LevelsOfDetail

It's commentary like this that irritates me to no end. All these people going around acting like it's a big flipping mystery why people don't buy stuff of the iTunes Music Store.

If you just thought about it for a second, it's obvious.

DRM. Price. Experience.

Any way you spin it, the DRM sucks. It means you can only listen to a song that you bought on a limited number of computers. It means you can't switch to other stores/services/devices at a later point and bring your music with you.

And guess what, you get all that DRM for a price that's not much better than buying a CD.

As if that's not bad enough, the buying experience is even not as good as going to a store. You don't get to preview songs (if you go to any decent music store, you can listen to CD's before you buy). And the songs that you buy are compressed to the point where someone with good ears can tell the difference.

You're getting a crippled, inferior product for not that much cheaper. And people wonder why they're not selling more. It's not that people just love love love going out to the store and buying CD's, or ordering on Amazon and paying shipping, it's just that the alternative sucks that much more.

But I'm sure Apple engineers don't really care for the DRM either. It's just what happens when you deal with record companies I suppose. They really need to either start selling full lossless tracks, or start a subscription service. Until then, I'm sticking with my Rhapsody.

I went into the Apple store for the first time in months today--a day before Macworld--and came away disenchanted and disappointed. Even as Macworld is about to begin, I can't imagine anything that his Steve-ness bring into this world that would rekindle my enthusiasm about the whole Apple platform. It's a rather depressing feeling for someone who used to drink the koolaid.

At the store, I waited around a while to play with a Core 2 Duo iMac. As soon as I started to move the mouse around, it all came back to me. All the little annoyances and disappointments that, as a koolaid drinker, you try to just ignore or rationalize away. The first rude reminder was the weird mouse acceleration. With OSX's default settings, the mouse just moves (or rather, accelerates) too slowly! argh. Fine, whatever, you can tweak that in System Preferences, but you never get exactly what you get with Windows (mainly because you can't tweak sensitivity and acceleration separately; I always want very low acceleration and medium sensitivity).

I've lately been searching for a good RAW workflow in Windows (details coming in another post), and was eager to be re-inspired by Aperture's completeness and simplicity. So I fire it up on the iMac, and start poking around. The first set of images loads, and I start scrolling through them. Then I see the familiar loading overlay message over the preview, with no visible progress. The Core 2 Duo is supposed to be way beyond the PPC G4 in terms of performance, and yet I'm still sitting here waiting for this image to load. There are tons of PC programs that can handle this without breaking a sweat.. grr.

I then try to switch to another album... beachball.

This is a brand new machine for [insert deity here]'s sake! What is the point of switching to a new architecture and raving about the "4x performance increase" if the user experience is exactly the same? They may have dramatically improved the hardware, in doing so, they've also illuminated serious software performance issues. It will likely take someone like Adobe to show everyone how it's done.

I looked around the rest of the store, and couldn't help but notice that everything just seemed like toys. Maybe it's only because I've been using an X60 Thinkpad for a while. Apple laptops can look nice, but also very consumery. Even the MacBook Pro's design looks somewhat dated. Silver is out. Meanwhile, the black Thinkpad look has been a classic since forever.

And then I was reminded that there's non-obvious piece of wisdom that I only really learnt after using a Mac for a year. It's this: if you're Apple's target user, then their stuff is great. If you deviate even a little bit from the predetermined user classes, then you're screwed. You're either a Pro with tons of cash, and everything you own has a "Pro" suffix on it, or you're a total noob who doesn't care about how iPhoto happens to arrange your photos on disk. Everyone caught in between just has to deal with random hacks, shareware apps that keep breaking because of OS upgrades, or would you prefer an OSX hint?

Apple's free to take whatever approach that it chooses. But in the general scheme of things, it's hard to see a closed platform that caters only to very specific users winning out in the end. If Apple decides to change course and open up their platform and make their software more flexible, they'll suddenly collide into the same problems that Microsoft has been dealing with for years. There's no indiciation that Apple would be any better at solving those problems, so maybe they are better off creating their niche products.

Apple TV: meh. It's still too locked into iTunes. I've already got a PC hooked up to my TV, which works fine, and I'm looking at a SqueezeBox to hook up to the Rhapsody catalog.

Yea yea yea, the iPhone is cool. It'll be great if all you did was browse the occasional webpage, send sms messages, and view photos. But what about hooking up with my work's Exchange server? or hooking up with Rhapsody? I'm not holding my breath.

It took Apple forever to even allow simple things like different games onto the iPod. How long until they open up the software platform on the iPhone? (and not just widgets!) Maybe not very long, but Steve didn't mention anything about that, which is cause for some concern.

Either way, it's damn expensive. And I'm not up for a Cingular upgrade discount for another year. Thus my verdict is a solid "wait and see."

Update: There are some reports that end users won't be able to add applications to the iPhone. That sounds too stupid to be true. Maybe it will take them a few iterations to figure it out, but I'm definitely not getting one if there's no way to get around the Apple lock-in.

I've been pretty enthusiastic about IE7 since it came out. It seems faster, has tabs, and handles most websites pretty well.

Recently, I've come to have a more negative view. Some of it is related to IE7's UI quirks, some of it is just performance. Specifically:

• There's not enough room for tabs (the bookmark buttons as well as the other buttons on there right just take room away)
• It never remembers the layout of the toolbar add-ons correctly. This is particularly irritating with 3+ toolbars.
• It's slower than Firefox on the same machine
• It temporarily freezes a lot (probably a few times a day, for a good 30 seconds or so. reason unknown, and this is on a machine with tons of memory that's not doing much else)
• Occasionally crashes. More than Firefox.

I'm also not convinced that memory usage with IE7 is much better. That was one of the original reasons I switched to it from FF 1.5, but 2.0 seems ok, and on a machine with 2GB, it just doesn't matter that much.

Anyhow, the last straw was when it froze while I was taking my online traffic school test. Right in the middle of it. No fancy Javascript. No nothing. I had to kill it and restart my test.

The only real downside of going back to FF is that now I get the crappy version of the Outlook OWA interface again.

I've been battling with the SFU NFS server for a while now. One mystery I haven't solved with it it's mapping of the 'group' owner of a file.

In Unix, every file has an associated user and group, and these are stored in the file system. In Windows, each file has an owner SID, which can either be a user or a group (at least, that is all that is revealed in the UI).

So here's the mystery: when the nfs client asks for the user and group of a file, how does the SFU NFS server decide? I found that if I set the owner of a file (on the windows side) to a user's SID, then the "user" part of the answer is the UID as specified in the User Mapping component. However, the group part always returns -2 which is convention to mean the nobody user.

Interestingly, if I create a file from the nfs client (Linux) with some UID and GID, the server accepts this information, and somehow stores it. Further accesses to the that file return the correct UID and GID, even across mounts and unmounts.

More annoyingly, a file created on the windows side by a user in the Administrator group always gets its owner set to the Administrators group SID. So when NFS servers up this file, it tries to map the Administrators group as a user, and always fails.

That aside, though, it is clear from the client-side file creation example that Windows is capable of storing the 'group' associated with a file somewhere. It's just that this information seems to be inaccessible and unmodifiable.

Anyways, getting this straight just became such a pain, that I decided to install Ubuntu on the machine instead.

One of the reasons I built a PC this time around was the price. The machine I built cost $1300 or so. The Mac Pro I could have bought would have cost at least $2000 (though with better specs).

But if you have the similar specs, the price ends up being pretty similar. Sure, I don't need fully buffered ECC RAM, or even quad core.

But I have this nagging thought: Is there some value in the fact that if I were to buy a Mac Pro, I'd stop worrying about what I could buy otherwise?

It's clear to me that my previous Powerbook was an incorrect purchase. My usage pattern doesn't fit the "big laptop" use case. I'm more of a "big desktop and small laptop" kind of person. And the PB was just too behind on the performance curve. But if someone handed me a Mac Pro, I'm fairly certain I'd be happy with it. Especially with the advent of virtualization on the Mac, I won't have any of the software annoyances that I had before.

I look at my recent HHK purchases. Though these things cost over $200 a piece, I've all but stopped looking at keyboards since I bought them. They were expensive, but given the amount of time I spent looking for the best inexpensive keyboard, could the time I "saved" from not having to continue searching have been worth the extra cost?

Does the guarantee of quality in product have value that's separate from the quality of the product itself?

Of course it's also crucial that you believe in the quality of the product. After using these HHK's for a month or so, I'm convinced that if you care about the feel of your keyboard, then they're certainly worth it. Likewise, the Mac Pro seems like a pretty good value for the price.

Well it's been about four months since I sold the Powerbook. I had all types of reasons to get rid of it, but now I find myself looking at macs again.

What's changed? Well there are a few specific things:

• Mac performance got a lot better. The PPC to Intel jump was huge, and even Photoshop and friends are about to finish the transition to Intel code.
• VMware is going to release a product for the Mac. This makes most of the software incompatibility pain go away. I've been using a Windows desktop at home since I sold the mac, and I find that most of the time I need to run Windows apps is to interact with systems at work. But even then, it's just simple things like our VPN client (which probably works on the mac by now) and Outlook. All this stuff runs just fine in a VM.
• Vista was kind of a let down. A lot of stuff doesn't work with it. I'm not sure that they fixed any of the fundamental problems, and it kinda looks ugly IMHO. It feels like a mishmash of eye candy. It still has a lot of ugly greys, and a smattering of inconsistent designs. Sure, glass window borders are cool, but are they really useful? The real stuff I look forward to in Vista is real double buffering (which OS X has had for a while) as well as better font rendering.
• Messing with hardware is a pain. When I built my new desktop, I was super careful about the parts that I chose. I picked all the reputable manufacturers, and only picked pieces that were well reviewed. And yet.. I still had problems. The wireless on the Asus P5B is a little flaky, I get weird messed up graphics when waking up my machine sometimes.. resume from suspend take 15 seconds! I thought building at all would be worth my time again, but it's really hard to say that it was.
• The selection of keyboards is rather small for the Mac, but I settled on the HHK Pro, and that works fine with the mac

I have lots of time to think about it, since I'm not going to make any sudden moves. The other thing I realized that is somewhat unfortunate about PC's is that they're much harder to sell on craigslist. Apple's are recognizable, and have lasting value since they sport designs that appeal to everyone. How many people are you going to find that appreciate a custom built PC? Dell took over the market years ago. Nobody cares anymore.

I suppose all is not lost. I can still install Linux on my home machine and do something interesting with it. But I'm definitely feeling these days that I should have just spent a little more and gone for the Mac Pro.

Microsoft has a pretty strong reputation for maintaining backwards compatibility for applications that run on their platform. They have to, since the continued operation of many thousands of critical applications depends on them doing so. Microsoft understands this special position and responsibility, and has put an amazing amount of work into keeping old program working. Just study up on the base Win32 C API to see what I'm talking about.

What's surprising, then, is the debacle of the Internet Explorer 7 release. Surely, with IE 6 having such a large market share, it would not be difficult to realize that there many web apps out there that depend on the platform provided by the IE6 HTML and Javascript runtime. Yet, even under such obvious circumstances, Microsoft released IE 7 which broke many a website, even forcing some organizations to avoid it all together.

This blunder seems to indicate a few things. Microsoft still doesn't really understand the significance of web apps, nor their existing presence in this area of technology. They could have released a significantly enhanced IE7 that didn't break IE6 sites, at least maintaining their market share, and perhaps allowing websites and organizations to jump on new IE7 features without hesitance. Instead, they made everyone realize the importance of web standards and probably also made a few people take a good look at Firefox (both are good things).

For a company that had historically done pretty well at releasing mostly strict improvements to their previous products and, most importantly, maintaining backwards compatibility for applications, IE 7 (and Vista, to also to a large extent) seem like a great departure from their winning strategy. Maybe this is on purpose, but it's hard to see how this has worked to their benefit. It seems counter to the strategy of taking advantage of their market dominance and installed base.

Then again, it is also very technically difficult to keep winning the backwards compatibility game. I'd say this is especially true for things like Javascript, where MS doesn't have complete platform control (they define Win32, where as Javascript grows more organically). Maybe their engineers finally gave up and decided to work on something new. Maybe IE7 and Vista are the results of this. But it'll be interesting to see what happens as these products arrive when there are already comparable market equivalents (Firefox and OS X). Breaking their support for legacy apps puts their competitors on a much more level playing field.

As much as I dislike IE7, Firefox go ing her ky jer ky on me eve ry hour I use it, re qui ring me to re sta rt it drives me even more nuts (and at least 4 of my colleagues have verified that I'm not the only one who hits this bug). So it's back to IE7, which may freeze horribly every so often, but I'l take short bursts of pain over continuous agony stretched out over many hours.

So apparently Microsoft came out with a patch to fix the horrendous Outlook 2007 performance problems.

In this article, there is a choice quote from Jessica Arnold, the Outlook program manager:

In the long run, she said the company is "definitely investigating" whether to re-architect Outlook’s use of .PST files for local storage, as some users have requested. But she also warned that users shouldn’t view their active .PST files as long-term storage for e-mail.

"Outlook wasn’t designed to be a file dump; it was meant to be a communications tool," she said. "There is that fine line, but we don’t necessarily want to optimize the software for people that store their e-mail in the same .PST file for 10 years."

Umm yea. Nobody would ever store 10 years worth of email would they? And sure no company would ever release a desktop search product that in combination with storing 10 years of email would be extremely useful, would they?

This statement isn't too far from Bill Gates' infamous "640K is all we need" comment, but seems to indicate a tendency for Microsoft to underestimate it's users.

The most infuriating part of the whole thing is, well if we're not supposed to use PST files, then what are we supposed to use? And I'm going to slap you if you say Local Folders.

So my experimental website doesn't work :-).

I'm not sure what the cause is, but once you sign out of an account, you can't sign back in.

There's a long thread about the problem on the Drupal site. I tried many of the suggested fixes, but it still fails to log me in correctly on both my home machine and work machine.

This probably has to do with how php has so many settings that are determined by your webhost, that it makes it rather difficult to write portable code.

Perhaps I should try another CMS. Plone looks interesting but also very complicated. Plus dreamhost doesn't run Zope. Aren't there any simple python-based ones?

Sometimes, you can choose to get what you do want, but if and only if you're also willing to take some of what you don't want. Other times, you can choose not get what you don't want, but then you also can't get what you do want.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to assign Windows and Linux to the appropriate categories, though I'm quite sure this applies to more than just operating systems.

So I've been happily using Thunderbird 2.0 at work to connect to our Exchange server at work. It was going so well, that I decided to try it out at home.

Install Thunderbird 2.0 on Feisty... connect to vpn... type in account info... download headers from folders... so far so good.

Thunderbird claims to implement offline mode. This is simply a necessity nowadays, especially when it comes to accessing work email. Even Outlook can do it

So I give it a try.. disconnect the vpn... click on the folder.

Then pops up a dialog 'cannot connect to imap4.vmware.com'. Awesome, shouldn't I be in offline mode?

Then I discover that you actually have to mark folders individually to be available in offline mode. Tedious, but fine, whatever.

Try it again... 'cannot connect to imap4.vmware.com'. Uhh, why are you telling me if you've cached the messages? I can go to File -> Offline mode or whatever and then things begin to work. But I shouldn't have to tell Thunderbird that I want to go offline. Offline IMAP support, to me, really means "don't totally suck when you can't connect to the IMAP server". But clearly Thunderbird doesn't mean it that way.

The worst part: If you forget to explicitly set yourself into offline mode, then go to click the top of the tree for your IMAP account (the tree item with the name of your account), it goes and tries to refresh your list of folders... and guess what? 'cannot connect to ....'. Well if there's no server, then there must be no folders, right? Thunderbird will proceed to remove all your IMAP folders from your folder view, and you won't be able to get to them until the IMAP server is reachable again, and to add insult to injury, it will need to re-sync all your folders all over again.

Lesson learned? All IMAP clients are broken in some way. I guess the only way to fix it is to use the OfflineIMAP (separate program) + dovecot combination, and point Thunderbird at that.

The Dell/Ubuntu guys are out of the gates with their first models, and also with their first QA mishap. I like Ubuntu 'n' all, but requiring users to edit their bootloader configuration to hack their way out of your mistake surely leaves a bad impression. Lets just hope that people know what they're getting into when they buy these Dells.

Does this mean that they'll institute a QA cycle at dell for Ubuntu updates before they release them into the wild?

It's hard to tell from the linked page whether this was Dell's fault or Ubuntu's fault.

Why, it's easy. Just ship all the C++ runtime libraries that you need.

% dpkg -L google-desktop-linux | grep \.so
/opt/google/desktop/lib/libstdc++.so.6
/opt/google/desktop/lib/libgcc_s.so.1
:

Sorry for the cliche heading.

Reflecting on my own situation gives me a good insight into why Linux hasn't really landed on the desktop. It comes down to one simple reason: If I run Linux, I can't pay anyone to solve my problems for me.

Actually, at work, Linux is great. At work, I have to solve problems that are new. Problems that nobody else has solved yet. At work, I need the best tools that are available. I need the ability to customize my workflow and my tools. Linux is very valuable and appropriate here.

At home, I don't have new problems. Chances are, I have problems that others have solved. I don't have time to roll my own solution. Nor the patience.

I want to take RAW photos and print them. I want to listen to music and maybe occasionally carry it with me. I want to watch videos on the Internet.

Yes. I know. Most of these things you can do in some form on Linux. However, F-spot is no Lightroom. Rhythmbox is actually almost as good as iTunes, but there's no Rhapsody equivalent. Flash videos sort of work (and they work on x64 if you try really hard), most other videos don't. †

Sure, free software is great. It lets you do so many things without paying a single cent. If you want to do something that's never been done before, it's a good place to start. But when you want to start doing things that it can't do already, and you don't want to spend many hours coding your own solution, that's where you hit a wall.

Why is this the case? As my friend always laments, "there's no good way to ship proprietary software for Linux."

Think of all the successful closed source desktop applications out there for Linux. Let's see, Bibble Pro, and VMware, Flash, and ... Real Player? Sorry, I've been using Linux for a while now, but I can't think of many more.

Bibble Pro works because it uses qt, and ships it's own qt library. If you're going to ship a C++ app on Linux, you better be prepared to ship every library you depend on. Trolltech's licensing sanity allows this.

VMware. well we spend lots of effort making our Linux product run on as many different distro's as possible. And trust me, its pretty insane. Just look into the vmware startup scripts if you're curious.

Flash? Well, Flash works because once upon a time a commercial company designed a plugin interface that was relatively stable, and has been good enough for all this time.

Real Player... didn't that use Motif?

Whether it's free software zealotry, laziness, or just the boringness of the work involved that leads to this situation, I know not. But in the end, without a better environment for proprietary software ††, closed-source thick-client apps will continue to be scarce on Linux desktops.

Without closed source apps, there's no proven business model. Without a proven business model, there won't be many businesses. †††

Without businesses, well there's no one that I can easily incentivise to solve my problems for me.

†Yes. I also know that a big part of why a lot of these don't work are DRM and proprietary codecs and the sort. Yes. I avoid these where possible. But these strategies aren't going to go away. Not until someone figures out how to really make money without them. And don't say Redhat. Look at how much they make compared to some software company that actually makes money. And don't say Google, because Google has just figured out a new way to deliver you their proprietary service and software that seems more open.

†† Ironically, the best support for closed source third party apps that OSS has produced is a reasonable HTML and Javascript environment.

††† Sure, some business innovate. Google is one of them. But there are very few Googles. And besides, if we do become totally web-based some day, who cares what OS you're running?

Update: I guess today is the day to chime in about Linux on the desktop. Anyhow, this artcile points out an important distinction. For many non-power users, Ubuntu has reached the level of usability and "good enough." These users will likely, as the article predicts, move more and more towards Linux. But its all the non-typical users that I'm really talking about. The gamers, the photographers, the artists, etc. There are too many commercial tools out there that are too hard to ship on Linux, that people will likely move to the Mac before they opt for completely open-source tools.

aKademy, the yearly KDE developer get together happened, and they fortunately put up all their videos of the talks. Fantastic.

Each video however is so fixated on the presenter, that it cuts out the slides!. And worse yet, not all the talks have their slides posted.

The two most important parts of a slide based talk, are the talk, and the slides. Sure it's nice to see what Shuttleworth looks like in action, but I don't need to watch him for 30 minutes straight, as I try to guess what his slides said.

I inadvertently ran a red light today. Yea, it happens. I've probably done it maybe 5 times total in 10 years of driving.

The problem is, the intersection that I happened to cross (Park Presidio and Geary) has a camera that captures you as you go by.

I'm probably not going to fight the ticket, but in my defense I'd like to point out the extremely poor design (IMHO) of the lights at that intersection.

If you've ever driven on Geary, you know that there are tons of lights. And they are all overhanging, in the middle of the road. At night particulary, you see a long row of lights stretch out in to the distance, and they are all fairly close together.

Except for Park Presidio and Geary. Here the lights for the east-west directions (on Geary) are the corner-lightpost style. So if you've been driving down Geary for a few blocks, and you're expecting lights in the center of the road and above you, you will likely not see these lights. Furthermore, because the lights on Geary are spaced closely together, it's easy to confuse a light slightly farther down the road as the next upcoming one.

That's exactly what I did. As I was going eastward on Geary crossing Park Presidio, I saw the 12th avenue lights and assumed those were the next ones I would have to worry about. And they were green.

Worse yet, I happen to cross exactly at the moment that the real lights had turned red, but the Park Presidio traffic had not yet started to move. I'm sure I wouldn't have driven straight into an intersection that had six lanes of intersecting traffic.

Furthermore, the camera that actually captures you is hanging from above! Why can't they just put the damn traffic light up there as well?

I've been using the "classic" windows theme for a while now, but yesterday I decided to switch back. Big blue title bars and task bar.

Yep. It's ugly. But I find it more usable. There are two key features:

• The focused window is easer to differentiate. The main reason for this is that the window border get's highlighted in the XP theme, where as it doesn't change in the classic theme. In the classic theme, only the title bar changes.

  Of the XP themes, the blue one has the most contrast between foreground and background windows. Otherwise I would have gone with the silver.
  



• Bigger + Highlighting minimize/maximize/close buttons. Minor, but buttons highlighting as I roll over them seems to really keep me from missing. It's just that slight visual indication that confirms your intention.

Actually, this was mostly inspired by my realization that Metaciy is pretty good in this department. Especially if you pick a theme that lets you adjust the color of the foreground window.

Damn, they already even have a website.

This is Havoc Pennington's "vision" for Gnome.

I like the old saying about how those who do the work get to decide.

I'll reserve judgement on this whole online desktop thing, but what I don't want to see is a bunch of code written in a way that makes it hard for others to leverage GNOME and build new things.

While I don't mind people having vision, open source is about allowing different people to have different visions, sharing visions, and most importantly, working together on pieces that are common among these visions.

If anything, the GNOME project should be worrying about the boring stuff.. allowing 3rd party apps to integrate better, ABI compatibility, providing more reusable libraries as part of the core desktop, providing more wrappers to make programming for GNOME easier.

Most likely, the next great OSS innovation will come from a small group of people who get together and write some code to implement a new idea. The idea and/or the implementation will happen to be really good, and the product of this work will spread and be re-used.

The less code that such efforts have to produce, the faster the open source platform will evolve. The last thing we want is to have the limitations of a single vision causing these innovators to look elsewhere for a platform to build on. Maybe someday it will get to the point where combining available components will be easy enough that a small company could realize their single vision in the form of a distro.

So while Havoc and crew can go and make the "online desktop" possible, I don't buy into the single vision argument, since it seems to go against what actually makes open source software interesting.

I had a bad feeling about this Asus P5B motherboard ever since I got it. It claims integrated wi-fi, but all that really means as it has an internal usb header with a usb wifi device hooked up.

And all the utilities are ricer-looking.

And the auto-bios update utility can't find bios files on their ftp site.

Well, today, in my quest to enable resuming from sleep with my keyboard, I downloaded a new bios update and tried to use their utility. Boom! flash failed. Can't even re-flash. (I probably should have suspected something when their supposedly x64 utility installed into c:\Program Files (x86))

Now when I power on, the power light comes on, and that's it. I heard the drives spin up because they get power as well, but no beeps, no post, no nothing. Lame. Now I'll lose a week to the RMA process. And a few hours doing a motherboard transplant.

Whats worse, Asus's site tells me to contact the reseller, and Newegg's site tells me to contact Asus. Fun.

I don't really know the lingo, I just know what I see.

Look at the image below. Can you tell which is which?

The left is XP, the right is Linux (Firefox, mstt core fonts, and mlind's freetype/xft/cairo updates with David Turner's newest lcd filtering patches, full, BCI-enabled hinting). I took the screenshot by overlaying a VMware window running Ubuntu on top of a Firefox window on the Windows host.

As far as I can tell, the problem isn't actually in the subpixel filtering. It's more that, in the Linux example, the "thickness" of the parts of each letter are inconsistent. For example, diagonal, and curved parts look much thicker than the rest of the character. Arial seems to exaggerate this effect. When there's a bunch of small text clumped together like this, the letters just look fuzzy and dirty.

A few months ago, I read about PeerGuardian, a special windows program that blocks traffic to and from certain hosts that are known to be associated with law enforcement agencies and the like or just plain old spyware and malware.

That's cool, except that today I discovered that the reason my Outlook can't download any of my dreamhost mail is because the mail server is blocked by this program. My theory is that someone must have sent a crapload of spam from a dreamhost mail domain, and that earned it an entry on the PG block list.

The real problem is that el cheapo dreamhost maps all your mail domains to the same host. mail.kendeeter.com, mail.test.kendeeter.com, etc, all point to the same IP, and thus all get blocked by the same rule.

Lame.

To my horror, I discovered that the last three "shoots" on my photo were all inadvertently taken with a ISO 800 setting.

These camera makers really need to tweak the interface.

Back in the film days, you put one roll of film in. That roll had a constant ISO. You know what film you put in, so you remember what ISO you're using.

These days, it's just another setting.. but unlike any of the other settings, it's not displayed anywhere. Furthermore, LCD previews of your shots don't show that you've accidentally set the ISO too high, since the scaling down usually averages out the noise.

They really need to put the ISO setting in the view finder, or at least in the smaller LCD at the top of the camera.

Maybe the lesson is just to use the auto-ISO setting.

I get really annoyed by random articles/blog posts written by Linux/Ubuntu evangelizers that all talk about how they had to use their friend's Windows laptop and it was slow and had all this crapware, etc.

What they forget, is that if it actually became easy for 3rd parties to ship software on Linux, then you'd see a whole bunch of crapware floating around on Linux as well. At some level, it is up to the user to be discerning about the software that gets loaded onto the machine. It's unfair to blame it on Windows. If you look at the industry as a whole, the benefits of Windows providing such a good software distribution platform have far outweighed the costs.

Of course, it's not really accurate to compare Windows and Linux as equals. For example, Linux distros come with more software in the default install. The distributors can usually test this software, and ensure that it isn't crap. So you can make the argument that if you install Ubuntu, then you're less likely to need to install some external piece of software, and therefore, you're less likely to install crap on your system.

Then there's also the fact that it's really hard to ship any software (let alone crap) on a Linux system. My friend Ramesh argues sometimes that it is actually this "high bar" to entry that keeps the awful stuff out. That may be true, but it weakens the argument that Linux is the platform of "choice".

A seasoned power user can easily keep a Windows system running well and free of crap. I do it. A bunch of my friends do it. It'll be funny to see the day (if it ever comes) where you'll have to go clean the crapware out of your relative's Ubuntu box.

And a final note. Microsoft could fight back by trying to integrate more useful software directly into the default install.. but we know what happened the last time they tried to do that. Apple gets away with it for now, since they're the underdog, but sooner or later, people are going to start complaining about them too.

So I knew that the Microsoft RAW image thumbnailer didn't work for XP x64. Fine, I can live without that. But today I find that their Color Management Control Applet doesn't work either? Lame!

And people who manipulate tons of photos would be one of the first to benefit from having 4GB of memory... What are they thinking?

It's probably time for me to just bite the bullet and install 32-bit XP. Or buy a mac again, or something.

How do people tolerate this crap? A quick peek at newegg shows that 2GB of DDR2 800 RAM is now $65! I mean come on, everyone and their dog is going to have at least 4GB of RAM soon. Do people really just install 4GB of RAM, and then deal with only being able to access 3GB (or whatever number determined by your BIOS) of it?

First, it doesn't work on any x64 system (linux or windows). Second, it works on 32bit Linux, but crashes the browser left and right. Third, it used to work on a lot of systems through yottamusic, but now they managed to even break that. Sorry, you don't get $100 a year from me anymore.

Mac users like to talk about how Mac OS X doesn't have any activation. How it's all about how Apple trusts their users and such.

Personally, although I agree that activation can be user unfriendly, I totally sympathize with Microsoft for implementing it. Let's look at the differences between Windows and OS X here:

Given all these differences, it makes sense that MS invests so much in this technology. When your software is running on bajillions of machines, you know there are people trying to screw you somewhere.

So I got around to writing some startup batch scripts that try to mount some network drives. The net use command is easy enough to use, but I ran into a separate problem. If the machine starts up too fast, then the network isn't up yet, so net use fails.

So I started looking for a way to delay execution until I knew the network was up. Well pinging in a loop seemed like a good idea.

I'll start with the end result first:

:loop
echo pinging host
ping -n 1 host | find "TTL=" > NUL
if errorlevel 1 goto loop

So I'll forgive the fact that the batch command language doesn't really have a while construct. But apparently, not all versions of ping.exe return a exit code of 0 when a ping succeeds. So the recommended way to check for a successful ping is to look for TTL= in the output, which you can do with find. Which leads to the abomination above.

While I find running Gutsy on my work development desktop workable most of the time (as long as I ignore the font issues), my X60 is still another matter. Perhaps its that there just isn't enough focus on laptops, or that the open source platform hasn't really quite gotten there for laptops, or that Lenovo happens to design things in an Linux unfriendly way. Probably a combination of all of the above.

Anyhow, the problems I have remaining:

• The machine gets really hot when plugged in. Right around where the hard drive is. I tried fiddling with some hdparm parameters, but it doesn't seem to help, and I'm not too psyched about the chance of really piling up the load/unload cycles.
• On a related note, the power management is a little weird too.. I came back after leaving my machine unplugged for a few hours.. I had a warning dialog saying my battery was low, and a panel applet telling me that I had 0:00 left to go.. not quite sure what to make of that. Shouldn't it have forcibly suspended for me?
• No xrandr 1.2 yet, so no dynamic external monitor hotplug. I guess this is just a matter of time. But its a funamental feature of the hardware that should just work.
• NetworkManager and ethernet device flakiness. NetworkManager isn't so great when it comes managing profiles. I want something like Apple's where each profile can turn devices on and off. And I don't want NetworkManager to freak out when a device doesn't show up. And I want my wired ethernet device to always show up (for some reason, it doesn't, more often on warm reboots from windows). Also NetworkManager doesn't seem to let you be on more than one network at once. Either give me the full apple-like solution, or give me the crappy but flexible XP-like solution. NM seems like some not useful point in between.
• Multiple input devices (trackpoint and external mouse) still have funny interactions. I can't set the mouse sensitivity parameters such that I'm happy with both at the same time.
• Various hardware settings like volume and screen brightness don't seem to scale from 0-100 correctly. Probably a hardware quirk, but noticeable none the less. For example, two or three presses of the volume reduction button almost mutes the machine, even though visually, 70% of the bar is still full. Don't know how you fix this without getting Lenovo involved to some extent, but annoying for the user nonetheless.
• Screen seems darker even on the max brightness setting compared to windows. Don't know why.

None of these are insurmountable problems. I'm sure in a year or two, they'll even be solved. But in a year or two, I won't be using this machine.

Zealots will say open source drivers written by hardware vendors are the answer, but clearly the vendors don't want to do that (and its unclear even if they are equipped to). And even then, just because a driver is in upstream, how do I know the latest version of Ubuntu that I want to run on my fancy new laptop will have the driver? Surely, even in some utopian vision, hardware vendors aren't going to synchronize their release cycles with Ubuntu releases. There needs to be a more outside-of-the-box idea to solve this, and nobody's figured it out yet.

Maybe there will be derivatives like Dellubuntu, and Lenobuntu, and HPubuntu, where it it will be an Ubuntu release plus drivers for that hardware platform. But that still feels inside the box, and also unlikely to happen given Ubuntu's small share of the market as a whole. That's where Linux fragmentation really hurts you.

Anyways, just felt like ranting about it.

It seems like a lot of people are learning this lesson with Vista these days. There are very few applications that require Vista, and XP works fine for most people, so why upgrade? There's really no harm in waiting, while the ISV's, hardware vendors, and MS sort it all out.

Personally, I'm terrible at this. Anything that's shiny and new I have to try, usually based on false hope that things will be better. I'm usually disappointed that things are the same†. As a technologist, it seems that one needs to keep up on the new stuff, and the best way of doing that is by trying to adopt things as they come out. But often, the time I waste dealing with problems of the new stuff offsets any potential benefit. I realize more and more that the true skill of a technologist is to be able to see which of the new things are really worth adopting, and spending time to master those things.

One person I know is extremely good at sticking with what works: my dad. He's just now moving to XP. He uses Win2000 on his main machine, and has a little prototype XP box that he's gradually moving over to. I guess he'll have a great many more happy computing years coming up, and maybe he will never even know how bad Vista really was.

† that's not to say there aren't notable exceptions. I'm pretty impressed with Gimp 2.4 so far. And Lightroom has really changed how I look at photo management. But again, these are rare occurences.

I got an email at work today, which had a couple lines of g++ calls, which Outlook displayed to me like this:

g++ -o exe1 -DXYZ=abc maintemplate.cpp test001.cpp -o exe2 -DXYZ=def
g++  maintemplate.cpp test002.cpp

Turns out, this was because it "removed extra linebreaks" (which works fine most of the time, but its terrible in some cases). The original was:

g++ -o exe1 -DXYZ=abc maintemplate.cpp test001.cpp
g++ -o exe2 -DXYZ=def maintemplate.cpp test002.cpp

Sigh. I guess it tries to recognized common prefixes or something.

Posts like this one do a disservice to the reputation of the OSS community. In this post, the author claims that implies that one shouldn't run Windows because of all the DRM technologies found in it. I wonder if that's also why he doesn't run OS X?

I never really buy this argument. It's easy to run Windows without buying into any DRM schemes at all. It's the user's choice. And at least the user has a choice.

And DRM isn't completely bad. It enables new business models. Subscription music. Streaming movies. Sure, it's a pain in the ass in many cases, but don't go blaming the companies for trying out new business models and trying to deliver new kinds of value. If you don't like it, don't buy it.

Sorry, sidetracked. The point is, whether you like DRM or not, it's not an argument for not using Windows. Especially if Windows provides other value to you. If Microsoft wants to go and spend tons of money on implementing a DRM scheme which makes life harder for everyone and diminishes the value of their product, they're completely free to do that. If it's bad investment or engineering choice, then that's all it is. But if you look at the market right now, Windows is the platform for DRM-based business models. All the subscription music models are on Windows, as well as most of the movie ones. Why is that? What has Microsoft done wrong in trying to implement this technology to expand markets?

If users don't support the DRM-based business models, then they will die. And DRM will go away. Whether it's on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

The continuous onward march of technology benefits everyone right? Well, I thought so too, but recently I've run into a counter-example: wide-gamut monitors.

First let me tell you about why wide-gamut monitors suck.

For ages now, except in high-end scenarios, the color response of your desktop monitor has been assumed be effectively represented by the sRGB color space. (Actually, that was a little backwards... monitors existed before sRGB did, but the standard became widely accepted because it was easily displayed on most monitors and was a close match to the capabilities of all the monitors that mattered). The assumption of sRGB has many consequences. Most notable is that non-color-managed applications (i.e. most apps, which just send 24-bit RGB values to the framebuffer) assume that a particular color value is actually the value in the sRGB color space. These apps aren't actually aware that they output to sRGB, they just assume it.

Run the same app with a machine hooked up to a wide gamut monitor. Uh oh, now the assumption is false. And you can't do anything about it until the author of the app actually updates their code to use complex color management API.

If that wasn't bad enough, most of your desktop UI isn't color managed. Neither is the web. Sure Firefox 3 supports proper rendering of colorspace-tagged images, but that's just one app. Reboot into linux? Fail. You're slightly better off on a Mac, but life isn't perfect there too. You'll pretty much have to live inside color managed apps. Games? I don't know of any that are color managed. They're usually programmed to deliver bits to your frame buffer as fast as possible, so I'd be suprised that they'd want to interject a complex processing step in between to correct for colors.

Worse yet, it's not entirely clear that having wide-gamut is beneficial. Your software and graphics card and dvi interface are all 8 bits per channel. So you're distributing your 16.7 M color values over a wider gamut. Sure you can express more of the colors on the far ends, but you're also losing resolution in the middle. Which is more important? especially when sRGB is big enough for most printing gamuts anyways.

But it's too late. This feature has become a checkbox on all the latest monitor's feature lists.

I wouldn't care normally, I'd just wait until 10bit interfaces and gfx card and software caught up. Except that I'm in the market for a monitor. I was considering the Samsung 245T because of its good reviews. But it's wide gamut. Now I may have to go with the NEC 2470WNX which has the same panel but is not wide gamut. But it costs $100 more. So I'm paying more not to have the feature .Lame.

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?