Tech – Page 7 – News from Great Castle Wilson

MacWorld

So another MacWorld keynote has come and gone. There was plenty of coverage in the Mac community, so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but here’s a capsule summary of the announcements: New versions of iLife and iWork, both of which have enough features that I’ll have to buy the upgrades. … Continue reading “MacWorld”

So another MacWorld keynote has come and gone. There was plenty of coverage in the Mac community, so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but here’s a capsule summary of the announcements:

New versions of iLife and iWork, both of which have enough features that I’ll have to buy the upgrades. From my p.o.v., the most interesting enhancements are:
- facial recognition and geotagging support in iPhoto
- (what looks to be) a much improved version of iMovie
- in GarageBand the ability to learn to play songs by particular artists as taught by the actual artist using video, on screen keyboard/fretboards and control over playback speed, etc.
- Support for remote control of Keynote presentations via iPhone/iPod Touch
- MathType and EndNote built into Pages — Dennis will love that
- Online support for viewing and commenting on iWork documents via a new “iWork.com” site, which is currently free in beta, but eventually will be a pay service. (I’m actually not sure how interesting this is in practice — Now, if you could edit them online…)
A new 17″ MacBook Pro, with a non-removable, 8 hour battery life. (Of course, they used to claim 5 hours, but I never got more than 3.5, so this effectively means a real-world battery life of 5 hours — definitely not too shabby.)
A new pricing model for iTunes: songs can be $0.69, $0.99, or $1.29. That’s in the U.S., of course, so it remains to be seen what happens in Canada.
All iTunes music moving (by the end of Q1) to be DRM free. This is great for people buying new music, but it should be noted that they did not wave the fee for upgrading your existing tunes to the new format. When I checked today, they already wanted >$60 to upgrade my existing purchases, and that can only climb as more tunes get converted. Oh well.

Some cool stuff there, but I was disappointed that there was still no word on new Mac Minis. My G5 PowerMac is getting pretty long in the tooth now, and since I basically just use it as a server (for this site, among other things) I’d love to replace it with a new Mini with a current C2D and a Gig of storage. Particularly since it now looks like Apple is phasing out support for the G5 processor.

iPhones and the need for responsiveness

There’s a pattern I fall for, about once a day, while browsing the web on the iPhone. It goes something like this: follow a link to a new page as the page starts filling in, read the first screenful do the “scroll up” gesture to make more content visible watch as the iPhone randomly does … Continue reading “iPhones and the need for responsiveness”

There’s a pattern I fall for, about once a day, while browsing the web on the iPhone. It goes something like this:

follow a link to a new page
as the page starts filling in, read the first screenful
do the “scroll up” gesture to make more content visible
watch as the iPhone randomly does one of three things:
- ignores the gesture completely.
- waits about a second and then scrolls a few pixels
- starts loading the page pointed at by the link you happened to be over when you started the scroll up gesture

Ok, so it’s not like I don’t understand what’s going on here: The poor thing is busy painting the page, and it just can’t deal with the added processor requirements of recognizing all of the events that make up the gesture. It either misses them all, or gets just a few of them, which leaves it either scrolling “a bit” or treating the gesture as a click on the link.

The thing is, it really doesn’t matter to me whether this is processor limited, or a bug in the OS (i.e. events get lost), or it’s just a bad design (i.e. input handled in the same thread that does the drawing), but the end result is that because I can’t trust what the phone will do in response to my touch, I have to wait until the page fully “settles” before I start scrolling. On pages that have lots of content and go off to ad services to fill in side bars, etc., this means I wait for a long time.

I mean, c’mon Apple; do I really have to tell you about the need for responsiveness?

Anyway, as frustrating as this is, the only real reason I started ranting about it is because it got me thinking about Eclipse, the UI thread, and the multi-core CPU trend. We’re pushing more and more work into multiple threads, drastically increasing the contention at the glass. The Jobs framework and UIJobs are interesting, but don’t address issues like recognizing when multiple jobs are attempting to paint conflicting (or even exactly the same) information in the UI… Anyway, there are aspects of the e4 “modeled UI” that are related to this, but it’s not clear that we’ve thought enough about it yet. Hm…

The Mojave Experiment is a total failure

The Mojave Experiment is an attempt by Microsoft to show that if people don’t know they are running Vista, they like it. Essentially, people are given an overview of a “new” operating system called Mojave, and then given a brief chance to try it. Afterwards they are told it’s Vista, and they say things like … Continue reading “The Mojave Experiment is a total failure”

The Mojave Experiment is an attempt by Microsoft to show that if people don’t know they are running Vista, they like it. Essentially, people are given an overview of a “new” operating system called Mojave, and then given a brief chance to try it. Afterwards they are told it’s Vista, and they say things like “Wow! This is much better than I thought it would be.” Sheesh. How shallow do they think we are?

Here’s the thing: Vista looks shiny, and if you get told that it runs all your old programs but gives you the security you need, then of course you’re going to like it. But if you actually installed that OS on the home machines of all those noobs, and made them live through the constant, irritating security prompts, crashes, and incompatibilities, I’m guessing that it wouldn’t take long for reality to set in and the average rating for Vista of 4.5 out of 10 to once again be the norm.

God, I’m glad my real computers are macintoshes.

Eclipse 3.4

With a heartbeat that would make a pacemaker envious, another awesome Eclipse release is out. You can get it at the Ganymede home page. I am very proud to have had the opportunity to work with such dedicated and absolutely professional people once again on this release, and I’m very much looking forward to getting … Continue reading “Eclipse 3.4”

With a heartbeat that would make a pacemaker envious, another awesome Eclipse release is out. You can get it at the Ganymede home page.

I am very proud to have had the opportunity to work with such dedicated and absolutely professional people once again on this release, and I’m very much looking forward to getting started on our new challenges in R3.5 and e4.

I would like to call out the unrelenting effort of the p2 team in particular this year. They did everthing necessary to make p2 a successful part of R3.4, going above and beyond the call every day for many weeks. As a result, I believe we now have the basis for a truly world-class provisioning story, something that will help the whole Eclipse community.

Eee!

Ok, you knew it had to happen. I picked up an EeePC 8g from the guys down at PC Cyber. So far, I have to say, I think it’s very cool. I was looking for a sub-notebook to carry around in my MEC bag, and this fits it perfectly. But wait, you say, what about … Continue reading “Eee!”

But wait, you say, what about the OLPC XO? Wasn’t that going to be your sub-notebook?

Well, yes, that was the plan. But after several months of using the XO, too many of its limitations became irksome, and the things that make it great (i.e. the educational software, the mesh networking, the kid friendly case) just weren’t useful to me.

So here I am with the Eee. It’s still got limited storage (but more than the XO — 8Gig + 4 on an SDHC), a really small (not outdoor readable) screen, and it runs a funky front end onto xandros (not Ubuntu, although that’s pretty easy to get going) but despite that it seems to be a much better fit for me. It comes with all of the software that I would use on a day to day basis, like OpenOffice, Firefox, Pidgin, Skype, Lightening, Java, FBReader… you name it.

Plus, I managed to get it to

sync calendar entries with the rest of my Macs
hold (but not sync) all my address book entries
mount my iPod (and my 120Gig USB laptop drive)
run eReader under Wine (so that I can read my DRM’ed eBooks)
…

Heck, I even got it to run Eclipse, and you know, it actually runs well enough to be usable, although it takes some careful tweaking to get enough screen real estate to run Eclipse on a 480×800 display. (Hint: “Toggle Toolbar Visibility” is your friend.)

[Latest find: a site that explains how to connect to LEAP/PEAP networks. I’ll have to try that at some point.]

The only real negatives I’ve found so far are the battery life which is somewhere between 2 and 3 hours, and the fact that it has a fan. The fan doesn’t run all the time, but when it does start up, man is it loud. At full speed it sounds like a hairdryer.

Btw, the small keyboard is not a negative. In addition to being a lot larger than the one on the XO, it’s actually large enough for me to touch type on without difficulty, now that I’ve gotten used to it.

Anyway, this is the proverbial first post from the Eee. I guess, if nothing else, the length of it indicates that the keyboard really is usable. I’ll let you know how well it works out once I’ve had it for a few weeks.

What do you mean mysql can’t find my wp database?

Well, that was more excitement than I was expecting. Tonight, Deb wandered into my downstairs office and said, “Are you playing with the server? I can’t get to my blog”. I naturally assumed it was the normal problem of my dynamic dns address changing and the associated delay before mikew.ca catches up. So I tried … Continue reading “What do you mean mysql can’t find my wp database?”

Well, that was more excitement than I was expecting.

Tonight, Deb wandered into my downstairs office and said, “Are you playing with the server? I can’t get to my blog”. I naturally assumed it was the normal problem of my dynamic dns address changing and the associated delay before mikew.ca catches up. So I tried connecting to my blog and what did I see: “WordPress can’t find your database”. What!!! That would be bad; very very bad.

Well, after about an hour of messing around, I realized it wasn’t quite that bad. MySQL and all my data really were still there, but it turns out they had been masked by some misguided hacking I had been doing with MacPorts.

Whew!

Well, in honour of the near miss, I promptly did a full backup of my entire website (as apposed to the incremental nightlies) and the mysql database, and then upgraded to WordPress 2.5.

So far, everything looks good. The upgrade went painlessly, as it has for me since I started using WP. Man, I wish all software was that easy to deal with.

GUI Bloopers: Paste Special

So in case you haven’t seen it, “Paste Special” is a common feature in many applications that support rich content of one form or another. The intent is that, instead of having the application decide (based on the available content types of the object in the paste buffer) the best format to use when pasting, … Continue reading “GUI Bloopers: Paste Special”

So in case you haven’t seen it, “Paste Special” is a common feature in many applications that support rich content of one form or another. The intent is that, instead of having the application decide (based on the available content types of the object in the paste buffer) the best format to use when pasting, it offers the user a dialog with a range of available formats, something like this:

The typical behavior, in this case, is to open the dialog with the format that would have been chosen if the user had simply picked “Paste” already selected. I guess this is done so that, if the user hits return when the dialog opens, they will get the same behavior as Paste provides. The thing is though, no one who opens that dialog ever wants that behavior. The only reason why a user would go through the extra pain of the dialog is because they want to paste in some way that is not the default, so in point of fact, picking any other choice would be better than picking the one that does what Paste would do.

The question is then, what should the dialog have as the default selection?

In 99.9% of the times Paste Special is used, the intent is to remove any rich formatting from the content in the paste buffer, so that it can pick up the surrounding formatting of its destination. Given that, when there are multiple possible formats, always pick the “plainest” one. So, for example, in the above dialog, it should have “Unformatted text” selected by default.

Of course, as usual, the Apple guys have understood the underlying problem better. Instead of a Paste Special command, in Pages I get this…

… which does what you (almost always) actually want, without putting up a dialog at all.

Sometimes it’s the little things

It’s been a while since I’ve done a link-of-the-day, but this one made me think. (Specifically, “Are my UI designs getting this right?”): Thanks, Windows. If I had a cookie, I’d give it to you.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a link-of-the-day, but this one made me think. (Specifically, “Are my UI designs getting this right?”):

Thanks, Windows. If I had a cookie, I’d give it to you.

I read books.

Steve Jobs can be such an a**hole sometimes. According to Gizmodo, he said about the Amazon Kindle: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore… The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” Hey, Steve, ever think that your iPods … Continue reading “I read books.”

Steve Jobs can be such an a**hole sometimes.

According to Gizmodo, he said about the Amazon Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore… The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Hey, Steve, ever think that your iPods are part of the reason why fewer people are reading? People used to read books on the bus, now they just listen. Why not show some societal responsibility and bring some of that trademark Apple coolness to something that drives intellectual development, so your next generation of customers will be able to get jobs that let them afford to buy iPods.

Some more OLPC XO notes

Here are a few random notes about the XO, after a day of playing with it: It’s heavier than I thought it was going to be. If I had to guess, I would say that combining the need to be robust enough for kids, with the need to be inexpensive, probably means that it was … Continue reading “Some more OLPC XO notes”

Here are a few random notes about the XO, after a day of playing with it:

It’s heavier than I thought it was going to be. If I had to guess, I would say that combining the need to be robust enough for kids, with the need to be inexpensive, probably means that it was bound to be heavy. It would really be too heavy to be an eBook reader, if I wasn’t pudgy enough to have a “belly shelf” to put it on. 😉
The keyboard is too small to type on. It is, of course, too small for my adult hands, but it even seemed small when my 11 year-old nephew was playing with it. I understand that the size (and the lime-green color) were intended to make it less appealing to adult thieves. I guess will see. To me it’s no worse than learning the Treo or the iPod Touch keyboards. In this case, 2 fingers from each hand + the right thumb on the space bar is working for me.
There’s something odd about the trackpad. It seems to get in a mode where it causes the cursor to jump to one corner of the screen every time you lift your finger off the surface. Whatever it is, Jeff noticed the problem on his as well, so it’s not a hardware problem with mine.
FBReader works better than I thought it would. I installed it by finding an RPM that started with “fbreader” at http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/7/i386/ and then getting it with a command like:
```
    rpm -ivh http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/7/i386/fbreader...
```
(Note: You probably have to be su’ed to do that.)
To start it, you type “FBReader” at the shell prompt. To exit, you hit “cntrl-Q”. The default font, font sizes, margin spacing, and keybindings all need to be adjusted on first use, but the values are remembered so it’s not a big deal. It may just be personal taste, but I find the resulting experience to be more pleasing than using the built in PDF reader. In any case, it’s certainly faster.
The SD slot seems to work fine. The way I tested FBReader was by sticking in an old 256Meg SD card I had used with one of my previous Palms, which was full of eBooks. It mounted as “/media/SD256” (because the volume label was “SD256”), and when I told FBReader that “/media/SD256/palm/Books” was on the library path it found the 4 unencrypted DOC format books that were there.
Wireless is definitely an issue. After several hours of attempting to get it to connect via WEP to my Airport Extreme, including following the instructions of people who have gotten it to work, I have given up. The claim is that the XO can’t speak WPA yet, but there also seems to be a counter-example. I may switch over to WPA and try that, but for now I just stuck a Linksys “USB200M ver.2” USB-to-wired-ethernet adapter into one of the USB ports. This worked without problem, and at least seems to be faster than using wireless anyway.