Bagel Belly Blog

Vista sucks

I don't think Windows Vista is going to last much longer on my laptop. It's been interesting getting to know the "latest and greatest" operating system out of Redmond, but it's getting in my way on a daily basis now and I really expect the OS to get out of my way and let me do my job.

Here's just a few of the most annoying problems:

• Dual display. I drop the laptop onto the docking station every morning. I have an external display plugged in and sat to the left of the docking station. At least half the time Windows extends my desktop to the right - meaning I have to move the mouse to the right in order to get the pointer to appear on the screen to the left. I have to open the display preferences and change the monitor layout. It only takes 30 seconds, but Vista should remember, damnit.
• RF mouse. I have a wireless mouse and each morning I plug the receiver dongle into my laptop. You guessed it: at least half the time Windows doesn't know what to do with it, requiring me to unplug and plug back in again. I fondly(!) remember Windows XP having peripheral amnesia, most frequently with my Kensington travel mouse. I'd have thought all the years of engineering that went into Vista could have solved this.
• The document could not be found. Opening attachments from within Outlook or Thunderbird, or even just double-clicking them in Explorer will open up the relevant program (e.g. Word, Powerpoint) just fine ... but if my machine is busy at the time, the file itself often fails to load, and is replaced by a stupid error. An OS with short-term memory loss?
• A program needs your permission to continue. Boom, black screen! WTF? I'm used to polite software installers that stay out of your way and do their job. When Windows asks if the installer can run, dropping you into a black screen with a single dialog box, it's abrupt, unpleasant and jarring.
• Too much candy. I'm used to my Macbook, which goes from suspended to running almost as fast as I can get my keys onto the keyboard, and which is asleep between closing the lid and placing it in my bag. Not so with the Vista brick: I've got time to put on my coat, drop my mug off in the kitchen, and read War and Peace between closing the laptop lid and a successful hibernation. I suspect the cause is all that glossy pointlessness they added to the GUI: it means the memory is full of bloat, so there's that much more to page out to disk.

All of these little things add up to one big heap of annoyance. I'm not surprised so many people stick with Windows "for teletubbies" XP or switch to Macs and Linux... It's a shame, because there's some nice touches and on the whole it feels more modern than XP. If only Apple would let us run MacOS on non-Apple hardware ....

Open the phone

Tim Bray has some interesting things to say in Answer the Phone Call, a commentary on where to find opportunities in the tough times ahead. Whilst I broadly agree with his analysis - more phones are sold every minute than there are people born, and there's far more innovation in mobile than on desktop at the minute - I disagree with one of his points:

This year, with the advent of the iPhone and now Android, there is a large and rapidly-increasing number of highly-programmable devices out there, which (and this is new) don't have moronic, blinkered, old-school mobile network operators erecting barbed-wire fences between developers and the people who actually buy phones.

I left a comment, but I'll add it here as well:

You're right in that the mobile market is a good place to look for opportunities - especially with the rise of the smart phone and the mobile always-on all you can eat internet. But it's misguided to suggest the iPhone and Android alleviate the barriers to development erected by network operators: many of these barriers still exist (as exemplified by the fact that neither of the phones you cite will let you any nearer the "bare metal" than you can get with all the other platforms).

Beware, also, where you seek your opportunities in the telecoms market. The previous commenter suggests SMS, but with the always-on network this is going to decline rapidly in favour of email, mobile instant messaging clients, and social networks, all of which have significantly less cost and far greater functionality.

Saturday morning disgruntlement

Two things annoyed me this morning.

Thing 1. Google. Specifically, Google Apps. Since switching to Google Apps, it has rapidly become an authentication bane of my life. Wanna share your Google calendar, use it in Thunderbird? Fine, except if it's a Google Apps calendar, where you can't authenticate with your Google Apps username. Wanna sign in to Google App Engine? Nope, not if you're a Google Apps user.

Let's be absolutely clear here: I pay Google money in order to use Google Apps and host my email with them, and as a result I can't authenticate with their other services, except by using a free account? FAIL. (Except they won't fail, because people keep throwing them piles of cash, and clearly no-one is accountable since this has been a problem ever since Google Apps came out in August 2006. Which on internet time is, like, 20 years ago.)

Thing 2. Nintendo. I've been patiently (well, not very patiently) awaiting the release of the wondertastic World of Goo for what seems like forever (about a week). I was delighted to read on the website that it's available on the Wii as well as via Steam for the PC. That's great: need to reboot the laptop away from Mac OS X and my fights with Google in order to play it, I can just fire up the console. Not so fast, sunshine.

Nintendo announced World of Goo is available, listed it on their website with a release date of last Monday, and so I rushed to the Wii Shop to buy it. Is it available? No. It looks like Nintendo have a UK-specific list of WiiWare games, all 27 of them, while the US list of WiiWare games shows 37, including World of Goo. Nintendo, you suck.

Thus has my morning of geek hackery and gaming been tainted, nay, ruined, by the incompetence and malice of Google and Nintendo.

I think I need another cup of tea.

Technorati Tags: computing, development, failure, google, hosting, life, nintendo, pain, games, software, wii

Blogs

I felt bad for having missed the fact that Linus has a blog. Then I realised it's only been there since the start of October. That's okay then.

Speedy mammal

Congratulations to my friends and former colleagues at Hippo for making the dutch Fast 50 again. This time they squeezed in at number 20. I don't recall what number they were last year, but either way it's great news.

Going down a storm

I got a chance to play briefly with the new Blackberry Storm yesterday.

First impressions were that it feels bulkier than the iPhone, but is a nice enough looking device. I wasn't too keen on the italics on the keyboard, but the tactile feedback was interesting: instead of having movement on individual keys, the whole screen clicks in and out on key presses. A clever idea, but I'm not sure it's much more than a novelty.

Here's the thing: in a few years' time, will people even expect keys to move when you press them? Already I find cognitive dissonance when I switch from my iPhone to a laptop after extended periods of writing: I'm used to audible feedback instead of tactile feedback (not to mention wishing I could swoosh windows around the screen with my fingers, and pinch/stretch to resize them with gestures).

So whilst the BlackBerry might be good for old-timers wanting the latest shiny-shiny, I don't think it's a game-changer, iPhone-killer, or anything-special... though it is about a billion times better than the other Blackberry handsets.

Technorati Tags: apple, hardware, iphone, mobile, blackberry

Green is the new black

It occurs to me that, in years to come, adages such as "I used to walk ten miles to work. Uphill. In the snow. With no shoes." will be replaced with "I used to run make with single-digit values for -j".

There'll also be a whole generation who have never compiled a linux kernel. Or removed a bunch of modules to get more speed / less memory usage. Or who know 'apt-get install' is the real way to do package management (not with a GUI). Or even ./configure; make; make install.

It's weird to be back in linux. I feel like I should be using the console all the time, but Ubuntu has so many shiny graphical utilities for managing things, it seems rude not to use them. I fear OS X has corrupted me and turned me into a mouse-wielding drooling moron.

Virtualbox shared folders with Vista Host and Ubuntu Guest

I've been using VirtualBox more and more on my Mac as a potential replacement for Parallels, and it's great. (Parallels is also awesome, not least because it allows me to have a real bootable Windows partition which I can use both natively with a reboot into Windows or within Parallels from OSX, but it's pricey.)

I've started to use VirtualBox on Vista, to allow me to test stuff in Ubuntu without booting. However, I just hit an annoying problem with shared folders not working correctly. It took some time to Google for the solution, so I'll link to it here to help others along the way: shared folders with Vista Host and Linux Guest. The solution is to create an init.d script that manually mounts the folder shared from the Windows side.

Hope that helps...

Update: another fix: VirtualBox has a nasty habit of consuming a lot of processor. The VBoxSVC.exe fix seems to help for those running 2.0.2.

Links for 2008-10-07

Catching up on what's been going on in the Linux world, and more specifically getting up to speed on the mobile side of things for obvious reasons. Here's a bunch of useful, interesting, quirky or otherwise notable stuff. Much more to come, I'm sure:

• Poky, platform build tool for creation of linux devices.


• HAL, hardware abstraction layer project for operating systems.


• OHM, Open Hardware Manager, systems daemon to abstract out hardware management tasks.


• D-Bus, message bus system, allowing inter-application communication / IPC. Ahh, I remember DCOP and Bonobo, the annoying bits in KDE and Gnome that kept crashing or making my machine crawl.


• GUPnP, open source plug 'n' play.


• GeoClue, geoinformation service built on top of D-Bus. API for providing position, address, velocity, etc. Nice!


• Hiker, application framework for linux, managing the lifecycle of an app on a device with limited specs.


• Hildon, application framework and touchable UI.


• Telepathy, interpersonal communication on top of D-Bus.


• GStreamer, media framework.


• WebKit, WebKit GTK and Mozilla Fennec, mobile browser alternatives.


• Clutter, gorgeous UI library. See Moblin screencast of a prototype. Reminds me of the early Apple piles/stacks demos mashed up with the surface computing demos.

And some meta links:

• David Wood's blog. David is EVP of Research at Symbian. Honestly, I could spend days reading this.


• VisionMobile blog - some interesting analysis.


• Nokia concept - video of a concept 'phone' from Nokia incorporating nanotechnology and morphing.

Links for 2008-10-05

I can't figure out how to reinstate my Delicious links since upgrading to MovableType 4 (something to do with Action Streams? Lazyweb?), so here's a bunch of links by hand:

• Don't Alienate Developers
• iPhone vs. Windows Mobile - Apple vs. Microsoft - It's the Little Things
• User experience is all that matters
• Android and T-Mobile G1's Five Most Obnoxious Flaws
• Why Android Will Soon Kick Ass
• Android: it's not about sex, excitement or cool
• Google's Android Market: cathedral or bazaar?
• T-Mobile G1: Where the heck is ...
• SDK shoot-out: Android vs. iPhone
• Android vs. the iPhone
• First look at the T-Mobile G1
• The future of mobile

Technorati Tags: development, google, iphone, mobile, gphone

Ch-ch-ch-changes

As I walked down Shepherd's Bush Road to Hammersmith the other day, my feet went swish-swish-swish through the piles of fallen leaves. The seasons are changing once again, and as this summer fades to autumn, my life is also changing.

Previously, I mentioned a move to London as the first of many changes taking place. There have been a number of other big changes, which for one reason or another I haven't had time to write about.

One of the biggest changes was that I stepped back from Sourcesense, and since March I'm no longer a director or an employee. After 8 years building up and working in Open Source systems integrators, the time was right for a change in direction. It's all good, though: having spent some time recently working alongside some Sourcesense competitors, I'm happy to confirm that Sourcesense are some of the best in the industry, providing not just open source support and integration but also professional, agile, smart people with a proven ability to instigate positive change.

So where have I been these last few months? In London, working on-site with a customer as an independent consultant. I've been helping them with their roll-out of some key new open source search solutions as part of stabilising their platform for growth. I was working with some great people there, on some interesting and challenging problems, and was all set to continue there, but ...

Meanwhile, another opportunity came up that was too interesting to miss. And so, as of Thursday, I became Open Source Manager for the LiMo Foundation. My mission is to help them with their engagement with Open Source, and I'm sure I'll have much more to say on both the role and on mobile Open Source in general in the future.

So swish-swish-swish, the world keeps moving and changing, and so does my place within it.

Technorati Tags: consulting, contracting, life, LiMo Foundation, london, mobile, moving, open source, sourcesense, startup, work