the inner curmudgeon

Apparently you don’t have to be terribly bright to be student of psychology. One Vlad Dolezal recently blogged that he’d worked out why Linux isn’t taking the desktop world by storm: it’s because it’s free. His theory goes that people choose Windows over Linux because Windows costs money, and is therefore perceived as being more valuable than the free-as-in-beer Linux.

The fact that there are versions of Linux that aren’t free tends to blow his theory out of the water, but there is a much simpler explanation for the lack of Linux’s success in the desktop market: it’s because it’s crap, and I say that as a Linux user. Linux handles most of my computing needs very well, but there are still a number of Windows apps I use from time to time for which there is no Linux equivalent. For those apps I use a Windows virtual machine, but this not a sensible arrangement for most people - in fact it’s downright insane.

linux: still going

6.5 months on and I’m still using Ubuntu as my operating system of choice. As you can see, I haven’t completely left Windows behind, but my Windows needs can be served inside a VMWare session.

I’ve upgraded to 7.10 and while I’ve lost a little of the Beryl eye candy, that’s more than made up for by the improved stability of compiz-fusion.

Would I recommend it to others? I guess that depends on your needs. Do you use Outlook? If so, stick with Windows because Evolution sucks, this is most especially true if you’re in an office that uses Exchange server. Do you rely on Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro? Again, stick with Windows because the Gimp will melt your brain. The most recent release is a vast improvement, but it is still a program designed by, and for people who would rather do their image editing on a command line.

Do you use Word or Excel? Then maybe you could switch to Linux. OpenOffice is much better these days, but MS Office is still a far superior suite. For un-demanding work, OpenOffice will satisfy your needs, but if you’re a Word or Excel power user, then forget Linux.

However, if your main use of your computer is for browsing, email and IM, then Linux will do the job.

linux: cancel, retry or ignore?

I’ve dipped my toe in the linux waters several times over the years. The closest I came to actually switching was a couple of years ago when Ubuntu 5.04 (aka Hoary Hedgehog) hit the streets. This was the first Linux distribution I had tried where everything “just worked” and I managed to run it as my primary operating system at home for several months. However, in the end it didn’t give me anything I couldn’t get in Windows, and I was still heavily reliant on a couple of Windows-only apps.

Two years later I am willing to give it another go. Ubuntu still seems to be the best choice and the latest version (7.04 - aka Feisty Fawn) seems to be a huge improvement on what was already a very good Linux distro. This time I have decided not to go the dual-boot path and am running Linux as the only OS on my desktop system at home (though I still have XP on the laptop).

One of the hurdles I will have to clear is getting Noise Ninja running under Linux. My first attempt will be to try it under wine. If that doesn’t work I’ll see how I go running it in VMWare, but my feeling is that if you have to go to those lengths then it’s getting to be more trouble that it’s worth. Other photo-related challenges are RAW conversion and geo-tagging.

OpenOffice is better these days than last time I tried it, but it is still dreadfully sucky. However, I have found a cheap alternative in SoftMaker Office that so far seems pretty good. It handles complex Excel spreadsheets with aplomb where OpenOffice’s Calc will grind away for 10-15 seconds every time you change a cell. It’s Word processor doesn’t seem quite as compatible as I would like, but I think it’s good enough for my purposes.

Yes. I’ve finally succumbed and signed up for flickr. Before the day had ended I realised that 20Mb per month was not enough and signed up for a Pro account. It certainly beats emailing photos to people.

.. and someone has already taken a shine to one of my pics.

You really have to wonder what kind of drugs self-styled “technology critic” Bill Thompson was smoking when he decided that Microsoft should release the source code of the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer to the general public. He is apparently under the impression that this is something that MS has just dropped on Mac users. In fact, the announcement that support and distribution of Mac IE would be dropped in 2005 was made back in June 2003.

In any case, Bill’s main argument is that some sites are still aggressively IE-centric, so an open-source supported Mac IE would allow Mac users to continue to visit such sites. Trouble is that he has never actually used Mac IE; if he had, he would realise that Mac IE is not IE. A site that breaks on non-IE browsers is likely to break on Mac IE as well.

About the only people that could conceivably benefit from an open-sourced Mac IE would be hackers, who would be able to mine the code for new and exciting security exploits that could be leveraged into Windows IE.

For my diabetes blog I wrote a WordPress plugin that will automatically convert blood glucose readings from the international units (mmol/L) to the units used in the United States (mg/dL). It works pretty well and I’ve written another plugin that localises date/time values such as “2005-06-22 4:58am UTC”. If you rest your mouse pointer over that, you’ll get a tooltip showing the equivalent date and time in your time zone - assuming you have your computer configured properly…

(more…)

I haven’t yet got my Linux-based DIY media player working as a media player yet, but I have been doing a lot of tinkering with it. The whole Linux-thing has taken on a bit of a life of its own. I’m now planning to install it on my laptop as the default OS, so I’ve been trying out various distros.

The first distro I tried was Ubuntu. Since then I’ve tried its stablemate Kubuntu, MEPIS, Gentoo, SUSE 9.3, Linspire and Zen Linux. Predictably it’s tough making a decision. Each distro has at least one feature that I would love to have on my system, though there is typically much to hate along with it. I’ve written up what I’ve found so far in the continuation of this post for those that are interested. Basically Ubuntu is the current front-runner, which is kind of fitting because “Ubuntu” means “humanity to others”, and I’m an avowed humanist.

(more…)

I’ve had a month of getting to know my new phone. For the most part I’m happy with the switch. For general usage, the LG u8110 handset is easy to use and the network seems adequate in terms of coverage and reliability. However, there are some annoying problems that crop up from time to time.

First off, contrary to what I said earlier, you can browse the web on the phone, but there is a bug in the firmware that means that it only ever uses the first configured access point regardless of which one you tell it to use. The way it’s supposed to work is that you have two APs: one that connects exclusively to the “3 services” network and another that connects to the internet and you then switch between them depending on whether you want to access 3’s mostly crap content for little or no charge, or useful content on the internet at prohibitive data rates. The firmware bug means that you have to reconfigure the pre-configured AP. This is a nuisance, but I can live with it given that I rarely want to browse either the internet, or 3’s services from my mobile.

Phone issues

• As I’ve said before, the PC-based phone management software is appallingly bad. It is very poorly designed and is unreliable to the point of being unusable. Once you work out how to successfully connect to the phone, it’s no guarantee that you will be able to transfer files. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it won’t. Even when it is working, for some bizarre reason you can’t just drag and drop files from the phone to the PC. You have to play or view media files in the Phone Manager before you can upload them to the PC.
• The ringtones that come with the phone are all atrocious. Presumably this is done deliberately to encourage people to pay for downloadable ringtones from the network operators.
• While you can change your ringtone to anything you want, message tones are strictly limited the factory set choices.

Network issues

• There are some serious roaming issues. When in Daylesford a couple of weeks back, I didn’t receive any calls or messages even though I had pretty good coverage most of the time. I wasn’t expecting any, so I didn’t think anything of it … until I got back into Melbourne and received a barrage of SMSs and voicemail notifications, one of which had been backed up for 27 hours!
• This notion of having different access points for 3 services and the internet is just lame.
• Speaking of lame, the 3 content is rubbish.

The roaming issue is quite serious and it wasn’t a simple case of lack of coverage. I periodically checked the signal strength indicator and except for a few locations I had good coverage in and around Daylesford. It seems that 3 has serious problems when you are roaming outside the 3 video coverage zone.

My final beef is with the phone management software. I’ve already mentioned that it is poorly designed and cantankerous. Now, for some no readily apparent reason it has stopped working on my laptop. The only way I can transfer files to and from my phone is to use my computer at work.

Yesterday I signed up with “3″. My reasons for switching from Telstra were:

• My Nokia 3530 kept futzing intercell handovers, so it would drop out of the network without my knowledge, resulting in missed calls.
• 3 works out cheaper, even without the deal they’ve got going at the moment.

So, basically I was wanting to upgrade my phone, and the 3 offer looked pretty good. On the downside, I lose the extensive coverage that Telstra has, but I figure that I never really needed it anyway.

So far (one whole day), I’m pretty happy with my purchase. I like the phone - an LG u8110, even though the camera is pretty ordinary. I haven’t tried videocalling yet. My brother and sister both have 3 phones, so I’ll give it a burl sometime, but I don’t imagine that I’ll be making a habit of it. Call quality is good, the LCD screen is nice and clear and the battery life is better than I expected. The menu system takes a bit of getting used to for someone rusted on to the Nokia way of doing things and sending a text message seems to take more button presses than are necessary, but I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it.

The other thing I’m looking forward to trying is using it as a modem. Given the extraordinarily high data charges I won’t be using that feature very often, but I think it will come in handy from time to time.

Just a few warnings if you’re thinking of getting a 3 phone:

• If you want to be able to browse non-3 internet sites on your phone, don’t get an LG phone. The phones are quite capable of it browsing any WAP site, but 3 has hobbled them for reasons known only to themselves.
• If you do get an LG phone, make sure they give you the u8120 as advertised on their site instead of the u8110. Mind you, the only difference seems to be that the u8120 has twice as much memory and can videocall to a PC (whatever the hell that means).
• The LG PC software is truly awful. It crashes at the drop of the hat, integrates very poorly with Windows and they have two separate applications that by rights should be rolled into one.
• Another annoyance with the u8110/u8120 is that you can’t edit time zones, so if you happen to be one of the 16 million Australians who don’t happen to live anywhere near Sydney, the “world clock” feature is worthless.

And a tip: if you want to answer calls automatically on opening the phone, the relevant setting is in a none-too-obvious location: menu > calling > settings > answer mode.

I really am astonished at the kind of things that companies will waste their - and our - money on. Not to mention the world’s precious resources. Disney has decided that what the world really needs is self-destructing DVDs. Don’t we already have enough landfill?

This bizarre notion reminds me of another really dumb idea that various people have been trying to flog for a few years now - disposable mobile phones. Despite the failure of one such scheme a few years ago, the idea keeps resurfacing.

Quite apart from the obvious environmental stupidity, these concepts fail to address any actual need. For the price they’re asking for a disposable phone, I can get three months on a prepaid plan with plenty of change left over to put towards a second hand phone. Similarly, the cost of these disposable DVDs is about the same as the rental on a new release movie and if you wait a couple of months you can get the same thing out for a fraction of the price and keep it out for a week or more.

Hopefully Disney’s plan will die a quick, quiet death and they can go back to bulldozing lemmings off cliffs and other equally constructive pursuits.