LevelsOfDetail

In Outlook, if you go to the dialog to configure your filtering rules, the scroll wheel won't let you scroll your list of rules.

Seriously. What year is this?

As I am prone to do with any gadget purchasing decision, I've been agonizing between the Pre and the iPhone 3GS.

Those who like the Pre like to point out that it can multitask: it can run more than one "card" at a time, and you get some interface to switch between them. This comes in handy, for example, if you want to an internet radio app while browsing the web with the browser app. On the iPhone you can't quite do this (though you can let the built in iTunes-based music app play in the background).

As I played with a friends Pre, I started using it like I use my desktop. Opening one application after another, not really thinking about how much memory was left. (When's the last time I've seen an out of memory error on a modern machine?) On the Pre, however, it's fairly easy to hit the memory limit. Seems to me like it takes about 4 browser windows and maybe a couple other apps.

Once you get into the out of memory state, things get annoying fast. Any action that would require a new card seems to freeze for a second, then the phone buzzes and tells you there's not enough memory, and that you need to close other cards.

Which card to close? Well, if you're a programmer, you may know that browsers are likely to eat the most memory out of the various kinds of apps you find a phone, so lets kill those first. Swipe to the card view.. and which of these cards are browsers? Actually, sometimes, it's quite hard to tell, especially since you're looking at thumbnails of web pages that can look like other apps.

In any case, the first time I hit this, I closed one card, then retried the operation. Still failed. Closed another, retried, still failed. Realized that there were still two other browser cards open, closed those, and finally I could open up my new contact.

The problems here are numerous.

• I don't know when I'm about to hit the memory limit, and when I do it takes a while for the phone to tell me I have.
• Recovering from the state is difficult, especially for users who may not know which apps take a lot of memory.
• There's no way to tell if I've closed enough cards. There's really no way for the OS to tell, since there's no guarantee that you're going to retry the same operation after you've closed some cards.

In light of my experience, Apple's decision to disallow multitasking on the iPhone doesn't seem so dumb. Sure they make some things inconvenient, but it also prevents users from getting into a situation that probably 90% of them would have a difficult time dealing with. It would be a huge usability hit, and the relative benefit would be rather small.

I guess until we have swap space on phones, multitasking is going to be something that will be difficult to implement usably, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple continued to limit it significantly.

Installed the Win7 RC on the x60. Damn it's good.

It's so good that I almost prefer using it over my big Vista desktop.

I'm on a stint of trying to use RHEL 5.3 at work, but now I really don't know how long I'm going to be able to last.

Sigh.

Well on the plus side, at least for the next year or so, it's going to be clear what the best OS to run is. So at least I can stop being OCD about it.

Update: seem to be hitting some bug where the screen will stop updating for a while (feels like several minutes). If video's playing, then the audio keeps coming out, but the screen is frozen.

Also, for others trying this on the X60.. don't forget to install the "System interface driver" from the Lenovo page.. or else things like the hotkey driver won't work. Also I had to do the registry hack described here to get the hotkey thing to install.

A little scared to install the power manager and power management driver. Won't those things conflict with the new Windows stuff?

I think I'm hitting the same problem that is reported in this thread on the Lenovo support forums. If I unplug my X60 running Vista SP1, then about 10-15 minutes later, the screen goes blank. Usually black, but sometimes white. The machine is still be running in the background, but there's no way to kick the machine to redraw the display aside from doing a S3 suspend/resume.

Probably a driver problem. (Is it just me, or do Intel driver updates seem to be really flaky?) I managed to update the driver to the newest one available off the Intel site. Just go to support.intel.com and under the laptop chipsets choose 945 Express. Choose your OS, and download the zip file. If you use the standard "Have Disk.." path through the Device Manager than you can update the driver, even if running the Setup.exe claims that the driver is "not validated" by the OEM for the particular model.

In any case, now I'm running the 7.14.10.1504 version, and have been running on battery for the last 3 hrs or so, and no blank screen yet. I'm sure I'm going to get it as soon as I post this, but here's to hoping. In any case, it was still useful for me to find out that you can update the driver to the "upstream" intel version directly, so I figured I should write that down, for those people out there still hitting this problem or other driver issues.

In mostly unrelated news, I've been playing with the T400 at work, and the Vista install on it is god awful. i feel like the software side of the Lenovo experience is starting to go down the tubes. Not that it was that great before, but this machine launches so much crap when you start up that it adds a good 90 seconds to get to the desktop "steady state". It's really disappointing since Lenovo for the most part still makes the best PC laptpo hardware (at least compared to the same-generation Dell's and Lenovo's I've seen). Oh, except for the touchpad. This is my first Lenovo with a touchpad, and while I prefer them to track points, this particular one seems really flaky. Ok that was my mini review of the T400. Nice keyboard, shitty trackpad, uninstall most of the ThinkVantage crap and you're fine.

Is it just me, or do liberation fonts included in Jaunty look a lot better than the used to under full hinting?

A little digging shows that the fonts are still being worked on. The package version is up to 1.0.4.93. Changelog doesn't say much, except the occasional "fix bluriness for X" entries. In any case, the improvement is impressive. It's almost to the point that I can use it as an Arial replacement and it doesn't bother me.

Yes, yes, we all know that Firefox under wine beats Linux Firefox for javascript performance. That's not what I'm talking about though.

I'm talking about the UI performance. Things like switching tabs and scrolling. To me, the Linux version of Firefox in Intrepid or Jaunty was always inexplicably more sluggish compared to the Windows version.

I think I figured out why.

The fix is simple. Stop using the Human GTK theme. Use one of the plain ones, like Simple (System > Preferences > Appearance > Theme > Customize > Controls). As soon as I made the switch, everything got much snappier. My guess is that Human makes firefox do some extra drawing, and that drawing is on the wrong path.

Got the FVWM itch this time.

If you're gonna use Linux on your desktop, then it's lame to try to use one of the "canned" environments. I mean, you're giving up all that application compatibility and workingness by going to Linux, so you might as well try to get the most flexibility and programmability you can get.

Anyways, I got the intrepid FVWM package, and as usual, I set it up to launch gnome-settings-daemon so that all the gnome/gtk apps that I use don't look like utter crap. Well turns out this breaks fvwm's shortcuts.

Took me a while to figure it out, but it was because gnome-settings-daemon turns on NumLock. And for some arcane reason, that breaks all of FVWM's shortcuts. No matter, a quick fix in the fvwmrc:

IgnoreModifiers L25

That is, don't treat NumLock and ScrollLock as they were modifiers. Even right there in the fvwm docs. Who else thinks they should make this the default? ;-)

I had a little time, and I was getting fed up with the slowness of Vista on my X60, which is now three years old. It runs fine once it's booted, but it's the boot process that's annoyingly slow.. and with the battery starting to die, I have to cold boot more and more.

Anyhow, I knew Intrepid still didn't quite have everything, so I decided to update to the late-alpha-status Jaunty.

Suprisingly, things are working quite well at the moment. Three big missing features are now available (with some work, of course):

• Trackpoint wheel emulation. You can turn it on using the xinput driver, and the configuration finally seems to persist reliably across suspend and resumes. I still have to turn it on with a script:

  #!/bin/sh
  
  DEVICEID=5
  
  xinput set-int-prop $DEVICEID "Evdev Wheel Emulation" 8 1
  xinput set-int-prop $DEVICEID "Evdev Wheel Emulation Button" 8 2
  xinput list-props $DEVICEID
  

  Where DEVICEID is something I get from the output of xinput list
• HDAPS, yes disk parking that's been in thinkpads since forever, FINALLY, works. A little extra work required however. In this case:
  • Get the tp_smapi out-of-tree driver from upstream. I tried building it with Ubuntu's module-assistant, but it doesn't seem to build the right hdaps driver there. With the upstream version, you can just type make load HDAPS=1 and it will load the driver.
  • Grab hdaps source from here. Yep it's just a .c file. You need to get 20081004 or later. Compile it using gcc, and name the output hdapsd. You can launch it like: sudo hdapsd -d sda -s 15
  And voila! disk parking! I can verify it works by runing du from /usr and watching the output stop and start as I shake the laptop. Cool. About fricking time.
• The machine doesn't get retardedly hot. The bottom side still gets a tad warm while plugged in, but the top side doesn't get unbearably warm like it used to. While on battery, temperature is just fine.

My office mate is on hiatus, so I decided to steal his monitors and do a quad-mon setup.

Productivity is definitely increased, but I seem to be straining my neck as well. My desk is not deep enough to be able to down four monitors, and curve them around in a way that prevents me from having to turn my head too much. Perhaps I need to back up and get a keyboard tray again.

My temporary solution is to rotate two of the monitors to portrait mode. Monitor rotation still sucks for many reasons (cleartype incompatibility, for one), but for now it's OK because I put only putty windows with a non-antialiased font on those heads.

I also have to jump back down into Vista Basic mode, because the crappy nvidia card that I use for my second pair of heads totally slows down in portrait mode.. enough so that putty becomes painfully slow.. and putty seems to be very sensitive to graphics performance.

Whatever, I'll live. Anything for the quad-mon. Someday, I'll bring in my 7600GT from home and things will be all nice and glassy once again.

I'd really like to do two 24 inchers at home.. but it's going to be a while before I can afford another 2490 WUXI ;-) Those damn high end NEC monitors also tend to never come down in price.

I’m pretty much over my Mac itch, but I wanted to write this down to really try to convince myself.

The Mac Pro is not a desktop, in the traditional PC sense of the desktop.

It’s easy to fall into this trap… it looks like a desktop, it has desktop-like hardware, it’s by far the most upgradeable Mac.

And yet, when it comes down to it, the upgradability is only skin-deep, and this is why it’s not a real desktop.

Want to add memory or hard drive space? Sure that works, but that also works on laptops and iMacs.

Want to upgrade the CPU? Well… that sorta probably works, but isn’t supported.

Want to upgrade the motherboard + CPU + memory? forget it.

Want to upgrade the graphics card? OK, as long as you pick from the three supported ones, which sometimes cost twice as much as they should.

So really, the Mac Pro is very appliance like. It just happens that you can throw a ton of HDD or RAM into it, and if you buy it right when it comes out, you can have four top-of-the-line video cards. But in two years, you’re stuck with a machine that’s very hard to upgrade.. either by replacing core parts with new ones, or by building a new box and recycling some of the old parts.

Realizing this makes the price seem even more outrageous.

Of course, I’m sure the people who buy these things don’t really care.

Also, if you look at things like Dells and HPs, it’s unclear how much better the situation is there. At least with OEM’ed PC’s you can buy a graphics card every year.