Category: Geekitude

While working on yawl this morning, I finally had had enough. I just can’t get my head around Gnome and what to me are very poor design decisions. Without much fanfare, I installed the Kubuntu KDE packages on yawl, restarted X, and was happily back in KDE land. For those curious on how to install KDE on Ubuntu:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop

I completely replaced the GDM login system with KDM, and after a restart, all was restored.

Why did I make this choice? I’ll freely admit I’m a lot more comfortable with KDE than I am with Gnome, but in the interest of learning, and that it seems most folks are defaulting to Gnome in their installs nowadays, I decided to try it. I lasted about 2 months before the frustration level got to be too much.

Here’s a brief summary of why I switched back.

• Dumbed-Down interface
  Gnome has made many decisions to ‘dumb down’ it’s interface, so it is not as ‘intimidating’ to new users. In doing so, however, it’s made the interface too sparse, too simplistic, and frankly dull.

• Audience targeting is wrong
  The choices that Gnome has made in their interface seem to fall into two categories. The first is the aformentioned ‘dumb’ mode. Make the interface simplistic and boring to avoid confusing users. The second set of choices is ‘make it not look like Windows’. My question here is “WHY?” The number of ‘new’ users on the planet right now who have never touched windows is incredibly small. Of those that fit into this category, many are Mac users. So building an interface that deliberately avoids any of the ‘existing’ UI designs is a ridiculous approach. What audience is trying to be targeted by making those choices?

• Deliberately limiting power users
  I’m a power user, I admit it. I will tweak, update, and modify my desktop the way I want to. I enjoy doing it within the paradigm of the environment, to understand the design philosophies that went into it. The Gnome interface appears to either be “Dumb dumb dumb, it looks like this, maybe in a shade of blue”, or it is “Edit the gnome registry to get what you want.” The entire desktop experience seems to have been shoved into “We make a pretty window manager, everything else is up to you to hack.” KDE’s desktop, applet, toolbar, and UI tuning is vastly superior, with mature, stable, and complete tools for doing whatever you’d like. These tools also stay out of the way unless you need them. Another bonus.

• Konqueror
  I can’t say enough about Konqueror. Gnome’s equivelent to the filesystem browser, Nautilus, is a sham. It looks like something dragged out of the Amiga days, and never updated since. I would never even remotely consider doing serious file manipulation work with Nautilus. Konqueror has a long history of stability and growth and expansion. Nautilus appears to change with every gnome release.

• KIOSLAVES
  And this is the final win. Because KDE is truly an integrated desktop environment, it’s quite possible to define alternative IO methods. An excellent example is the ‘fish’ kioslave plugin. It allows urls within file open/save dialogs that reference a remote SSH server, just as if it were part of the local filesystem. When I do a screenshot with ksnapshot, I save it to a bookmarked location called “fish://boomer.homeport.org/home/dbs/public_html” – which pops up in my Save as… dialog, as if it were a local filesystem. This occurs in all KDE applications. Bookmarks, kioslave pointers, links I’ve defined – they’re all there in the file save/load dialog.

I recently had a conversation with an old friend of mine who, while his wife’s computer was down, decided to give her a try on Ubuntu linux, running Gnome. They set up Thunderbird and Firefox, and let her work on it. She was intensely frustrated and annoyed at the environment, because it was totally UNLIKE windows, which she had worked on for years. This deliberate ‘breaking’ of paradigms that users are used to, for no other reason than “We don’t want to be like windows”, is, I believe, one of the major reasons Linux desktops do not have more widespread use. The interface is TOO different, and too hard to understand, despite the ‘dumbing down’. The intuitiveness level is non-existent, so people will not want to use it.

Gnome folks, sit down with the KDE people and start learning about UI design. Shut down your emacs editors and bash prompts and learn how the rest of the world has advanced beyond these poor outdated models. Perhaps you’ll begin to understand that a desktop is not just pretty graphics on top of shell prompts, and start designing accordingly.

My love affair with my Sony MZ-RH1 Minidisc player / recorder just keeps rolling along. After a few bumps getting it set up and running, I’m quite happily listening to music off little handheld disks. The player is working great. Soon I’ll be able to test it as a recorder, as a recently ebayed microphone is on it’s way.

Tonight, though, I had my first ‘walkabout’ with the player, listening to it as I went on a hike. Once I had figured out it’s sort of odd ‘Group’ structure for music, I was able to set up my albums and playlists on the one disk I had filled (well, to 700meg) with MP3’s. All works just as it’s supposed to. I once again have a perfectly useable, long battery life, high sound quality portable MP3 player that has the added bonus of having removeable media, be able to do high end recording, AND is the half the size and weight of an ipod.

But that’s not what I’m here to tell you about.

While it’s true the new Hi-MD Minidiscs use a non-standard format for their filesystem, that doesn’t mean the new player doesn’t function well with others. In fact, I randomly plugged the unit into my Linux box, to see if I could see my music filesystem.

[19860885.124000] usb 4-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
[19860885.260000] usb 4-6: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[19860885.456000] scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[19860885.456000] usb-storage: device found at 6
[19860885.456000] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[19860890.456000] usb-storage: device scan complete
[19860890.460000]   Vendor: SONY      Model: Hi-MD WALKMAN     Rev: 1000
[19860890.460000]   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
[19860890.476000] SCSI device sdc: 494023 2048-byte hdwr sectors (1012 MB)
[19860890.476000] sdc: Write Protect is off
[19860890.476000] sdc: Mode Sense: 00 2a 44 00
[19860890.476000] sdc: assuming drive cache: write through
[19860890.492000] SCSI device sdc: 494023 2048-byte hdwr sectors (1012 MB)
[19860890.496000] sdc: Write Protect is off
[19860890.496000] sdc: Mode Sense: 00 2a 44 00
[19860890.496000] sdc: assuming drive cache: write through
[19860890.496000]  sdc: unknown partition table
[19860890.672000] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sdc
[19860890.672000] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[19860895.184000] FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems,
filesystem will be case sensitive!

Well this certainly looks promising. And look! I have a new filesystem mounted!

dbs@yawl:~$ cd /media/usbdisk-1
dbs@yawl:/media/usbdisk-1$ df -k .
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc                987904    665728    322176  68% /media/usbdisk-1
dbs@yawl:/media/usbdisk-1$ ls -l
total 32
-r-x------ 1 dbs dbs     0 2007-02-21 19:15 HI-MD.IND
drwx------ 2 dbs dbs 32768 2007-02-27 20:07 HMDHIFI

Alas, it’s not quite trivial to browse the music I’ve stored on the disk, as it appears Sony has their own way of clustering music. But, I’m okay with this. Sony has finally removed all the DRM insanity that has plagued the Minidiscs since their inception over a decade ago, and now the format is actually useful – in fact, it’s downright sexy.

Stay tuned for a more indepth review of the unit. I need to go play some more.

Update 2/28 9am – Fixed a little formatting problem with <pre>.

Well, today I received my spiffy Sony MZ-RH1 minidisc recorder and player. It’s a fantastic little machine, very sexy and elegant. It does, however, require the SonicStage software from Sony. I did the full installation, and went to run it, and got this dialog.
I haven’t rebooted yet, but I’m just getting that little shiver of “Oh, this can’t bode well.”
I’ll file further reports as events warrant. But for the moment, I need to reboot. I’ll be back after start the computer.
Update – It rebooted fine, and the Sony software came up as expected. 20 minutes later I have a gig of data on the MD player, all sourced as MP3’s, loaded onto a disc without a problem, and without corruption. Whee!

This thing is by far one of the COOLEST gadgets I’ve ever seen. Watch the videos – it’s hard to explain what it does without seeing it in action. The summary on their page is:

The reactable, is a state-of-the-art multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

The wonder of it all is the entire thing is opensource and downloadable. Build your own!
Thanks to HackADay.

Is this a problem for the 2k’s or what?

Poor clipper is having a hard time dealing with my rampant gadget-itus. Since USB has really taken over the ‘small component’ interconnect need, the number of devices connected to your standard power-users desktop machine has gone through the roof.
Well, I’ve hit the wall myself. clipper lives in it’s docking station most of the time, which provides 3 nice USB ports in the back of the dock (I ignore the 2 ports on the side of the laptop, to avoid having to plug and unplug things everytime I undock). One of the ports on the dock is a cable to my external powered 4 port hub.
Doing the math, that gives me 6 available connections. Here’s how they’re wired up:

• Labtec USB webcam (Used with Skype and MSN Live Messenger)
• USB audio dongle (Dell D620’s for -some- nutty reason have no speaker connector on the dock. So when the laptop is in the dock, I would have to plug in my desktop speakers everytime I dock. Screw that, $10 from newegg got me an external audio device.
• Microsoft 4000 ergo keyboard (IMHO one of the best keyboards ever made)
• USB ‘LED’ mouse
• HP deskjet 5150 printer (I got this printer about 2.5 years ago for $70 from CompUSA. I’ve never regretted it, it’s a great printer.)
• Dock for a Mobile Crossing GPS
• Sync cable for my Treo 650

And I’m out of ports. I’m somewhat amused that the Dell monitor I have has a pair of USB ports on the side of it, but that’s pretty ugly, and would only gain me one more port (it would take up a port to plug it in).
The search is now on for a super-geeky 8 port hub. I want lights and blinky bits and cool live activity. I have to thank Mort for finding this Evil Genius USB hub which is mighty tempting, though it’s only 4 ports. (And no, I -do not- have USB powered manicure kit 🙂

Nothing like posting on Thursday some details about what happened a week ago, eh?
Well, one of the things I did on my absurdly productive weekend was bring yawl back from the dead. Some may rememeber that the poor Dell suffered a fatal drive crash back in December. Since then it’s been sitting, forlorn, silent. I had actually purchased the replacement 160gig drive already, but just never got around to putting it in.
Well this weekend provided the final kick in the pants to finish the upgrade. I realized that yawl was the host to the external drives I use to back up our colocated server. With yawl down, I couldn’t run the backups. THAT needed to change.
So open went the case (Yay for Dell creating -really- nice SFF (small form factor) cases. This case just opens right up with two button pushes, and the drive pops out via a simple plastic clip). In went the new drive, and back together it went. Total surgery time – perhaps 15 minutes.
The next problem of course, what to install on it? Since I’ve had Windows on clipper for the last 6 months or so, I haven’t been using a Linux desktop. Before that I had been running Debian etch with KDE as my desktop. For the new ‘yawl’, I decided I needed to get in on what is now the most popular free distro – that being Ubuntu. This distro is primarily Gnome based, which is something I’ve been avoiding for quite a while, but I figure I should give it a run for a bit and get at least mildly familiar with it, even though it doesnt’ match my preferences.
The install went perfectly, with an excellent clean installer (came right up in X and walked me through the setup). Rebooted, and lo! A clean desktop with sound and graphics all working perfectly.
I won’t go into a more detailed rundown of it quite yet, but it’s good to have it back. I was able to mount my external drives and run my backups, letting everyone breathe a little easier!
At any rate, we happily welcome ‘yawl’ back into the planet-geek system farm!

This is a big Happy Birthday to an entity near and dear to all of our hearts. One year ago, we brought boomer online. It has been running without fault ever since. Boomer provides web, mail, chat, database, and other services to over 30 users, handling 5000+ mail messages daily, on a 1.6gig AMD Sempron with 512meg of RAM and a pair of mirrored 80gig drives.
(In reality, it was brought online in September or thereabouts of 2005, but a power-nudge caused a reboot one year ago. It’s been up ever since)
20:09:11 up 365 days, 3:28, 20 users, load average: 0.11, 0.30, 0.34
Yay stable, long running, dependable Linux boxes!

I was just reading a cool review of the Nokia N800 written by a Sean Luke, an assistant professor at George Mason University, and fairly serious Apple Newton Hacker. In the article, he runs down how much better the N800 is over the Newton Messagepad 2100, but also really lambasts the UI designers for making abysmal decisions on decisions.
I have to side with the Sean on a number of points. There seems to be a mindset in the Linux community that GTk is the be all end all of UI’s, and it’s simple to just adapt it to whatever machine or environment you’re running it on. But in reality, GTK is a badly designed environment. The widgets are painful and inconsistent, they, as Sean says, borrow some of the worst ideas from Windows, and apply them poorly.
In the case of a handheld PDA-like device, these metaphors break down even further. Desktop processes for managing applications, tools, and workflow simply do not work in a handheld, pen based environment. This has been proven time and time again with the success of the Palm line of products (an environment that has nothing to do with windows), as well as the Newton line itself (also has no desktop equivelent). Both these environments were designed from the ground up to work on a small screen, doing basic tasks, interracting with just a stylus. I believe that many of the issues with the WindowsCE line come from this basic poor assertion. Windows isn’t a great GUI to begin with. Adapting it to a handheld device just by making it smaller doesn’t work, and even now, 10 years after the original version, the UI is difficult to work with and notoriously inconsistent.
I think the only ‘open’ environment that has come close to tackling this problem has been the fine folks at Trolltech, with the QTopia handheld environment. They’ve taken the QT environment and re engineered it to work on an embedded platform. The very first iterations of this, running on the Sharp Zaurus were functional, but still had that ‘first time’ porting problem. Trying to fit an Xwindows based environment on a small handheld screen, without a mouse.
Later versions have reached a high level of stability and functionality. Why doesn’t Nokia use this environment? The best I can think of is “Because it’s QT! Not GTK! Not real Linux!” Which makes me sad. This argument has been going on for years now, and frankly it’s time to bury the hatchet. But while the linux world continues to back GTK and Gnome, while ignoring the (IMHO) technically superior, more consistent, and better designed QT based environment, I feel that Linux UI’s will stay in the also-ran category, never considered a serious alternative.
Having said all that, I still find the N800 sexy as all get it. It does take things to the next possible level of Ubiquitous Computing, with it’s wireless capability and long battery life. Closer and closer.

Well, it’s hit that point. With the astronomical increase in spam lately, it’s getting quite obvious the problem will not abate on it’s own. The open-ended ‘we trust each other’ process of mail delivery is now in it’s death throes, it’s time to look at other solutions.

According to my spam report, my personal inbox is getting 450-650 caught spams a day. Unfortunately, that is only my Stage One filter. I also use Thunderbird as my email client, which has excellent spam filters of it’s own, and that catches another 100-150 messages there. I have monitors showing me the total mail I receive daily, and it’s in the 1500 messages range, of which 500 or so are mailing list messages. That means one out of every 100 messages I receive is legit. And lately, the filters have occasionally gotten things wrong. Mail intended for me is marked as spam, and I never hear about it.

In 12 hours of operation on our only mail server, here is an account of the volume we move:

Grand Totals
------------
messages
4801   received
5413   delivered
173   forwarded
79   deferred  (434  deferrals)
230   bounced
484   rejected (8%)
0   reject warnings
0   held
0   discarded (0%)
45428k  bytes received
49843k  bytes delivered
1416   senders
1092   sending hosts/domains
334   recipients
148   recipient hosts/domains

In the past, it was okay to occasionally go through your spam box and see if there’s anything legitimate in there. That is simply not possible in todays climate. It may take an hour to go through a days worth of spam, and is mind numbingly tedious. There’s a good chance you’ll miss something just because it -looks- like spam.

So what are the options? This is where I’m asking for help. I’m speaking not only for myself, but also for the greater Homeport community. I maintain user accounts for 20-30 people, and they’re all under the same attack as I am, maybe to somewhat of a lesser degree, but it’s still hurting.

I’ll note for the record that we are currently running Amavisd, with Spamassassin, all through Postfix. Amavis is happily removing -all- virii from our mail, so that is not an issue. SA with some filter tweaking is doing an admirable job considering the masssive load it is contending with.

• Option A – A commercial filtering service
  There are several vendors that offer commercial filtering. Many of them are simple ‘mail accounts’ that you can POP your mail off of, letting them handle the filtering. Others will forward a specific mail address in and out of their system. Are there services that will filter an entire domain? I’d be willing to pay for a service that maintains its filters, rulesets and RBLs in a respectable fashion.

• Option B – Fiddling my own configuration
  I’ve been doing this for quite a while. It’s tedious, it’s time consuming, and it’s never ‘quite right’. It’ll work perhaps for a few, but how do you really know if it’s working correctly? I’m probably going to do one major wash-through to enable the various Postfix standard rules, but in reality, unless someone wants to take over being Spam Master for Homeport’s servers, this is not a task I’m keen on doing much longer.

• Option C – Massively restrict received email
  I like the idea of using some form of sender authentication. I’d be willing to say “If you PGP sign your message, I will accept it”. This is something that’s available to most mail users, and is easy to enable. It makes tracking easier, and I can rank accepted mail by if I’ve accepted their PGP key onto my keyring. The drawback to this is that not everyone I communicate with will have PGP set up, and while it will help with authenticating known users (everyone I bludgeon into using PGP), I still run the risk of missing important mail from people I have not corresponded with.

• Option D – Whitelisting
  This is probably the easiest to implement, but gets the most grief as a poor solution. I know the list of people who I correspond with regularly, I know they are not spammers. There is a slight risk a spammer may forge their email address in a From line, and therefore get through my filters, but in reality, I have seen NO spam of this type ever in my mailbox. Ever.

• Option E – Give up on email altogether
  No, not give up in this whole concept. But give up trying to run my own server. Gmail and Yahoo both have excellent mail clients, and they are available to remote clients. Why fight this anymore? Everyone should just get their own accounts on gmail, and be done with it.

So that’s where I am. I invite folks to chime in with ideas or suggestions on where to go from here. I know this discussion is happening all over the net right now, but wading through that is tedious and rarely productive. I also invite the members of the Homeport community to chime in with their suggestions, observations, or thoughts on how the systems are running now, and where things should go.

I’m sure this will end up turning into a nice long list, but lets start with this particular rant. If you have a Windows XP installation, and you’re trying to enable or disable something from starting when the machine boots, where do you go?
Well, naturally, you right click on Start, go to Explore, look at Programs->Start menu->Startup and… hm, your app is not there. Ah, must be on the global settings. Explore all users, programs, start menu, startup… hm, not there either.
At this point, the spectre of editing up the Registry comes in, where you have to navigate ridiculously long lists of keys to possibly find the switch that may actually fix your problem.
Today I found a new one. Microsoft has decreed (jedi hand-wave here), that all Windows XP computers must start MSN Messenger when they boot. You don’t have a choice, it’s enabled by default. Sorry if you don’t actually want to use it, or you’re using some other IM system.
Microsoft, by the way, doesn’t -tell- you it’s running. It’s not in the tool tray, it has no startup screen, it’s just ‘there’. The only reason I knew messenger was running was that when I logged in via Jabber, a little popup window told me, nicely, that I had been forcibly logged out of MSN messenger because I had logged in elswhere. Afterwhich, the popup disappeared, and again I had no access to Messenger. Thanks guys.
Today I decided to finally rid myself ot this behaviour. There may be occasion to use the Messenger service, but I want to determine when I run it, and when I don’t. It would be easy to go to Control Panel->Add/Remove software, and evict the application entirely, but that’s not what I wanted to do.
Apparently there’s an alternative to this mayhem. I dug through various google results and came up with this gem:

Simply mention the word “registry” and some folks cringe! There’s a much easier way to stop Windows Messenger from starting and running in the background in Windows XP. And this can easily be done without doing any registry editing. All it takes is a few clicks of your mouse.
Go to Start>Run and type in gpedit.msc which will take you to the Group Policy and Local Computer Policy settings. Now click on User Configuration>Administrative Templates>Windows Components>Windows Messenger. Set both settings to “ENABLEDâ€? and reboot. That’s it! This will allow you to disable Windows Messenger, which will stop it from loading at start-up.
This is by far the most straight forward and easiest way to disable Windows Messenger. And should you decide to use Messenger in the future, just simply reverse the changes you made and turn it back on anytime you like!

Sounds good, and after a few clicks, lo, there’s the policy. To me this seems like yet another interface that applications under Windows may or may not adhere to, but it seems like it’s worth a shot.

By now everyone has heard about Apple’s latest contribution to the War on Available Cash, the iPhone. What’s been amusing to me is watching the impact this has had on the Palm world. It would be foolish to assume the introduction of an OSX embedded device with more features than ANYTHING on the market won’t have an impact on what has up until now been about the best in handheld general purpose telephone devices – the Treo. As a steadfast Treo owner myself (not without my share of gripes admittedly), I found myself, like most of the geek populace, seriously lusting after the new iPhone.
But don’t take my word for it. Lets take a look around the net a bit.
PalmAddicts led off this morning with an article ‘I’m getting that nagging sensation again:

Don’t get me wrong: the iTunes compatibility is a non-issue in an era of 4GB SD cards and PTunes, and my cellphone needs are very modest. What really intrigues me, though, is that the iPhone is a real computer in a PDA format, but one that runs on gestures instead of a thumbboard. In essence, I’m seeing the iPhone as the logical successor to the T|X.

I’d also recommend taking a look at this whimsical conversatin between an owner and his Treo.
There’s also the impact of the announcement on the stock market in general, including Palm. Apple’s stock soars, all the other manufacturers tank. Granted, this is a short-term plot, but it’s telling. Apple’s stock is trading higher than ever (as of this posting, at around 95).
The excellent Treonauts.com does a side by side comparison of the iPhone vs the Treo 680. They make the comment:

the iPhone is primarily a consumer multimedia phone and not a business smartphone.

I have to disagree. The undercurrent is that the Treo is a ‘business smartphone’, and, frankly, it isn’t. The Bluetooth is so crippled as to be unuseable, the software suite is slow and painful, Wifi is a bulky and unwieldy bolt-on, and corporate network interraction is almost non-existent. It’s also hard to say that PalmOS is considered a business OS, when the alternative on the iPhone is… OSX – a fully featured, multithreaded, portable operating system.
Will the iPhone be a success? Undoubtedly. Palm has nothing in the wings to compete with it, and no other vendor has the design moxy that Apple has. I predict there will be a raft of new product announcements in the next 6 months until the iPhone is officially available as other vendors scramble to “Me Too!” their product lines, but in the end, the Treo will slide down into the also-ran territory, and the iPhone will take top slot as the preferred mobile platform for geeks and tinkerers.