Tag Archives: linux

Dear Apple: It’s not me, it’s you

Apple is asking for another $707m in damages from Samsung, in addition to the $1b they were already awarded in the ludicrous patent trial. They also asked for a permanent ban on 29 different Samsung phones — i.e. all the phones that are successfully competing with the iPhone.

Meanwhile, Apple’s new iOS 6 purges YouTube and Google Maps. The former is now available as a separate app, but the latter has been replaced with Apple’s own mapping app — which is apparently disastrously awful.

After promising the EU that they would settle on a standard MicroSD connector for charging, like every other phone manufacturer, Apple instead launched a new proprietary connector, incompatible with their three previous generations of proprietary dock connector. There was absolutely no need for this — if they were going to be incompatible, they could have switched to Micro USB with MHL and provided exactly the same functionality over a standard connector. But of course, then they wouldn’t have been able to charge $40 for an adaptor cable.

But of course, the sheep are lining up to buy the iPhone 5 anyway.

On the Mac side of things, OS X 10.8 came out. It was said to be a bit better than 10.7, but still not as good as 10.6. New functionality? Well, there’s a messenger program that’s useless to me because it only talks to iPhones and other Macs. There’s a file transfer program that’s useless to me because it only talks to other Macs. There’s a new video chat app that’s useless to me because it only talks to iPhones and other Macs. There’s a notepad app that’s useless to me because… You get the idea. Oh, and perfectly good apps like iCal and Address Book got ugly faux-leather makeovers.

iDVD, which I use, is gone. iSync, which I use, is gone. X11, which I use, is no longer bundled. Most GPL-licensed open source software is either shipped in obsolete versions or has been removed entirely. And of course, there’s that new Gatekeeper feature, which by default only lets you run software Apple approves of, though you can bet I don’t trust that to remain the situation in future releases, as the iPhone and iPad are still locked down.

As far as hardware, the new MacBooks have batteries glued in so you can’t change them, RAM soldered in so you can’t upgrade it, and a proprietary SSD connector so you can’t even upgrade the drive easily. There’s no Ethernet port, no optical drive. I realized that there’s absolutely no way I want to buy such a machine.

Which means it’s now getting on for two years since Apple put out any kind of product that was remotely of interest to me, software or hardware. That and the continuing douchebaggery of their lawsuits have driven me from hedging my bets and not purchasing new software for the Mac platform, to actively planning to abandon it.

So far:

  • The iPods are done with. Replaced by a Sansa Clip Zip, with a 32GB MicroSD expansion card to give me 40GB total.
  • The Apple TV has had its tasks taken over by the PlayStation 3.
  • DEVONthink Pro is Mac only, so I’ve taken all my archives out of that and put them in Evernote. Ditto for Circus Ponies Notebook.
  • Pages has been replaced with ConTeXt and LibreOffice.
  • Numbers has been replaced with Google Docs spreadsheets and LibreOffice.
  • iPhoto has been replaced with Corel AfterShot Pro, which produces better photos into the bargain.
  • iChat (for video chat) has been replaced with Google Hangouts. (Video is jerkier but higher resolution, audio is significantly better.)

I don’t have a replacement for Ableton Live yet. I’m hoping that Bitwig Studio will ship and be affordable.

iMovie and iDVD I’m not sure about. I haven’t done much video editing recently. There are three or four Linux packages I can try, so I’m just going to deal with that problem when I hit it.

I guess I’m going to have to learn to deal with the GIMP as my Photoshop replacement.

Apple Mail proved surprisingly tough to replace. I expected to just use Thunderbird, but the latest release of Thunderbird is a complete disaster. So, I’m moving all my e-mail archives into Gmail (which fortunately now offers enough space to hold them all), and I’ll keep a backup just in case and hope I don’t need it.

So yeah. Sorry, Apple, it’s not me, it’s you. Steve Jobs saved you, but he also set you on a path to evil and eventual ruin. I begged you to change, but you didn’t listen, so here we are. After 22 years as a devoted Apple customer, it’s over. Enjoy the money from the masses while you’re getting it, I have a hunch it won’t last for much longer, and you’re driving away all of us who supported you through the difficult times.

I think I’m past the angry and bitter stage. I’ve moved on to looking forward to how much money I’ll save, and how much easier it’ll be to get open source projects working. One thing I’m not looking forward to, though, is doing all the research to find out what machine to buy…

Steam in a box?

As you’ve noticed from my postings about Apple, I don’t believe in locked-down hardware. People have asked me what I do about video game consoles. My answer is that I buy them, even though they are locked down, because there’s no good alternative. Yes, there’s PC gaming, but then you’re financially supporting the Microsoft empire, and that’s even worse. Plus there are the endless DRM and driver problems, the software updates, the periodic reinstalls, and all the other things that make Windows miserable.

So I have a Wii and a PS3, until such time as someone makes a decent open console.

Now a new report claims that VALVe is planning an open console. This makes me very excited. Team Fortress 2, Portal and Portal 2 are some of my favorite games. (The original Half-Life was good too.)

There have been leaks suggesting Steam for Linux. I’m thinking those leaks are related to this Steam Box project. It wouldn’t make sense to require a full Windows license for every console and introduce DLL hell into console gaming; game programmers don’t want most of Windows anyway, they want access to the bare metal. It would make sense to have a standard Linux or BSD image to support Steam, and then provide direct access to a standard set of hardware components for the games themselves.

Anyhow, if VALVe does release a Windows-free open gaming console, I will definitely buy one. Even if it doesn’t come with a copy of Half-Life 3.

Did the Mac just die?

Months ago, I outlined what I considered a nightmare scenario: that Apple would gradually lock down OS X to be like iOS, with Apple exercising absolute control over what software you were allowed to run, and requiring that software be developed in Objective-C, like on the iPhone and iPad.

Yesterday, it started to happen. Apple announced the App Store for the Mac. Just as with the iPhone, there’s now an annual fee to be a Mac developer for the store, and a long list of things your software is not allowed to do. For example, you’re not allowed to ship software that looks too similar to Apple’s software, or duplicates its functionality. Want to write a Finder replacement or iTunes alternative, or perhaps a web browser? Bad luck, Apple may prevent your software from being shipped via the App Store.

You’re also not allowed to use third party installers. You’re not allowed emulators. You’re not allowed copy protection, you’re not allowed to present a license screen, you’re not allowed to leave shortcuts on the desktop, you’re not allowed to mention that your app is available for Windows or syncs with Android, you’re not allowed to do software rental.

“We never said that 2010 wouldn’t be like 1984.”

Of course, Steve Jobs was quick to point out that there are still going to be alternatives to the App Store for distributing your software.

For now.

But a chance comment on Macintouch made me think: Lion is the last big cat. Could OS X Lion also be the last planned unlocked OS X? Steve Jobs talked about the “virtuous circle” of iOS feeding back into the Mac–could the Macs of 2012 ship with iOS, with a proper unlocked OS X reserved for developers, and priced to match?

I was trying to convince myself that I was reading too much into it all, and then the next clue surfaced today: Apple deprecated the JVM. They are no longer interested in assisting users in running Java applications on their Macs, and warn that there may be no JVM in OS X Lion, let alone a JDK. If you’re a Java developer using a Mac, it’s time to start migrating, unless you want to count on Oracle releasing a JDK for the Mac before Lion ships. And that’s unlikely, because it would be an immense amount of work for them.

In addition, the App Store rules say no Java apps are allowed. The new MacBook Air ships with no Flash plugin, and Safari will no longer prompt you to install it if you visit a page that uses Flash. Other Macs will be following suit.

So here we go. The Mac is turning into a big iPad. Thanks, all you lemmings who bought crippled iPhones and iPads, you’ve convinced Apple that it can get away with crippling the Mac as well. So after 23 years of using Apple computers, my current Mac looks like it could be my last. I’m not the only person seeing lockdown in the Mac’s future either.

I’m going to hold out for a little longer and see what happens. So far OS X Lion doesn’t offer anything I want, but maybe there will be something worthwhile announced before it ships. Maybe Mac users or developers won’t accept the App Store. Maybe.

But I’m suddenly very wary of investing in any new Mac software, when I could be switching platform in a year. And I’m looking at the state of video editing on Linux, because I really don’t want to go anywhere near Windows.

Update: It’s reported that Steve Jobs has dismissed the idea of a Mac app store with mandatory Apple approval. Which is great, but I’m sure he can change his mind, and it doesn’t stop OS X being removed from low-end machines and replaced with iOS as I’ve suggested.

RPM fail

It’s 2010, and RPM still sucks.

Transaction Check Error:
file /usr/share/man/man1/xdelta.1.gz from install of xdelta-1.1.4-1.el5.rf.x86_64 conflicts with file from package xdelta-1.1.3-20.i386
file /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/psvn.el from install of subversion-1.6.12-0.1.el5.rf.x86_64 conflicts with file from package subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1.i386
# rpm -q subversion                                             
subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1                                                      
subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1
# rpm -e subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1                             
error: "subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1" specifies multiple packages  

Apparently i386 and x86_64 versions of packages count as different packages for the purposes of installing and removing, but are listed identically. This means that yum will fail to work out that it needs to uninstall the 32 bit version and the 64 bit version as a unit, before it can install any kind of upgrade.

Posting this because every time I mention how much I hate RHEL and RPM, someone says that there’s nothing wrong with it and it’s perfectly OK these days.

Best of all, searching around shows people hitting this problem in 2005.

Why I won’t buy a Nokia smartphone

In 2007, the Nokia N800 came out. Nokia released Maemo OS 2007, and dropped support for the N770 they had been selling a few months before. The OS2008 / Maemo 4 release wasn’t released for the N770 by Nokia, though hackers released an unofficial distribution.

Next came a point release, which was a major pain to install, but added APT support so that the OS could be updated without having to mess with firmware tools. Nokia promised that this would be the last time we’d need to flash the OS.

That was true, in a way, because in 2009 the N900 came out running Maemo 5, and Nokia dropped all support for the N800 and N810. They announced that Maemo 5 wouldn’t run on those devices.

Pretty much as soon as the N900 was released, Nokia bought Trolltech, and announced that Maemo’s GTK UI was a dead end–future devices would run Qt instead, via a different Linux based on merging Maemo with Intel’s Moblin. The new OS would be called MeeGo.

Now they’ve announced that the N900 hardware is a dead end too–it won’t run MeeGo when it’s launched later this year, you’ll need to buy another new device for that. (Again, though, there may be a hacker version.) Nokia are also throwing away APT in favor of the craptastic combination of RPM and yum.

There are probably people in Nokia who are wondering why Android is exploding in popularity, while their smartphone efforts are even less popular than Windows Mobile.

Reflections on a Macless month

On December 23rd, my MacBook Pro died. The screen started flickering, and the entire graphical layer died. The underlying Unix system was still responsive, and I could SSH in, but that was it. Rebooting the machine, it would run for a while, then die with the same fault.

I used rsync to create a full backup–I already had a Time Machine backup, but better safe than sorry. After a couple more reboot cycles it stopped booting entirely.

I took the machine to the Apple Store. Based on the problem description and my apparent cluefulness, they said they’d need to get a replacement motherboard. Unfortunately, motherboards for my particular model of MacBook Pro are apparently in short supply, so I’d have to wait.

I took the machine home. Christmas came and went. In the new year, I got a call from the Apple Store. The replacement motherboard was in. They warned that they could only reserve it for me for 6 days. I said that wasn’t a problem, and was at the store half an hour later to drop off the machine.

The next day I got a call. Swapping the motherboard hadn’t fixed the problem. The machine needed to be sent to the main Apple service center. Make it so, I said, confirming that I had a full backup.

The service center received the machine…and put the repair on hold, because they needed another part that was in short supply. And so I waited, without a Mac, using Linux for all my computing needs.

Yesterday the service center flipped the status on my Mac to repaired, pending return shipment. Just now, it arrived back in my hands by overnight shipment.

The accompanying paperwork says that they replaced the motherboard, the display, the cooling fan, the DVD-RW drive, and some internal cabling. Basically, I have the original casing, hard drive and keyboard, and the rest is new. So once again, the extra cost of 3 years of AppleCare has proven to be an excellent move, this time saving me from having to drop $1500+ on a new machine.

I’ve had similar experiences with IBM (and Lenovo) laptop hardware. Always buy the extended warranty for a laptop. Consumer Reports agrees. It’s not like I’m rough on my hardware–I travel infrequently, I’ve never dropped a laptop, and I’ve never spilt coffee in one either. It’s just that laptop hardware is inherently less reliable than desktop hardware–you have smaller components, and more heat-producing hardware in a tighter space. My Mac probably died when it did because I’d just been encoding and burning four different DVD projects.

So, what was it like using only Linux instead of Mac and Linux for almost an entire month?

On the whole, not bad. Linux does the job for most day-to-day tasks. The two places where it still falls down are sound and video.

Ubuntu 9.10 has seen major regressions in sound functionality–any kind of Flash audio frequently results in fragmented looping, like a CD skipping. Applications also tend to grab the sound interface and not let go, preventing anything else from playing sound until you quit them. The user interface for volume control is a total disaster too, and Bluetooth headsets don’t work.

In video land, there just isn’t anything to compare with iMovie HD plus iDVD. OpenShot looks promising for the editing piece, but it’s still very young.

There are quite a few other Mac apps I missed. iTunes doesn’t really have a good equivalent, functionality-wise. Organizer software on Linux isn’t as advanced. But if you don’t use sound for anything more than soundtracks to video, and don’t do much video editing, then Linux is probably good enough. It’ll certainly cope with web browsing and office documents.

Would I switch? Well, if you ever need to jailbreak a Mac, that’s the day I switch. Failing that, I suspect Apple can keep far enough ahead of Linux that switching won’t be a temptation.

KDE 4 UI critique

Human beings have different kinds of memory; they remember things in different ways. Three common classes of memory are spatial memory, visual memory and verbal memory. (There’s also chronological memory, but that’s not relevant to my point here.)

I have excellent spatial memory. It’s what I rely on most. For example, if I start to think about how to get to a given place in town, I literally find 3D visualizations of my route flashing into my consciousness. I also have pretty good visual memory; when I make the journey, I verify that I’m going the right way by comparing the visual appearance of buildings and landscape that I pass with the scenes I remember.

My linguistic memory is terrible. If you asked me to name the actual streets on the route, I’d have a hard time remembering them. My mental map of London, for example, only has 6 street names. This makes me a really bad person to get directions from. “You take the narrow road that heads off at a thirty degree angle, right at the place with the green copper roof, over the light colored bridge…”

There’s an upside to my condition. If you rely on verbal memory to navigate, as soon as you step outside your known area you are pretty much lost until you can find a familiar street name. In contrast, I have a pretty good chance of navigating between two known points, even if the area in between is totally new to me.

This hierarchy of types of memory also applies in my interaction with computers. When I want to find my password manager, I don’t remember its name. Instead, I remember that it’s in the bottom hierarchical menu of my KDE menu, positioned near the top, and has a green icon.

I know this experimentally, incidentally: back in the System 6 days there was a joke Mac INIT that removed all the text from the menus. I tried it, and was quite startled to discover that I could still use most of my favorite applications.

With that background out of the way, I would like to talk about why for me, the new KDE 4 application launcher is a user interface disaster of epic proportions.

Continue reading →

BlackBerry Curve review

In mid November, our contract with AT&T (formerly Cingular) expired. We switched to T-Mobile and got BlackBerry Curve phones.

I was a BlackBerry skeptic for a long time. I didn’t think I wanted a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. This changed when we looked at the phones available. It turned out that the Curve was only marginally wider than the average phone, perhaps a centimeter or so. It’s otherwise comparable to mid-range phones in size. It ends up being pretty much as portable as our Sony Ericsson Z520a phones.

The BlackBerry UI is best described as “retro”. The icons look like 1990s Windows, the text fonts look like 1980s Atari ST, and the general method of navigation most resembles Palm OS. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Starting with the good, the UI is clearly designed from first principles to work well on a handheld device. The central trackball handles scrolling, pointing and clicking. It sits easily and naturally under the thumb. You can do pretty much everything with one hand, including browsing the web and checking e-mail.

This is in marked contrast to the iPhone, which pretty much requires two-handed operation. Windows Mobile devices suffer from having a desktop UI squeezed into a handheld form factor, and also require two hands, and often a stylus. Symbian is designed for phones, but the UIQ interface for smartphones uses a stylus. Overall, then, the BlackBerry works better than other phones I’ve tried when you’re standing in an airport with a coffee in one hand.

On the downside, it’s hard to find the icon you want in a hurry, because of their visual clutter. Perhaps a replacement UI theme would help; I’m a little tempted to grab the theme designer and start working on one, but it’s Windows only. The fonts were initially problematic too; nowhere near as nice as Apple’s, and they took some getting used to.

But when it comes time to reply to an e-mail, niggling issues with fonts were forgotten as I got to grips with the keyboard. Yes, it requires both hands, or more accurately both thumbs. It’s not as fast as a full size keyboard, but it’s faster than Palm Graffiti or Windows Mobile pen input, and much faster and less frustratingly error-prone than I found the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard to be. Unless Steve relents and allows a Son of Newton to use the Newton’s non-cursive text recognition, I can’t see it being bettered.

Textual messaging is where the BlackBerry really shines. It’s quite possible to thumb out fairly lengthy e-mail responses, or even update your web site. As far as IM, there’s support for Google Talk and AIM built in, as well as Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and ICQ if you know anyone who still uses only those. There are third party clients for non-Google Jabber and other protocols, and in addition, there’s BlackBerry’s own BlackBerry Messenger, previously called PIN messaging.

If you have a friend who also has a BlackBerry, PIN messaging is definitely the way to go. The manual doesn’t cover its benefits, so I’ll digress a little here. Unlike other IM systems, PIN messaging is tied to the BlackBerry device by a unique ID. You connect with another person initially by sending them an invite via their BlackBerry-specific e-mail address, or any other address they access via BlackBerry e-mail. When they reply, their device records the device ID you sent, and sends you theirs.

The primary benefit of PIN messaging is that it’s push-based. The recipient doesn’t need to be logged in. If their phone is switched off, the message will be queued until they log on.

The second benefit of PIN messaging is that it’s reliable. Unlike SMS, messages don’t get randomly dropped. In addition, you get delivery confirmation automatically for every message: when you hit enter, the line you typed appears in the transcript with a small icon next to it indicating that the message is going out over the network. When your device receives positive confirmation that the recipient’s device has displayed the line you sent, the icon changes.

If that’s not enough, there’s a third benefit over IM or SMS: there’s a separate “ping” option. So you can set up your regular notification to be something discreet, and know that your spouse can ping you to set off something more noticeable if necessary.

Other than that, PIN messaging has the usual file transfer, allows you to send voice memos, and looks and behaves like regular IM. For us, it has completely replaced SMS, not least because it doesn’t cost 15¢ a message.

One interesting feature of the BlackBerry is that as well as individual icons for each messaging system, there’s also a unified inbox that shows IM, SMS and e-mail in one place. This makes sense, as they all have pretty much the same UI on the Curve; the protocol is almost an irrelevant detail. I believe that if you attempt to send pictures via SMS, the phone automatically uses MMS, but I haven’t tried it.

Web browsing is a mixed bag. The built in BlackBerry browser has two modes, mobile mode and “desktop” mode. Although there are references to WAP, the browser copes with both, the mode just determines how the page is formatted for display. In mobile mode it works like a typical phone browser, in desktop mode it tries to deal with things like tables, CSS and JavaScript. Overall it makes for a pretty good browsing experience, as phones go. (If you haven’t tried browsing from a phone, the main issue isn’t usually layout–it’s latency. Each page request takes a ridiculously long time to send, compared to a desktop system. I assume this is something to do with the mobile network.)

An alternative is Opera Mini, which takes the “thumbnail of page with moveable active area” approach to web browsing. It works surprisingly well with sites that the built-in browser can’t cope with, like zagat.com. (Yeah, good move, make a web site of restaurant reviews that doesn’t work with a phone browser.)

Maps are another strong point. There’s a map application supplied, but I downloaded Google Maps for BlackBerry, which is free and offers pseudo-GPS location by correlating your active cell to its geographical location. Accuracy can be as little as 50m or so in cities, up to 1km in the countryside. The Google Mail application also works well once downloaded.

The BlackBerry OS appears to be Java based, and is pretty solid. It’s more reliable than a Palm; I’ve only managed to crash it once, which is comparable to Linux on the N800 in solidity. Initial bootup (after inserting a battery) is horrendously slow, but once running it seems to use a soft power off which doesn’t require a full boot. The UI is generally responsive at all times, unlike some Sony Ericsson phones. You can put the phone into standby mode by holding down the power switch. In standby the screen and keyboard deactivate, but you can still receive messages and calls. The same hold-down-button action brings the phone out of standby instantly.

The one bug I’ve found so far is in the BlackBerry web browser. After a while the cache gets full and slows browsing down tremendously. The workaround is to empty the cache once a week.

The phone shows a lot of attention to the details of how a mobile device should best operate. For example, an ambient light sensor behind the notification LED turns the screen brightness down in dark areas, and automatically turns on the keyboard backlight. The LED itself has behavior customizable through the notification options; each event (phone call, IM, SMS) can have any or all of a user-chosen sound, vibration, and LED flashes. You can even set different messaging systems to have different notification; for example, I have IM just flash the LED a few times, unless it’s a PIN message from the spouse.

Mac sync is a bit of a sore point. There’s a package called PocketMac that BlackBerry purchased and now give away for free. It worked for me, more or less, but had some annoying bugs. (For example, syncing with a subset of address book records didn’t work, and editing records on the BlackBerry resulted in duplicates.) The solution is simple enough: Mark/Space have a Missing Sync for BlackBerry, which makes everything work, and even syncs user pictures so you can see the face of the person calling you if you’ve given them a picture in OS X.

Overall, it’s the best mobile phone I’ve used. Whether it’s good for you will of course depend on your use cases. If you’re someone who likes to talk to people or use voicemail rather than IM or e-mail, or if you have little patience for customizing software, the iPhone is probably a better bet. It certainly look prettier. But if you prefer text to voice and prefer functionality to prettiness, the Curve beats the iPhone hands down. This may change once they stop crippling the iPhone and open it up to third party applications; we’ll see. For now, I’d pick the Curve again, even if the iPhone wasn’t tied to AT&T.

Update: Oh yeah, the Curve is also a quad band phone. That’s de rigeur, so I didn’t even think it was worth mentioning.

Kindle

Dear Amazon,

You’re so almost there with your new Kindle e-book. There are just a few minor details you need to fix to get me on board.

First of all, you need Mac support, and preferably Linux support as well, both for content creation and for reading books. There’s really no excuse for not having reader support, as you have a working Mobipocket reader in Java that will run on Mac and Linux, you just haven’t taken the time to package it up properly. The creation tools ought to be a pretty simple task to port too; a command line version would be fine. I don’t even care if it can’t apply DRM; I just want a way to be able to package up free text.

Secondly, you need to either drop the DRM, or drop the price of the books. Let’s consider a real example here. I’m about to start reading Charlie Stross’s The Atrocity Archives.

Let’s get one thing straight here: because there’s DRM, I can’t sell the book when I’m done with it, which breaks the first sale doctrine. Therefore, you’re not actually selling e-books, you’re renting them to me for an indefinite period of time, a bit like Netflix does with DVDs. I’d respect you more if you admitted that.

Anyhow, If I go the Kindle route, it’s $9.99 for the book.

Suppose I go the paper route instead. I can pick up a new copy on amazon.com marketplace for $12 plus $4 shipping = $16. When I’m done reading it, I can sell it for $9 second hand. Total cost to me = $7.

So the Kindle is more expensive, and I can’t actually buy the books. That to me is a poor deal.

Oh, sure, Kindle prices include network bandwidth… but with paper books, I had to include the cost of physically shipping dead tree across the country, and I still came out ahead. If you can’t beat the paper book price-per-reading, you’re doing something seriously wrong.

We’ve all watched the music industry flail around overcharging for DRM-burdened files and get nowhere. Learn from their mistakes. Drop the DRM, or drop the book prices to $5 or so (comparable to a DVD or video game rental, plus some markup to cover network costs) and I’ll order my Kindle tomorrow.

Update: Of course, if you gave me the Kindle for free, I’d use it to buy books from you, and look on the extra cost as a convenience fee.