, such as the antivirus that comes preinstalled on your new laptop.

I think that many in the open source movement like it because the development model tends to result in rapid improvement and in rapid fixing of bugs and security holes. In that case, concern for users and their rights ("free software" is really about the freedoms of the users, not the freedoms of the developers, nor the price) is a secondary motivation if it factors in at all. That is great, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough to advance the rights and interests of the user.

I encourage you to go and read both of the above. (ZDNet is ad-supported, so by visiting you help ensure that Dana can continue writing.) I hope you will do more, though. Start specifying and requiring and buying and using GPL-licensed software whenever you can. Always, when the alternatives are commecially-licensed.

IceRocket: software licensing

Software Licensing

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Ditching Amarok 2, Going Back To 1.4

When I upgraded to the 9.04 version of the Ubuntu family of operating systems, there were some immediately apparent problems. Notably, sound no longer worked on any Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Xubuntu system I upgraded. After some gymnastics, audio mostly works. There are random issues with it, but I am again able to listen to my favorite podcasts, such as Geeks and God and Industry Misinterpretations.

Well, I should say that I am able to listen now that I've reverted back to Amarok 1.4 and dumped version 2. What was wrong with Amarok 2? Let me list some things that are wrong with it:

• No audio. For most things I attempted to listen to over the past few months, I wound up using Listen Music Player because Amarok just would not work. Changing Phonon to use Xine as the backend partially solves that problem. For some reason, the Gstreamer backend is unable to communicate properly with the sound system. At this point, I was unsure whether the remaining audio problems were Ubuntu and PulseAudio or KDE and Amarok.
  


• Not as easy to change the podcast download & storage area to ~/Podcasts. I wound up having to create a symbolic link from ~/Podcasts to the hidden, too-long default directory path, ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/podcasts. I use other media players too, and I want them all to use the same directories for file storage. Unfortunately, they all re-download a podcast episode that was previously downloaded by another player. Perhaps the feed should contain a hash (MD5/SHA1) of each episode, so that players can determine when an episode is already downloaded and ready to be added to the database.


• The interface is filled with unwanted garbage. For example, the center pane kept reverting to showing me every file I had attempted to listen to. No amount of changing settings would stop this until a recent update replaced this very annoying "feature" with another (less annoying, but still not useful to me) display.
  


• Amarok 2 was constantly throwing up this "dynamic playlist" thing at me. If I wanted someone else to decide what I want, I don't need a media player. Radio stations do that already. Well, media player X does this. Good for them. Make it an easily-selected option, perhaps using Pandora as the selector / source.
  


• Amarok 2 is in your face, whining and clinging and getting in the way, hindering you from. If you've had a 3 year-old around the house when he or she felt sick, you know what I mean. I cannot imagine why the team behind Amarok intentionally did this.

It feels awful, because Amarok was one of two applications that I used to show people who were considering a transition from the slavery of Windows to the freedom of Linux. (The other was digiKam, another KDE application that has similar problems in KDE4.) It was so easy to download a podcast episode, to play it, to access your music collection--far easier than fussing with Windows Media Player--plus it can use music in the Ogg format, which neither Windows Media Player nor Apple Quicktime can do.

Someone decided to hide the controllability that made the software usable in the first place. I like simple interfaces, but those interfaces must allow one to easily surface "intermediate" and "advanced" functionality when desired. That's one of the mistakes that the GNOME environment has made. Look at how much more functional and usable the KDE 3.5 versions of AmaroK and digiKam are as compared to software like F-spot. I'd like the KDE 4 versions to be equally functional and usable, even if their interfaces never return to the former configuration. Don't decide for me! Choose a sensible default, and then make it easily possible to change it if the default turns out to be wrong. KDE used to know this, and that is one reason why the KDE environment has always been the better of the two, even with its beefier memory and CPU requirements.

Instructions for switching back to version 1.4 are here.

IceRocket tags: Amarok, Ubuntu

AmaroK, Ubuntu

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Interest Waning In iPhone? Buy A Pre Instead.

IPhone fever drops a notch as 3G S debuts - Los Angeles Times

"It's a device that does everything in my life," said Vartan Nadjaryan, who already has an iPhone but still showed up at an AT&T store in Glendale at 3:30 a.m. Friday to be among the first to get his hands on the latest incarnation of Apple Inc.'s popular touch-screen device, the iPhone 3G S.

...

Since introducing the original iPhone in 2007, Apple has snagged a significant chunk of the market for smartphones, a category of high-end cellphones that also lets users take pictures, play videos, access the Internet or play games. Last year, the Cupertino, Calif., company sold 13.7 million iPhones worldwide, capturing 8.4% of the smartphone market, said Tina Teng, an analyst with research firm iSuppli Corp. in El Segundo.

But while throngs of people lined up for hours for the first- and second-generation iPhones, Friday's launch of the iPhone 3G S was relatively subdued. At the AT&T store where Nadjaryan went, about 15 customers were waiting when the store opened at 7 a.m. But a mile away at the Apple store in the Glendale Galleria, about 200 had shown up by the same time.

As the owner of a Palm Pre, I understand the hunger. Still, I think the 3GS is roughly equal to the Instinct I traded for the Pre. The iPhone is still not expandable, still only runs on the inferior AT&T network (in the US), and still only runs apps approved by Apple. It has a very active Appstore; its connection with iTunes gives it a sure connection with music and other media buyers; (two things that were lacking on the Instinct) but it is as controlled by Apple as any former Soviet hostage nation was.

The Pre's App Catalog has a much smaller number of applications, although the number is growing. Thanks to the "Classic" emulator, the Pre can run many legacy Palm OS apps, a pretty large number. The apps are mostly beta versions right now, and therefore zero-price. But some of them are already worth buying--Tweed (a Twitter client), AccuWeather, and The Sporting News Baseball app are all professional quality software--this, of course, was lacking on the Instinct. There was no central repository for third-party applications.

But I think the thing that the Pre has that is making iPhone users drool is its multitasking "cards" interface. (The iPhone's BSD-based OSX very likely retains multitasking in the core, but support at the user level is lacking.) The keyboard is a great improvement over on-screen keyboards, but it would be even better if it were bigger. Possibly it could slide out of the side of the next model of the phone.

The Pre isn't perfect by any means, as any honest user will admit (same for the iPhone--I played with it before I got the Instinct--the Instinct was a better phone and the Pre is even better). For example, if I shut off the Bluetooth (from the top right corner) and then get a call, I am consistently unable to reactivate it during the call. The green in-a-call app refuses to yield the foreground when I touch the top right to reactivate Bluetooth. But if Bluetooth is already active, it works great. My previous phones lacked even the ability to temporarily shut down Bluetooth when convenient, so this is a big improvement already. I am currently downloading WebOS 1.03, so this may have already been resolved.

I love having IM and text messaging open while I'm also checking my e-mail, tweeting, watching an approaching storm, and tracking the Dodgers as they stomp their opponents. Having all of them open and being able to switch between them at will is mega-awesome! If you're looking for a smartphone, look at the Pre before you look at anything else. I think you'll find no reason to continue looking for a phone.

IceRocket: Palm Pre, iPhone 3GS

Palm Pre, iPhone 3GS

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Pre-Mania: The Phone Is So Good, It Was Worth It

Background:
Over the past couple of years, I finally left Cingular / AT&T and their spotty and inferior coverage. With my current employment, I travel to different parts of the country and work for a few months at a time. In every location I worked, with the exception of New Jersey, AT&T's coverage was lacking. Each place, I'd call their support line, where someone would tell me the same thing: "We know we have a problem in that area, but we intend to add more towers in [name of area] later this year."

I went with a service called Helio. Helio was an awesome thing. They run on the Sprint network, so coverage was excellent. For instance, in the San Diego area, around the corner from UCSD, I had perfect coverage (except for the grounds of the hotel, which was in a little bowl-shaped depression). The same great coverage was true in Columbus, Ohio, and in Nebraska (both in Lincoln and in tiny towns with names like Schuyler and Kearney). But Helio's financial state put communication in jeopardy, so I added a Sprint phone, the Instinct. Being on the same Sprint network, I got the same great coverage.

Now, Helio's big thing is media & data functionality. My original plan was to get the Ocean, but the store where I got the phones was out of Oceans and offering a deal on the FIN. I had intended that I would upgrade to the Ocean "in a few months". But then something happened. Apple introduced the iPhone (with features that exceeded those of Helio's products and service) and Helio promised a version 2 of the Ocean that would catch up and pass the iPhone. But then came Helio's financial crisis.

(The iPhone was not without its own problems. At one place, there was a guy who had to charge his phone two or three times per day, because he was playing music and browsing the Internet. My FIN could go most of the day with similar usage. Plus, the iPhone was and is tied to the static-filled and slow AT&T network that people love to hate.)

The point is, I was very happy with what I got from Helio, even if the phone itself wasn't as pleasant. Text messages and e-mail defaulted to T9 text entry mode, which meant that I was constantly having to switch modes, erase what I'd entered, and re-enter my text. The screen was small, and the e-mail display was too confined. If there was any error message from the mail server, the phone would erase your username/password and require you to re-enter it. I could read and send e-mail from several popular services (and POP3/IMAP4-based providers). I could browse the Web (many, but not all, sites were easily viewed). I could view YouTube videos. And if I wanted to do so, I could use the phone as a phone.

Once I added Sprint and the Instinct, the onscreen keyboard was an amazing improvement over the FIN. When Helio and I parted ways, the Sprint phone and service were so reliable that I seriously never missed Helio. (Hint to VirginMobile/Helio: get rid of the foreign-based support line. Oh, and if someone is insuring one phone, ask whether he/she meant to insure all phones on the account. You'd be surprised how an unexpected $400 charge can chase away customers.)

Today
Now, I loved my Instinct. Again, it was not without problems, but I could truly understand why iPhone users are fanatical about their phones. One of the problems I found was that it only sporadically mounted as a disk under Ubuntu Linux. This made it unusable as a media player. I don't really use the media player I have, so it never mattered to me. (As I understand it, Apple tries to prevent Linux users from getting full use of their iPhones and iPods, too.) From first touch, the Instinct was love alive.

The Pre, on the other hand, immediately presented itself as a problem. As a tech-savvy user, I expected to be able to use Bluetooth to beam contacts from the old phone to the new one. Unfortunately, this is currently disabled. We have to bring our phones to the store and ask the nice young man behind the counter to do the transfer for us. I felt like a 65 year-old woman getting the Geek Squad to set up her phone for her.

Once that obstacle was crossed, I noticed just how small the keyboard is. It looks like it was made for a five year-old's fingers. But it takes very little time to get used to it. Soon, you are typing one-handed with pretty good accuracy and speed.

At that point, you start to actually use the features on the phone. And wow! someone did a good job with this phone. There is really not any single feature that is a "killer", must-have feature--at first--on this phone. Everything is very good, and everything has one or two "what were they thinking?" moments, just as the contact-transfer did. The browser is good. The e-mail application is very good. The way the contacts applet fetches and merges your contacts is, again, very good. The ability to switch between IM and SMS messaging and back is very good. In all these things, the Pre far outshines the competitive feature of the iPhone.

But the killer feature, expected to be the physical keyboard, is in fact, the "cards" multitasking metaphor. WebOS, unlike the operating systems in most smart phones, is designed to run multiple apps at once, and to do it in a way that is natural and efficient to use. Once you experience cards, the Instinct, as much as I love it, will never again satisfy. I've watched a few iPhoneys (over-the-top fanatic iPhone users) already struggling with their loyalties once they played with my Pre.

The Pre is attracting a lot of attention right now, even when Apple is reducing the price of the iPhone and introducing an all-3G model (which still runs on a network that doesn't have 3G availability in many parts of the country).

If you have not yet gotten in on the smartphone revolution, take a look at the Pre. If you're an iPhone user who isn't happy with AT&T (or prospective iPhone user who is reluctant because of AT&T), take a look at the Pre. You may be surprised at just how good it is.

VBox 2.2: Yes, Yes, Yes!

Background

Over the years, as I've tried out different operating systems, I ran into a substantial obstacle: I have very limited hardware available, and I don't want to destroy my existing set up to try out another operating system.

For this reason, I have been a real fan of emulation and virtualization software. Over the years, I have tried out Bochs, Qemu, VMWare Workstation, VMWare Player, VMWare Server, VirtualBox, and probably a few others that I have forgotten. (This does not include Xen, primarily because it requires hardware assist and my hardware is too old for that.)

Two years ago, I had decided to focus on VMWare Server and Qemu. Then the VMWare kernel modules stopped updating in the Ubuntu repositories, which meant that I had to keep an older kernel around and boot into it whenever I planned on using VMWare. So late last year, I gave VirtualBox another look.

VBox 2.0 ran virtual machines faster and with lower memory consumption than VMWare Server had run on my 512MB RAM P4Mobile Dell laptop. It also (finally!) enabled me to set the default storage place for virtual machines onto an external hard drive. When I upgraded to VBox 2.1, it added some networking modes (such as giving the virtual machine an interface on the external network, so other local computers can communicate with it). It was also even less draggy on my system. I recently upgraded to VBox 2.2, which seems snappier still, and adds the ability to import and export virtual machines.

It still does not offer the ability to split a virtual hard disk into several 2GB files, but that is becoming less of an issue as few people host their virtual disks on FAT/FAT32 partitions anymore. Back in the olden days, that feature enabled me to store VMWare virtual machines on FAT32 formatted drives.

I am not using this in an enterprise environment, not using it to provide services to other hosts on the network, and not using it for 'real' work. I'm using it to try out operating systems, but even more for testing out changes I am considering in my 'real' system.

The software is available from the Ubuntu repositories, but they are a little bit behind the VirtualBox project's repositories. Instructions for modifying your sources.lst file to add their repository are on the site. If you are using Ubuntu or one its derived distributions (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint), be sure to install dkms, so that modules will be compiled for you each time your kernel is upgraded. (Dear VMWare, look into this.)

It just keeps getting better.

Helio Free

Where I previously was just waiting for October to come, so I could drop Helio without the breakup fee, I decided to go ahead and do it.

It makes me feel better, but I have to say that Helio has not been a bad company to has as your mobile carrier. Other than the fact that first-line support is overseas, and the fact that they have closed their retailer system, they were not a bad mobile carrier.

My problems with them are:

1. They did not have a way for my bank's payments to be done electronically (generally takes 1 to 2 days from sending to clearing at your vendor). Instead, the bank had to mail a check each month.
2. The phone I had (the Fin) automatically defaulted to the T9 input system. This means I had to go back and delete garbage and switch it to multipress ABC mode. The phone had no Linux driver available. This wasn't Helio's problem, it was Samsung's problem. But if you send lots of text messages (SMS) and e-mails, it gets maddening quickly.
3. First-level support is overseas. Being concerned about where my personally identifying information goes, I dislike the fact that it was going outside of U.S. jurisdiction. This includes full name, address, telephone number (obviously), and at least part of the Social Security Number. Of course, there is also the dog's grandmother's uncle's name or some such mumbo jumbo.
4. Some of their staff members were rude.
5. When a phone had an issue, it was too expensive--over $300--for the replacement. I ordered insurance on all of the phones and was paying a monthly fee for insurance. Only it turns out that only one phone was covered.
6. The ownership change resulted in a complete change of character for the company. Where they had been a pleasure to deal with (other than the overseas thing), it became unbearable.

Again, I am not slamming Helio. If their ownership hadn't changed and the Ocean/Ocean2 was available to me last Summer, I probably would be writing about how pleased I was. But instead, they were in danger of going down and leaving me stranded, so I hooked up with Sprint. I got the Instinct (which isn't perfect, but is good enough that it makes Helio redundant).

Personally, I think the MVNO model is dying, now that the main network operators are distributing phones such as the Instinct and the iPhone. The Ocean2 may be really good, but it is no competition to Sprint's Samsung Instinct or AT&T's Apple iPhone.

Drupal Gets OpenID Right

I recently mentioned that Joomla!'s implementation of OpenID does not add OpenID to regular user identities, as it should have been designed to do. Now I see that Drupal's implementation does exactly that.

I'm not a partisan--I like both content management systems--but it seems to me that someone should really have thought about what OpenID is about.

The good news, from a Joomla! point of view, is that one can override it--replacing the current implementation with something that is actually useful from the site admin's point of view--assuming, of course that one is sufficiently familiar with PHP5 and Joomla! code. I'm not there, at least not yet, but it does suggest a way forward.

Joomla! OpenID Defective

I mentioned yesterday that Joomla!'s implementation of OpenID is defective. Here's why I say that.

Imagine that your webmail provider is also your OpenID provider. So you go to joomlasite.example.com and log in using OpenID. Later, you notice that your e-mail account is attracting too much spam, so you close it and open a new account with the same provider. Just like that, your account at joomlasite.example.com is gone, because you never had a regular account on the site.

Here's another example: You sign up at joomlasite.example.com with your OpenID account, which is your webmail account. A year or two later, that webmail provider decides to outsource its service and close down their OpenID server. Just as before, you have lost access to everything you had stored on joomlasite.example.com. This is the fragile ID problem.

Both AOL and Microsoft used to offer network single sign-ons. I think these services have been curtailed, but because most accepting services used their own username and password systems and merely associated that with the identity providers, they were considerably more robust than Joomla!'s version of OpenID.

Now this is the way it should work: You cruise over to joomlasite.example.com and create an account. You pick a username and password, just like every other account holder. One of the setup screens, however, allows you to associate an OpenID (or two) with your account. Now, you can log into the site with either the site username and password or the OpenID, but either way, you are using the same account. When you change your webmail account to dodge the spam, you can log into joomlasite.example.com with the site username and password and change which OpenID is associated with the account.

If you want an example of how this works, sign up for an account with Zooomr. You are able to associate one or two 'OpenID's with your account (I'm not exactly sure how many). Should one of your OpenID accounts change, you can still get logged into Zooomr and make whatever changes you need. This is how it should work, and a great example of why Joomla!'s version is defective and deficient.

That said, I realize that the best way to help fix this is by contributing code that remedies the issue. So... Joomla! core team... does anyone have time to teach me enough so that I can contribute the fix? Should I file a bug report? Would you accept a link to this blog article, or would I need to utilize Trac or whatever system you are using?

CMS Fun

Recently, I've been having fun with content management systems.

Drupal had an update recently. I had manually installed the CMS, meaning that I did not use Fantastico Deluxe or SimpleScripts to install it. The upgrade process was long and convoluted. It failed utterly, leaving me with little choice but to rip it out and reinstall. I could not spend hours fiddling with one site. Fortunately, the hosting service does offer a quick-install, so I installed the replacement that way.

I've also recently tried the PHPWebsite and e107 content management systems. PHPWS seems like it has a lot of functionality, but the management interface is too convoluted. On the other hand, e107 had almost nothing to offer. Actually, I had it pulling down a feed from VGChartz. But when I returned the next day, it was gone, and I could not find a way to get it back. I intend to come back to PHPWS, but for now, I'm going to focus on Drupal and Joomla! and Mambo. Meanwhile, I may put MODx on my test server. The goal is to be reasonably competent at setup and administering (and "skinning") four or five CMSs, and then to learn to write add-ons or extensions for two of them.

I'm also working with Joomla! on a test server. I'm teaching myself to create templates to change the way the site displays. No matter what tutorial I follow, whether online or in a book, my templates say they've installed, but they never show up for me to select them.

Speaking of Joomla!, what is the thing with OpenID? When I turned that feature on, I expected that it would enable regular account-holders to associate their accounts with an OpenID, so they could log in that way. Instead, I find that when you enable OpenID, you enable a whole different class of accounts. Regular accounts and OpenID accounts are not the same, even though you can place OpenID accounts into access-control groups the same way you can place regular accounts into those groups. I'm sorry, but that is not what it should work like. In my opinion, Joomla!'s implementation is defective. I certainly hope that someone in the core group feels the same way. I'd like to see it fixed when version 2.0 comes out.

One more thing, guys. Let's make sure that your CMS offers the ability to directly bond with other applications. The best gallery that I have seen, for example, is Gallery2. (I realize they are ditching it to offer a stripped-down Gallery3 soon.) You should be working with projects such as Laconica, dotProject, G2, Coppermine Photo Gallery (CPG), Vanilla, vBulletin, and WebCalendar, and even other CMSs to offer unified account creation and single sign-on through some agreed-upon interface, such as oAuth.

Yes, there may always be a place for bridging. There may always be a place for CMS add-ons which perform certain functions. But for those who wish to use best-of-breed applications, why shouldn't they usually just work?