... is the new hype these days. Everyone seems to want to be part of it; even Microsoft wants to allow Docker to run on its platform. How they visualise that is slightly beyond me, seen as how Docker is mostly a case of "run a bunch of LXC instances", which by their definition can't happen on Windows. Presumably they'll just run a lot more VMs, then, which is a possible workaround. Or maybe Docker for Windows will be the same in concept, but not in implementation. I guess the future will tell.

As I understand the premise, the idea of Docker is that getting software to run on "all" distributions is a Hard Problem[TM], so in a Docker thing you just define that this particular stuff is meant to run on top of this and this and that environment, and Docker then compartmentalises everything for you. It should make things easier to maintain, and that's a good thing.

I'm not a fan. If the problem that Docker tries to fix is "making software run on all platforms is hard", then Docker's "solution" is "I give up, it's not possible". That's sad. Sure, having a platform which manages your virtualisation for you, without having to manually create virtual machines (or having to write software to do so) is great. And sure, compartmentalising software so that every application runs in its own space can help towards security, manageability, and a whole bunch of other advantages.

But having an environment which says "if you want to run this applicaiton, I'll set up a chroot with distribution X for you; if you want to run this other application, I'll set up a chroot with distribution Y for you; and if you want to run yet this other application yere, I'll start doing a chroot with distribution Z for you" will, in the end, get you a situation where, if there's another bug in libc6 or libssl, you now have a nightmare trying to track down all the different versions in all the docker instances to make sure they're all fixed. And while it may work perfectly well on the open Internet, if you're on a corporate network with a paranoid firewall and proxy, downloading packages from public mirrors is harder than just creating a local mirror instead. Which you now have to do not only for your local distribution of choice, but also for the distributions of choice of all the developers of the software you're trying to use. Which may result in more work than just trying to massage the software in question to actually bloody well work, dammit.

I'm sure Docker has a solution for some or all of the problems it introduces, and I'm not saying it doesn't work in practice. I'm sure it does fix some part of the "Making software run on all platforms is hard" problem, and so I might even end up using it at some point. But from an aesthetical point of view, I don't think Docker is a good system.

I'm not very fond of giving up.

Looks like I'll be speaking at LOADays again. This time around, at the suggestion of one of the organisers, I'll be speaking about the Belgian electronic ID card, for which I'm currently employed as a contractor to help maintain the end-user software. While this hasn't been officially confirmed yet, I've been hearing some positive signals from some of the organisers.

So, under the assumption that my talk will be accepted, I've started working on my slides. The intent is to explain how the eID middleware works (in general terms), how the Linux support is supposed to work, and what to do when things fail.

If my talk doesn't get rejected at the final hour, I will continue my uninterrupted "speaker at loadays" streak, which has started since loadays' first edition...

Localization in the web context is hard, I know. To make things easier, it may seem like a good idea to use GeoIP to detect what country an IP is coming from and default your localization based on that. While I disagree with that premise, this blog post isn't about that.

Instead, it's about the fact that most of you get something wrong about this little country. I know, I know. If you're not from here, it's difficult to understand. But please get this through your head: Belgium is not a French-speaking country.

That is, not entirely. Yes, there is a large group of French-speaking people who live here. Mostly in the south. But if you check the numbers, you'll find that there are, in fact, more people in Belgium who speak Dutch rather than French. Not by a very wide margin, mind you, but still by a wide enough margin to be significant. Wikipedia claims the split is 59%/41% Dutch/French; I don't know how accurate those numbers are, but they don't seem too wrong.

So please, pretty please, with sugar on top: next time you're going to do a localized website, don't assume my French is better than my English. And if you (incorrectly) do, then at the very least make it painfully obvious to me where the "switch the interface to a different language" option in your website is. Because while it's annoying to be greeted in a language that I'm not very good at, it's even more annoying to not be able to find out how to get the correctly-localized version.

Thanks.