FremLog

Dearest Facebook,

You have no Linux users in your UI testing groups. Either that, or you ignore them. Or they don’t actually test. It’s one of those. I state this merely because Firefox 3 on Linux is not compatible with your new design. This has been tested in Arch Linux and the version of Ubuntu that came out back in April.

So anyway. The links on the main page don’t work. You must click a link, then refresh the page to be taken to your destination.

On a completely different note, it’s somewhat disappointing to see that you switched from one fixed-width style to another. I used to be able to have a web browser on the left sode of my desktop and IM windows on the right side. Now my browser needs to be about 170 pixels wider, so it overlaps. The worst part is how much seems to be dedicated to ads (a large number of which are either completely irrelavent to me or offensive. I shamelessly block them) and whitespace. Yeah, the new layout seems a lot cleaner, but a lot of that is because you bought the whitespace by making the user resize the window larger. And what’s up with 1/3 of the viewable area not being used while looking at wall-to-wall conversations? It would have been a lot more nifty if the layout flowed depending on how wide the window was.

Just some thoughts.

Sincerely,
–James

P.S. Oh, just remembered. That you know that guy Joe Minifeed? Why are you calling him “Mr. Wall” now?

P.P.S. Try loading the main page with the window not full length. Scroll to the right. Note the fun redraw issues. I’ll bet we see Firefox 3.0.2, “Facebook Edition” pretty soon.

What the previous updates could not show you was how bad the carat was spazzing out in my branch of AbiWord. Fortunately through a bit of good fortune, this is no longer a bug, but a feature!

Behold the future:

Hopefully other word processors will also soon begin to show innovation of this high calibre.

Why, from a technical standpoint, Windows XP is a really bad choice for the OLPC. Or, “This fails. :-(”

Drive Size
Wired has a good summery of why drive space could be an issue; Windows XP and Office take up way more space than the XO has room for. They’ve got at least part of it running off an SD card. This likely means that one will be unable to store any data on SD cards while running Windows. Joy. Also, what is with this dual booting thing? Users will have even less space to store data in an already limited environment.

Battery Life
The OX has been designed so that it can hibernate and resume in a tiny fraction of a second. This means that as long as the user isn’t doing something that requires the processor to be running (multimedia, keyboard/mouse interrupts, etc) the processor is turned off. The machine has a buffer which allows it to display the last frame rendered even when the machine is in hibernation.
In addition, I imagine that most of the Linux software has gone through optimization using tools like Powertop (many desktop Linux apps have, anyway) which allow them to be more efficient when demanding processor cycles.

Unless they put a lot more work into the XO version of Windows than I think they are, it’s not going to have nearly as good battery life as it would running Linux.

Mesh Networking
Almost every tool currently on the XO allows one to hook into the automatically generated mesh network. It’s not like some special mode which individual application implements differently, it’s a system-wide API that everything uses. As a result, one can turn on a bunch of XO laptops and see on a little map what everyone else is doing and collaborate in real time. It’s a very social system and great for educational purposes. Microsoft doesn’t have anything that compares to it, period. A few apps in Office might have collaborative editing capability, but it’s not automatic, intuitive, or integrated with the system. The mesh networking is also used to pass onwifi signals to machines which are out of range of the access point. It would be a shame if the XO lost useful automatic mesh networking in software and got stuck with access-point dependant 2 km wifi.

Competition
The reason OLPC switched to Windows is because of competition. Though the XO has superior software, it’s hardware is less powerful than Intel’s Classmate and it runs unfamiliar specialized software. By running XP, the only difference between the two is hardware, and quite frankly the XO looses badly in this department right now. Without the specialized Linux operating system, the long battery life or the out-of-the-box automatic mesh networking, the only reason one would purchase this thing is because of the dual mode screen. Great.

I still wish OLPC luck with their project, but from a technical standpoint, things have gotten considerably less exciting with this decision.

Hey, look! Someone gave me a twelve year old 400MHz computer. Also, mom wants a distraction-free offline machine for the younglings to write reports and use their CDROM-based science textbooks on. In addition, there’s this cool thing called SliTaz, a complete Linux distribution that takes up minimal system resources, runs really fast, and fits on a 25mb CD-R! Are you thinking the same thing I’m thinking?

This is a thirty minute job, tops. What could go possibly go wrong?

Two hours pass…

Stupid computer! Taunt me, will you?!

Woah, so this is what sleep is like. *ahem*

Everything is all over the place in room. Most of my textbooks are about a fraction of a centimeter too tall to fit anywhere in my bookcases neatly. Random books I never use, various burned CD-Rs, and paper scrap litter various elevated surfaces; this is partially due to my philosophy that the easiest way to clean up a book case is to take everything off it, then put everything back on. The other part is due to the current complete lack of floor space. >_<

Summer of Code marches on! Except not. The new router I set up for family which seemed to work so nicely over Christmas break now seems barely capable of transmitting a signal which I can receive consistently. I get disconnected from our home network and reconnected to our neighbor’s stupid “linksys” signal every ten to thirty minutes. And just forget about it if someone is using the cordless phone or the microwave. A reconnect every ten to thirty minutes doesn’t seem too bad- and I keep telling myself this. And [sic, don't care] it woulden’t be, if I didn’t happen to be conversing with someone about how to fix it, or downloading an eclipse update, or something of that nature every time it happened.

Seriously! NetworkManager is driving me crazy. Why on earth can’t I easily blacklist this “linksys” network? It’s freaking weak, weaker than the signal I want to stay connected to. Wicd won’t connect to my network at all. It’s really rather messy. To compound the frustration, the wifi tool in XP seems to have a slightly longer timeout that NM, so I can stay connected in Windows but not Linux. The irony!

Also ironic: the IDE situation on Linux, which is usually my development platform of choice. I installed Arch Linux half way through this past semester because of issues with Ubuntu, and I’ve been absurdly busy since then. Thus, I’ve just been using Gedit and a terminal window with gcc, guile, or whatever compiler/interpreter the situation called for. No sense mucking around with a full fledged IDE for 200 line homework assignments. However, AbiWord has a lot of code. This is by far the most complex project I’ve worked on.

So, after getting thoroughly overwhelmed (and reminding myself that this was the planning/research phase and I didn’t have to start coding in earnest for another three weeks), I decided to take Eclipse for another spin. Problem: it won’t spin. After figuring out how Subclipse worked and getting things syncing off the AbiWord SVN, my wifi connection died, taking Eclipse with it mid-checkout. Now Eclipse freezes on the loading splash screen.

In between the lack of IDE and lack of stable internet connection, I’m getting pretty frustrated. So, I need a plan.

• Teh Internets
  • Construct a Pringles ™ antenna, slap it on the router and point it in the general direction of my laptop.
  • (Plan B) Install OpenWRT (or something similar) on the WRT54G router, then pump up the transmitting power. Pray that the router doesn’t overheat, the FCC doesn’t show up at my door, and that the router doesn’t brick. Any of these are bad as they mean potentially making the internet situation worse. Gah!
• Eclipse (Ideally, after fixing the wifi situation. It’s hard download packages and/or to flame people on IRC when one’s connection drops every other thing.)
  • Visit #archlinux. Complain. Get connection dropped. Be ignored by everyone. (Accomplished)
  • Run Eclipse and get some sort of terminal output. There must be a console debug argument or log or something somewhere.
  • If Eclipse won’t run at all, I’ll fall back upon the “pencil and paper” approach and try drawing out the relationship between things. You laugh, but it’s worked before.
• General Sanity
  • Unpack from school and get boxen out of room.
  • Find mouse. Battling my laptop’s touchpad is not aiding my mood.
  • Unruly mob! Unruly mob!
  • Get something done on AbiWord. Seriously.

That said, I’ve got quite enough to keep me busy right now. Over and out.

The ramifications of the rampant American consumer in and/or about places of popular commerce (specifically, WalMart) is deeply troubling. Look at Europe. They don’t have WalMart there. How do they get great prices at great values?

Continue reading ‘In Which James Embraces Consumerism’

Wee! The end of the school year is in sight. Honestly, I felt a lot more in control this point last semester. Since spring break, everything seems like it’s been a blur. An accelerating blur. I can hardly even remember the last week. Well, I can remember specific details about it and sort of piece things together, but I can’t really picture it as a whole. This is probably because I’ve had a bizarre cold/allergy thing coming on, followed by lots of sleeplessness. I have taken to measuring the days past by noting the number of tissues piling up in the trash bag under the sink. That’s probably not a good sign.

Notable events this week have included:

• Getting back an operating systems assignment and not failing. Doing considerably better than failing. Yay.
  • Good thing too, because I was up ’till three AM working on that. >_<
• RAM from NewEgg arriving. Subsequently, my Linux desktop runs a lot zippier and Guild Wars runs smoothly (There are several other games I’d like to test, but haven’t had time). I can have a lot more stuff open before swapping kicks in. In fact, I haven’t managed to hit that point yet. Yay. The laptop also seems to be dumping out a bit more heat. I’m guessing this has impacted the battery life in some way, but my battery is basically a 15 minute UPS at this point.
• Learning that even though you can implement procedural algorithms in a functional language, it doesn’t mean that you should. TEA looses a ton of elegance when written in Haskell. Not to mention it becomes a ton harder to read and understand. Quite disappointing.
  • Thank you Jurassic Park. You have given me a phrase I can apply to just about anything.
  • Taking two programming courses at once is interesting. There is always something due. Always.
• Racquetball tonight? I want to play racquetball. I’ve hardly moved at all this semester, unless you count walking to classes and SAGA. Need physical motion.
• Attending physics TI this evening and having a personal tutor of whom to ask stupid questions.
• Almost walking into a lightpost on Wednesday. This was my second clue that I needed more sleep. (The first was how tired I was.
• Not recalling having difficulty forming coherent sentances while sleep deprived. Amazing! My personal theory is that all speech is simply bypassing the mental facalties. Um, yay?
• Everything I write eventually turning into bulleted lists. Normally I’m able to supress this urge and make the English flow like butter on a rabid bald monkey, but I suspect the aforementioned lack of sleep is overwhelming my English facilities.

My desire to play racquetball seems to be being fulfuilled. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and loose miserably.

Also, as long as I’m procrastinating, might as well post this too. It’s only like a week or two late.

• Diddy Kong is a lot of fun. I was surprised as how fun and balanced a character he was.
• But Sonic the Hedgehog is definitely my favorite character.
• Moves are way easier to pull off. Love chaining combos in midair? So much easier now.
• Way more floaty. Wee!
• Because there’s a lot more airtime, there’s a lot more focus on combat in the Y-axis. Sonic’s down stomping attack is used a lot.
• Sonic is now the fastest character. However, he doesn’t really move all that fast compared to the characters in Melee. Thus, everyone moves more slowly.
• The nerf bat hath smiteth Link, my previous main. He feels a lot less visceral than in Melee. Part of might be the animation cycles; in Meele it was totally possible to pull off two or three spins in a row on DK. Now, not so much. Things feel slower and smoother.
• SOOO much more of an emphasis on items. I have no problems with items normally, and Nintendo hit the sweet spot with the defaults in Melee. Now it just feels like too much.We’re talking like five smash balls in a single round, and two or three insane ships of doom, split into three pieces which everyone battles like crazy over. Yeah. When you play with items (he said, abusing italics), you fight for items. There are now at least five or six items of power equal to or greater than the stupid hammer. And they spawn all over the place! Seriously, it’s completely insane.
• However, you can turn it all down and/or off, so I’m not complaining too much.

Every platform has software that defines it; the “killer app.” The software everyone remembers and immediately thinks of when thinking about the platform. For DOS, it was stuff like lotus123. For the Open Source world, it’s GUN/Linux, LAMP, and Firefox. For Windows, it’s more or less every bit of proprietary software out there, singing songs of platform exclusivity and vendor lockin in beautiful chorus.

Well, Facebook’s killer app has surfaced. And what do you know? It’s a game. Why am I not surprised?

So, yes. It’s a simplistic MMORPG. Amazingly, it’s actually designed to be played in ways other than spamming your entire friends list with invites. It’s called PackRat, and it is, in fact, a collectable card game which focuses on getting ahead of everyone else by stealing their cards. Some people seem to like it a lot. Whatever. Either way, killer app or not, this is the first app I’ve seen to make good use of the Facebook API.

I have just discovered a wonderful ethical dilemma.

A man is hiding in your closet, and another man is standing before you in the doorway. You know that each wants to kill the other, and you suspect both are evil, but you don’t know for sure. Man number one, standing in the doorway demands to know if the other guy is in the closet. If you reply in the affirmative, he will shoot the man hiding in the closet. If you deny that man number two is hiding in the closet, he will pop out and shoot the blighter standing in the doorway.

Now, both men could be equally evil, one could be slightly eviler than the other, or one could be the evil train robber and the other a hero mounted atop a white horse. (Aside from the complete absence of handy monochromatic hats and/or quadruped transportation, that is) You just don’t know.

Assuming that it’s a binary situation, what is the best ethical choice?

In retrospect, I’m probably I’m the last person on the planet to come up with this situation, but it still amuses me.

Discuss.