This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Since my Zaurus seems to have died the Final Death (although I will be getting a replacement), and I can’t do without my reading fix, I need a way of reading books. Fortunately, help is at hand, in the form of an ebook reader for my K700i phone. It’s called BookReader, and it’s nicely free. (Not Free Software, though, as far as I can tell.) It’s a bit awkward, because it doesn’t just get loaded once and then merrily allow you to display ebooks that are uploaded separately. Instead, it comes as a JAR file (not unreasonable, since it’s a Java app) and you unpack the JAR (JAR files are just zip archives with a different extension), stick your ebook(s) inside it (calling them textfile.txt, textfile1.txt, textfile2.txt, etc.), save the jarfile, and then upload that jarfile to your phone. A little bit awkward, but not incredibly so, and it’ll certainly tide me over until I can get a replacement. The tiny font is surprisingly readable on the nice bright screen of the phone, and you can add your own font if you feel so inclined (which means it could be really minute if you were hawk-eyed).
Those of you with Bluetooth will have read “upload that jar file to your phone” and thought “yep, I can do that“. (In fact, Jono and I were experimenting with Bluetooth this very evening, synchronising a Palm Tungsten with Linux using pilot-link most successfully. Except that Evolution won’t do it, because it (well, gnome-pilot-daemon) doesn’t understand network syncs, but Jono can tell you more about that himself.) Those of you without Bluetooth may well think: how do I upload stuff? Easy. Just upload the jar file to your web server and then bang the URL into the browser (I use Orange World; don’t know how to do this on other networks, but it’ll be pretty simple). A word of warning: make sure your webserver serves it as content-type application/java-archive. Apache on Debian stable seems to have application/x-java-archive by default, and it doesn’t work if you serve it with that: the phone won’t recognise it as an application. Anyway, I’m off to read some books. And possibly investigate MIDP and MIDlets and how to make a Java MIDlet application display some arbitrary text files you have on your phone (rather than just its own JAR file contents), assuming that you can do that.

A new LugRadio is out for your listening pleasure: it is episode 4 of season 2 and it is very good, I think. Despite how Matt had serious points to make and we all just took the piss and didn’t let him get a word in edgeways.

-----

I, like Ned Batchelder, read Simon’s complaint about Eclipse. I’ve looked at Eclipse in the past, and come away concluding that it’s way too complicated for my poor little brain. Ned says

I often find myself tempted by the glittering riches of some new IDE, or some new language (or language feature), when what I really need to do is buckle down and write some code, or even harder, do some of the difficult thinking that happens before coding. Usually, when I am not making progress on a project, it is because of something that neither languages nor tools will help. Usually, I am mulling over some thorny problem, either in the user experience, or in the architecture. When those hard chunks are out of the way, it’s pretty clear
sailing.
So I didn’t do anything about Eclipse this morning. I continued to hack Python in one of the many Python IDEs that clutter my hard drive. Aha! “Many IDEs” must mean I’m an IDE guy. I’ll admit it, I like playing with new tools. But the fact is that I use all those IDEs the same way: as a Python-aware text editor with tabs. I don’t do much more with them than that. For me, IDEs occupy a similar slot to candy: they’re tempting, almost irresistible, enjoyable for a short while, but ultimately unsatisfying. They don’t get at the heart of the problem.
I haven’t had an opportunity to use Eclipse’s luxuriant refactoring tools and quick fix doodads. I’m sure they make developers more productive, how could they not? But they won’t help me decide how to refactor, or what the right semantics are for an abstraction, or predict in which ways the system will have to change in the next release. They won’t help me find the simple path among the complex, or choose just the right words to describe my thoughts, or understand the user’s problem better. They may help me be a more productive coder, but they won’t helpme write better software.

I couldn’t agree more, I really couldn’t. I’m in total agreement with everything Ned says, there. Interestingly, that includes one other thing that has reassured me no end. You see, Ned’s on my list of “hackers I would like to be more like“, because I’m always impressed with how much he knows about the art and science of writing code. And he says that he only has “a primitive understanding of what a closure is“. Hooray! There’s hope for me yet. That describes my understanding perfectly, that, no matter how many times I read someone explaining them. I know what they are, and I know where they can be used, but it’s a primitive understanding.
But Ned’s completely right about using Python IDEs “as a Python-aware text editor with tabs“. At work, when writing ASPs, I use Visual Interdev, but I’m not using it to manage projects, no no. Instead, I use it as a VBScript- and JScript-aware editor that can do more than one file at once. Even the Intellisense thing isn’t all that useful, because it’s Interdev 6 and doesn’t do it for most things. (I suspect that’s not its fault but mine for not doing some necessary setup, but I don’t know how to make Intellisense work for an arbitrary object.)
I keep hearing that Eclipse (or, worse, Emacs) is our answer to Visual Studio. Maybe it is. But clearly I’m not the person to tell you whether that’s the case.

Has anyone else noticed that, now that half the mints in the world are Super Death Power Mints that are tiny but make your tongue burn, old-fashioned ordinary mints liike Mint Imperials or (even) Trebor Extra Strong Mints just taste really wimpy and watery? This is a sad example of something, but I’m not sure what.
Oh, the respect of your fellows (but no prize) is open to the first person who can identify from where the title of this post came. Gladys need not apply, because I know he’ll get it without even trying hard.

Yay! I got a schroedinbug. Hoorah for that. I hate debugging at the best of times. Better still, this manifested itself in schroedinbug form (it didn’t happen at all until someone discovered it, at which point the bug manifested for everybody!) but is also a heisenbug, in that it doesn’t occur in the debugger. Great. I hate debugging.

-----

The dating game in the UK is pretty complex. Frankly, I’m glad I’m out of it. Those of you who aren’t, though, will be all too familiar with the complexities involved when you try and find a boyfriend or find a girlfriend. Dating’s tough. A friend of mine, though, has come up with a pretty good solution. It’s called Compa, and it’s designed to orchestrate group dating in the UK. A clever idea, actually, and originally Japanese: the plan is that, instead of going out there looking for love by yourself, you get a group of you together. Then, on the website, you find a similar-sized group of the opposite sex, and arrange to go out on a big group date. If it works, great, and some of you go home together; if it doesn’t, you all get to have a laugh, and there’s no cringingly embarrassing blind date moment when you realise you can’t stand the person you’re in the pub with. It’s an intriguing idea, and I wish him the very best of luck with it. And all the rest of you who are in the market for a date might now be in the market for a group date, too.
Nice clean (although sadly invalid) CSS-styled HTML, too. The designers did a reasonable job there (although I would have liked to see validity). I consulted a little on security issues, and they seemed like a good group of guys.

So, blogging technology goes mainstream. The really cool thing about this, from my perspective (a shamefully egotistical perspective, admittedly), is that I invented Pingback. In truth, I came up with the original idea, Simon Willison and I enhanced it, it was further enhanced by various people through discussion on the Blogite mailing list, and then Hixie applied some real rigour to the thing and wrote the real spec. Nonetheless: wow. I’m well pleased with that!

Some fucker spammed my private wiki with loads of links. I suspect it was some kind of spamming robot. Anyway, that’s gotta stop. Fortunately, since it’s a private wiki, I don’t need to leave access open to people. That being the case, what I want to do is enforce authentication on URLs with @edit in them. This is done using the Apache LocationMatch directive: I added the following into the VirtualHost section that defines kryogenix.org in my httpd.conf.

<LocationMatch "wiki/@edit">
 AuthType Basic
AuthName "No spam"
AuthUserFile /var/www/kryogenix.org/html/wiki/.htpasswd
Require valid-user
</LocationMatch>

The really annoying thing is that you can’t use LocationMatch in a .htaccess file. Why? Why does this require me to have root access to edit the main server configuration file? It’s really bloody irritating.

Matt has begun a series on the use of marketing in open source, at least partially as a response to an argument he and I had in the most recent episode of LugRadio. He begins by explaining very briefly what marketing actually is (as opposed to what programmers think it is) and then goes on to a more detailed analysis and review of Linspire’s new OooFf! product—a retailbundling of Firefox and OpenOffice together—where he pays specific attention to its branding and marketing. My feelings about corporatism and its potentia linfluence on the open-source world were not all that well explained in the LugRadio discussion—I suspect we’d need a whole episode just on this, and I intend to return to the topic with a few more well-considered essays here—but one of Matt’s major arguments is that I don’t understand what marketing is. Perhaps this is true: if it’s so, I’m certainly not alone, and it’s rare to find someone who is capable of explaining it to a programmer: not many hackers can explain hacking to a marketeer, and none of them understand hacking, so why do we expect that we understand their discipline? Matt’s work should help bridge the gap: if you work with free software and you think that marketing waste time and money, or even if you don’t but think you can see effective marketing techniques that they can’t, then you need to read this series. More please, Matt!

I’ve got a new phone, a SonyEricsson K700i, like Andy Budd and Ross Burton. Ross is a nutcase: he had a T68, just like I did, and he transferred his contact details by multisyncing them from T68 to PC and then from PC to K700i. Me, I just beamed them all directly from one phone to the other via infrared. (I’d have done it via Bluetooth if I’d have thought of it, but I’m old-school and haven’t really got on the Bluetooth vibe yet. I’m going to, though.)
Anyway, it’s really superbly cool. New trick, which I picked up off a guy; when you get someone’s mobile number from them, take a picture of them as well and associate the picture with their addressbook entry. That way, when they ring you, you’ll get a picture of them and it’ll help you remember who they are. This applies more if you’re a sales rep or something, admittedly; if you need a picture of your mum to remind you who she is then you are doing something wrong.
I shall be syncing it with my online calendar and contact details at Mobical too, but I’m holiding off on that until my proper number propagates to it in a week or so (I switched providers, so I needed to transfer my number—it was even easier than it was last time!) and everything works right.
It’s cool. Looks really nice, works really well. Plays mp3s, which you can add as ringtones. The only complaint I have so far is that I tried posting here using MIDlog and it didn’t work. Said “Error” but didn’t tell me what the error was, so I shall investigate further. Pretty cool that it runs Java applications; it’d be cooler if it ran Jython, but it seems that a mobile phone with J2ME is too poor an environment to run Jython.
Lots of fun times ahead fiddling with this!

And we’re cruising onward further into a new season. LugRadio season 2, episode 3 is now available for your listening pleasure. Hear us slag off Powergen! And Novell! And Microsoft! And people who buy software! And all corporations! And the National Health Service! And Sparkes! And Jono!
Update, 3.08pm: and the Isle of Man and everyone who lives in it!

-----

Unless you are the richest person alive, it’s a pretty safe bet that I now have at least as many pianos as you do, and probably more, by which I mean that I have one piano. Tragically, they failed to deliver piano-playing ability to our house along with the instrument, so we’re currently limping through one-finger playing and stopping after every note to work out what the next one is. Pointers to excellent references and tutorials (on the net or off it) or suggestions for how people with no previous piano-playing experience at all should learn are greatly welcomed. Sam wants to play Christmas carols; I want to be Fats (ha!) Domino and play blues and jazz.

JWZ writes about a record company who release their works under a Creative Commons licence and goes on to quote Chuck D on sampling :

Public Enemy’s music was affected [by copyright lawsuits] more than anybody’s because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn’t have been anything—they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style, the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.

-----

So, I got a wiki. Those of you who listen to LugRadio will have heard me being extremely abusive about wikis, and may therefore (charitably) be wondering why I’ve got one myself, or (uncharitably) be laughing hysterically at how the mighty are fallen.
No so, I say. Official update to the Castle Kryogenix Software Policy coming up.
What I don’t like about wikis is not the general concept of the thing: it’s the way that software developers think that they can throw together a wiki instead of documentation, presumably in the hope that

1. Their users will create their documentation for them
2. They don’t have to do any work
3. It is somehow easier to understand how to use a piece of software by reading a wiki filled with random disconnected notes and arguments than it is to read a fucking manual (this is the sort of thing that Matt rants about all the time)

Anyway, mine is not really for you lot to read: it’s for me to read. You are, of course, welcome to read it (Danny O‘Brien has talked before about “working in public“, and it’s a laudable goal), but I’ve thought more than once about having a “projects” weblog to note down ideas I’ve had. Since one of the major ideas is “rearchitect kryogenix.org so that other weblogs work properly“, there was a sort of chicken-and-egg problem there. So, a wiki. Looks like a good one too, if you don’t need a lot of features, which I don’t; it’s not a proper website, it’s a collection of online notes.

I anticipate that Winamp will continue to limp along for a little while longer. With minor bug fixes and updates for some time to come. Over the long term, I anticipate Winamp’s identity will change to fit the goals of those at AOL who don’t really care what Winamp means to the millions of our loyal followers.
A sad day. Windows Media Player for everyone, it seems.

In January my daughter Niamh starts school. So today people from the school came round for a home visit. Basically it’s done so they can ask her questions: they asked her to count, to recognise some written numbers, to write her name, to draw a picture of herself, that sort of thing. I assume that they also wanted to take a quick glance around the house to ensure that we weren’t keeping her in horrendous squalor, which we aren’t, much as my mum might like to think that we don’t tidy up enough. What I want to talk about, though, is reading ability.
You see, we’ve been teaching her to read. It’s going pretty slowly, as you can imagine, but she can sound out letters and, given a bit of prompting, put them together into words. This is phonics, a dirty word in the argot of teaching children things, but it’s what both Sam and I know. I’m quite prepared to believe that the “whole language” sort of method might be good, but I don’t know how to teach it. Now, the nursery that Niamh currently attends write a Record of Achievement (or some such named thing) which is a summary of her academic progress to date. Apparently it would seem that the school completely ignore this and start teaching everything right from the beginning, leaving one to wonder whether the nursery might as well have just let her play with toys solidly for two years: the school have given her a couple of books with pictures. No words, just pictures. She graduated from picture-books to books with words in (which she has read to her, and reads along to some extent) some considerable time ago.
Even that, though, is not the main point here. Dm comments, over on Crooked Timber (first comment after tha main article) that “the teaching technique used was far less important than whether or not students arrived at school knowing what books were and how they worked“. You might think that that’s a ridiculous statement, but it isn’t. Three years ago, a woman from Sainsbury’s visited the toddlers’ group that Niamh attended with news of a great special offer: Sainsbury’s were, in an effort to help literacy, giving away free children’s books! All you had to do was go to the store and pick them up; you didn’t even need to buy anything. Needless to say, we went, and got a rather nice cloth bag with five or six books for very young children in it. No problem, right? Except that, without fail, all the mothers who turned up with children in tow to get the free books were in nice middle-class families and really didn’t need them.We’re just the same. We have loads of books. Niamh has loads of books. The people who this kind of thing is aimed at, those who don’t have books in the house, wouldn’t dream of buying any, don’t visit libraries: they didn’t turn up. And why? Because they don’t care about books. That’s why they don’t have any, and so if they feel like that why would they ever want to turn up somewhere and get some? So it didn’t work at all, despite being done with the best of intentions. The real horror, for me, was the reasoning behind the need for the scheme, and something to which dm alludes in the comment linked above: apparently, there are now a non-insubstantial proportion of kids turning up to school at the age of five who do not know what a book is. Not “are unable to read”—they’ve quite possibly never even seen a book, and don’t know what to do with it. They’ll pick it up and shake it, or chew it, or wave it around. I find it almost impossible to conceive of a five-year-old child who doesn’t know what a book is. They might not be able to read it, but they should know that reading is what you do with it when you’ve got it. I was horrified; really, seriously horrified at this.
Obviously, Niamh is not one of these children.

A new script and description: DOM Image Annotation. This describes how to achieve Flickr’s neat trick of annotating bits of an image with a box and a tooltip through simple unobtrusive DHTML.
This is a minor celebratory script, since I have now (wait for it, wait for it) finished writing the book! Well, nearly all; I’ve done all the technical bits. The introduction and stuff remains to be done, but all the hard and useful stuff is out the way. No, I still don’t know a publish date. But this script came to mind in an instant after reading about Gina’s image annotation, and so I put it together.

An ongoing conversation between Tom (rabid public transport fan and car-hater) and me (thoroughly loves driving; buses smell of piss) over on Aurlog, prompted by some anti-car activists’ distortion of facts. Or, y‘know, a pressure group’s vital unearthing of some of the hideous truths about car driving that the petrolhead lobby try to conceal. Depends which side of the fence you’re on, I suppose…

John Siracusa on Delicious Library for the Mac:

As is customary, the background image helpfully includes the “installation instructions” (if you can even call them that). [ those being “drag the icon to your application folder to install”—sil ]

I’m pointing these things out not because Delicious Monster is unique among Mac developers in the quality of their artwork and their attention to detail, but because they aren’t unique. Nearly every popular Mac OS X application is a single-icon drag-installed affair, sporting an attractive icon, distributed in either an internet-enabled or meticulously decorated and arranged disk image. Even open source applications like Fire and multi-platform ports like Mozilla meet this standard on OS X. Heck, even Real gets it right. Real software…think about that!

The is an example of the best kind of peer pressure. There is simply a “climate of excellence” on the Mac platform. Any developer that does not live up to community standards is looked down upon, or even shunned. Commercial, open source, freeware, shareware, it doesn’t matter: pay attention to detail, or else.

Windows users, think about what your typical download and installation experience is like. How many dialogs are you presented with? What do the file names and icons look like? Do you have to run an installer? What kind of manual clean-up is required afterwards?

Linux users, when you look at the carefully laid out disk image contents in the screenshot and links above, think about how far “desktop Linux” has to come before it can even begin to think about details like how single-icon drag-installed applications are arranged in their disk image windows.

Yes, I know, all of this is “pointless” and “dumb” because looks are meaningless. It’s the software that counts—the code, the bits, not the packaging, right? And so we come to an important difference between Mac enthusiasts and other computer users. Mac users understand that the packaging counts too (and are willing to pay for it). Happily, you get a lot of nice things “for free” on the Mac platform these days: composited windows, large icons, rich disk image and application bundle standards, etc.

And why don’t we have this on Linux? Well, the ROX Desktop does, which is why I always liked it so much; it just doesn’t have a lot of the other stuff that makes a good desktop environment, and it doesn’t have enough applications (or enough developers). And we’re not going to get it on Linux either, not with the packaging system in the mess that it is. Now, one big hope for sorting out packaging (if you ignore everyone saying “make Red Hat and SuSE use .debs”—Jono, I’m looking at you here) is autopackage. And what do they say about single-drag-and-drop installation?

What’s wrong with NeXT style appfolders?
One of the more memorable features of NeXT based systems like MacOS X or GNUstep is that applications do not have installers, but are contained within a single “appfolder“, a special type of directory that contains everything the application needs. To install apps, you just drag them into a special Applications folder. To uninstall, drag them to the trash can. This is a beguilingly easy way of managing software, and it’s a common conception that Linux should also adopt this mechanism. I’d like to explain why this isn’t the approach that autopackage takes to software management.
...
Update: As of 21st May 2003 I’d consider AppFolders broke on MacOS as it appears that most Mac software is now shipped using installers, even Apples own software. Wise is also forging a business in InstallShield style wrappers. It seems they really are too simple at this stage in the game, even for the Mac.

Gordon Bennett.

In response to Khendon’s rather tidy desk picture , I present: my desk at work.

It’s a tragedy that Top Gear slagged off the Chrysler 300C so much, because it’s stunning to look at. And stunningly cheap, too, if they do release it here in the UK for (a pitifully low) £29000. I mean, that’s nothing. There are some of you out there who will be thinking: that’s thirty grand! You could get a Boxster for that! Yeah, I could, if I liked Porsches, which I don’t. The 300C looks like the Mafia’s dream car. Fantastic looks, especially in black. I mean, look at it. Wow. Looks like it should be armour-plated or something. I’d feel like Adam Susan driving around in that. Cool.
I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that whatever my next car will be is basically not going to be any faster than my current one, because for it to be so I’ll have to buy something like a BMW M3, and that’s a cool fifty thou or so. So I’ll stick with current levels of performance and instead more luxury. The Chrysler, in addition to looking like the car that Lucky Luciano would be driving around in if he were still with us, has everything built in. Everything. Say what you like about the Yanks, they know about chucking in all the electronic wizardry stuff for nothing. But, if the Top Gear crew are right, it wallows like a fat hippo when you’re actually driving it. Damn. My quest to know what I’ll be buying next (no S2000, it’s only got two seats; no M5 or M3, they’re too expensive; no 300C, it drives like a pig) continues unabated.

Two years ago, in response to another Guy Fawkes night and its associated pathetic firework display in my back garden, I spoke of how annoying home fireworks were. Since then I have learned my lesson: go to a public fireworks display. Last night I visited Spooktactular at Himley Hall (warning: crap conversion of a PDF), which cost us a stupendous fifteen quid to get in (£6/adult and £3 for parking; Niamh was free), after queueing for half an hour in the car.
And it was bloody excellent.
The fair was rather packed. The bonfire was large, but had no Guy on top of it. And the firework display was superb. Long and strong and definitely worth it. They had music playing all through it, taking shameless advantage of how Hallowe‘en was a week ago; there were songs from The Lost Boys and The Addams Family and Ghostbusters. And there was Bring Me To Life by Evanescence, and a few others. Went well with the music: a touch of the dramatic, some big beats, that sort of thing. None of them, however, could hold a candle to the music that played over the huge sky-lighting rainbow-shaded crashing explosive finale of coloured lights in the sky, because that music was Orff’s Carmina Burana (well, O Fortuna from same, for pedants). It’s such a good bit of music for dramatic things. It is, in fact, one of the three best bits of classical music ever written, along with Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Bach (and even then only the beginning bit, and only if played on a really massive church organ) and the Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem, and that’s not only equally dramatic but also terrifying. Rodrigo’s Concierto d‘Aranjuéz gets an honourable mention at number four, but it is for guitar which is silly. Plus, Gladys once corrected me on the pronunciation of “Aranjuéz” in such a patronising way that I had to shoot him.
How did I get on to music? I was talking about fireworks.
If you even remotely like fireworks then you should go to a public display. If your gsrden ones disappoint you because they say “Global Thermonuclear War” on the wrapper and look more like “Light Green Ejaculation” once lit then go to a public fireworks display. Half the time they’re run by the local council anyway, so you’re helping them to get money to do useful things like fix roads and so on, which can’t be a bad thing.

From Powergen, via Bill:

We currently support Microsoft Internet Explorer (Version 5.0 or above) and Netscape Navigator (Version 7.02 or above).
Whilst not officially supported the site can also be used with Opera (Version 7.20 or above) and Konqueror (Version 3.1.1 or above).
Your Current Browser: Netscape
Your Current Version: 0.10.1 (Debian package 0.10.1+1.0PR-4)
It is recommended that you upgrade your browser to one of the below.

I would have thought that they were clueful people (we support Konqueror! look!), except that they clearly all still use Internet Explorer at work (or one of them would have noticed this).
Alternatively, is the Debian version number wrong?
Nonetheless, regardless of which it is, this shows, very very clearly, the flaws of browser sniffing from the user agent string. Don’t do it, kids!

Today is Guy Fawkes Day, also known as Bonfire Night, the day in which we, the citizens of the UK, celebrate the life and death of the only man in history to enter Parliament with completely honest intentions. Guy Fawkes: tried to blow up the House of Commons. Now, that sort of thing is, admittedly, Not Cricket, but you’ve gotta admire the largeness of the bloke’s thoughts.

“This thrice-damnéd Government perpetuates itself at the expense of the people! What say you, Alcazar?”
“Verily, I cannot but agree, Tobias. How shall we, as True Catholic Men of England, put an end to their villany?”
“Mayhaps we should rouse the common Man to our cause? With silvered words might we not educate those beneath us to a more depthful understanding of their lot? How say you, Guy?”
“No.”
“But Guy! What manner of persuasion propose you to use to shew the men of Parliament their errors?”
“Gunpowder. A shitload of it, too; I’ve got 36 barrels lying around here someplace. Incidentally, don’t tell King James that I said that.”

...and the rest, as the man said, is history. I wonder what dear old perfidious Albion would be like if he’d succeeded? The view from Westminster Bridge would be quite a bit crapper, I expect, as would the opening credits of News at Ten. Still, we can’t have everything. Can’t even have anything, some days.
Which is a neat segue away from the topic of politics (of which everyone is bored anyway) and into Ubuntu Linux, which has also been failing me recently (much as did Fawkes 399 years ago: big celebrations next year!). In particular, while I’ve been impressed with Ubuntu’s looks and easy installation and basic stuff, I recently actually tried to do something with it. Two things, in fact: plug in a USB pen drive, and browse to a Windows share. Neither worked. Plugging in teh pen drive did, apparently, nothing. Reading @/var/log/messages@ made it clear that the kernel had recognised it and identified it as @/dev/sda@, but Ubuntu utterly failed to then mount this device. The “Removable Storage” applet (which is actually gnome-volume-manager, as far as I’m aware) has “mount removable media when inserted” and so on, and it didn’t happen. What I’d expect to happen is for a mount point to be created for the drive and the drive to be mounted on that mount point, and then (at base) for a new drive to appear in “Drives“, or (better) that and an icon appear on the desktop, and (best of all) the drive to be called “USB Pen Drive” or the name of the manufacturer or something rather than “sda” or “hal-disk-3-1” or something equally meaningless. In fact, none of these things happened. That’s not very good, and it’s obviously not a fault with the kernel setup because that worked. Yes, it might be a fault with hotplug or something, but Ubuntu and Gnome 2.8 are meant to make this sort of thing Just Work, and they failed dismally. In the end I had to create a mount point and mount it myself from the command line, which is pretty alarmingly arse. Perhaps I didn’t have something installed, but I can’t see why this shouldn’t work as part of the install, especially since I was upgraded to the Warty release.
Secondly, browsing to Windows shares in Nautilus doesn’t work. Not even a little bit. It doesn’t even seem to understand smb:// URLs, let alone show anything under “Windows Network” in “Network“. This is also very pants indeed. PLus it means that I can’t print anything from my laptop, because I can’t find the printer (which is connected to a Windows box). Again, maybe I’ve not installed something (smbfs wasn’t installed, and I wondered if installing that would fix it, but it didn’t) but I shouldn’t have to; isn’t this sort of thing pretty basic functionality?
So, Ubuntu fails on the “actually do something” test rather than the “start it up and browse the web a bit” test, which isn’t good. Plus, there seems to be something wrong with the applet that lets me configure my network cards; half the time it locks up, and it refused to configure the wireless card to come up at boot, so I had to edit @/etc/network/interfaces@. Now, I’m aware that warty is an early release, and I have no major problem with stuff not working; it just means that (and the Ubuntu team might well entirely agree here) that it’s perhaps not as ready for prime-time just yet as I have been thinking it was.

It’s always nice to be mentioned places. A chap has written something which includes my name, as well as Simon Willison’s and Christian Heilmann’s. It seems to be about unobtrusive JavaScript, but it’s a bit difficult to tell. The online Hungarian translators I can find don’t help much (except for how I believe that “Simon” is the Hungarian word for “Stroke“, heh heh). Can any Hungarian speakers out there furnish me with a translation?

Paul Hammond bemoans how everyone’s sites are looking the same, prompted by Heather Powazek’s exhortation for new design. I wrote about this a couple of years ago, saying that Orient looks pretty much like kryogenix looks pretty much like Caveat Lector looks pretty much like Simon Willison’s weblog looks pretty much like Textism looks pretty much like Zeldman in a discussion of “anonymity of style“. I did then go on to say that “perhaps this era of relatively plain (but very pretty looking, and fairly minimalist) site designs is an interim period while we find our feet in this relatively new medium“. Has this happened? For a while, I thought that the Zen Garden was the counterpoint to this argument; it shows how design can be incredibly varied on exactly the same content. No-one’s actually doing that, though. It’s not just that we’ve got too many people who are just using the default templates for their weblogs (and all sites are weblogs now, right?), meaning that their sites look exactly the same, but that, as Heather says, “I long for the diversity of the time before weblogs (BW) when life was more than a two or three column layout“. Look at the three best designers I know, Zeldman, Jon Hicks, and Douglas Bowman. While their sites are very pretty, they fall into Heather’s black hole of two-and-three-column designs. If the best and the brightest are coming up with simply graphical variants on this type of design, what hope the rest of us?
Possibly the reason that everyone’s got this type of design is that it makes the best sense for usability. I mean, all buses are roughly the same shape: they’re a big long box with wheels on. No-one builds a bus that is one person wide and 144 people high, for example. This isn’t because bus designers aren’t creative, or becuase they’re unable to do anything other than copy their predecessors, it’s because that’s the best shape for a bus. So one concentrates (if one concentrates at all on bus design) on little things: the shape of the wheel arches, the fittings, the doors. Look at cars that are acknowledged as a triumph of design, like the Aston Martin DB9 or the Jaguar E-Type (or the Fiat Coupe, heh heh). Yes, these are beautiful cars. But they have four wheels and a steering wheel and a windscreen and the pedals are in the same place as a Lada Riva. Apart from how the Riva looks like two boxes in a pile and the E-Type looks like a big shiny dick with two chairs in, they’re the same in concept. Perhaps weblog sites have to also be the same: two column layouts aren’t like design, they’re like wheels. You have to have them to go forward, and that’s not negotiable.

001 007 009.

-----

See, at work I used to use Visual Sourcesafe, because we’re a Microsoft shop. At home, well, nothing. I had to use CVS to get other people’s project code, but I never really got on with it. Then I discovered Subversion. It seems pretty cool. I use it at home, and we use it at work, along with TortoiseSVN, the Windows Explorer extension that makes it easy to manage your svn working copies.
So, the choice was between CVS and SVN at home, and VSS and SVN at work: pretty easy choice.
Then came loads of other source code control systems. Now which should I be using? Arch seems sort of interesting, in a BitKeeper-ish sort of way; BK must be pretty good, because they’re using it to manage the Linux kernel, and so arch should be reasonable if it works on the same principles. Ned is talking about darcs, which operates without a central server, which seems pretty clever (although what do you do if the bloke with the one working copy isn’t onlne? Sounds a bit like it might have the BitTorrent problem, where there’s got to be at least one person with a full dataset online at all times.)
Which do you use? Do you stick with the old standbys like CVS or SVN, or are you using some of these “next-generation” SCC systems? Why, or why not? Are you doing anything interesting with them other than source control, like, say, Roberto’s weblog backend, or something even cooler?