Monday, April 4th, 2005
I’ve done some updating on this page:
- Most pages now have a contents listing.
- New picture of me, since the old one was kind of out of date. This one is even worse (bad lighting, etc) but I’ll take another one soon.
- The top menu items are now also highlighted for subitems of those items.
- Breadcrumb navigation added (couple of days ago actually)
- Rewrote the log. It’s not yet operational, but it will be soon. Hopefully that’ll fix some bugs with navigation, RSS feed and include some more features.
Monday, March 28th, 2005
Here’s a little TicTacToe game which can be played online in your browser against an reallife opponent. Everything is interactive, no need to refresh anything. It uses XMLHttpRequest to do Client 2 Server 2 Client communications.
Thursday, March 24th, 2005
Felt a little better today (I’ve got the flu), so I decided to do some hacking. I had this idea for a while about building a WebGUI toolkit with Widgets and all that stuff. So I made a little Proof-of-Concept. More (just barely) information can be found in the Playground.
Imagine what you could do if you linked this up with XMLHttpRequest! Awesome. Gonna test that out soon.
Thursday, March 24th, 2005
Ever wanted to know the life of a critical bug in a Free Software application? Some days ago a bug was discovered in FireFox’s (or rather the complete Mozilla Suite) GIF handling code.
Life line:
- 2005-03-10 07:56 PST: The bug was reported
- 2005-03-10 12:52 PST: (5 hours later) The bug is confirmed.
- 2005-03-10 18:36 PST: (5.5 hours later) A fix is available.
- 2005-03-11 17:39 PST: (1 day later) The fix has been applied and when two more, unrelated, bugs are fixed the new version can be released.
- 2005-03-23: The new version with the bugfix is released.
That’s only one day for a complete fix to be applied and thirteen days before that fix reaches your home. Now, thirteen days may seem like a long time, but do take in account the fact that vendors usually request a little time before announcing the bug and releasing the new version so they too can prepare new releases of their packaged versions of Firefox.
I’m amazed at the speed and effectiveness of the communications within the FireFox/Mozilla team.
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005
I’m finally sick! Hooray!
“Why, that’s nothing to be happy about, is it?” you might say. But do know that I’ve been on the verge of being sick for over a month now. Too bad that at that time we were running up against a dead-line, and I couldn’t be sick. Well, I could have, my boss wouldn’t have minded I’m sure, but I just don’t seem to be able to get sick when something important needs to be done.
All in all I think I’ve fought two major influenza epidemics without getting sick, but now one has finally cought up with me. Too bad, but there’s not much you can now is there?
I hope I’ll get better soon. I never thought I’d say this, but I’d much rather spend a day at work than in bed.
Anyway, I’m off to bed again before I drip mucus on my laptop again. Or worse.. sneeze on the screen.
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005
Recently, I’ve been giving the Ion2 window manager a try. Ion2 is a window manager with a twist. Window managers like it are sometimes refered to as tiling window managers.
Instead of the normal ‘floating’ windows, Ion2 tries to give each window as much screen space as possible. Normally, this would mean all windows are automatically made fullscreen, but it is very easy to split the screen in horizontal or vertical spaces. These divisions are called ‘frames’. Each frame, in turn, can contain multiple completely overlapping windows. They are somewhat comparable to tabs.
Ion2 takes a little time to get used to and, to be honoust, it’s somewhat elitist. Everything (except dragging and resizing of frames) is controlled by keyboard which sometimes becomes a bit tiresome.
Even though the concept of tiling window managers appeals very much to me, there’s a lot that’s wrong with Ion2:
- Horrible documentation.
It took me quite some time to figure out the keybindings and how to configure Ion2. For instance, I couldn’t even find out how to name the configuration files. The fact that the default configuration files aren’t transfered to ~/.ion2 on startup and that they reside in /etc/X11/ion2 also weren’t a big help. Neither was the fact that documentation for ion1, ion2 en ion3 where completely mixed together (or at least, so it seemed to me).
- Various bugs plagued my use of Ion2.
Some examples:
I couldn’t use the Windows key instead of alt as the default command-key because, for some reason, it would notify applications of the keypress too. So pressing Win+s would transfer the ‘s’ character to the application.
Some applications frequently lost focus when switching desktops. This was mostly noticed with FireFox.
Resizing events sometimes didn’t propegate to the client windows correctly, leaving, for instance, Vim at a small height.
I actually suspect that Ion2 is not at fault here but rather the client applications. Perhaps they weren’t honouring standards enough, I don’t know. I do know it rendered Ion2 useless for my needs: Non-Irritating Window Management.
- Very user unfriendly.
Take for example the fact that to create a ‘floating’ virtual desktop (one in which tiling is not used), I had to press F9 after which I got a prompt saying something like: Window type: [WMIonframeST]: after which I then had to enter something like: WMIonFloatST. Not very user friendly at all.
All in all, Ion2 is a pretty decent window manager. It goes through great lengths to get things right. Pop-up dialogs, for example, are shown in much the same way as FireFox shows it’s search bar and pop-up notification bars. Very intuitive and handy.
Unfortunatelly the ‘bugs’ mentioned above are too annoying for me to work with Ion2 on a daily basis.
There are plenty of other tiling window managers around like ratpoison (whom’s usage I still haven’t figure out after about 2 hours of trying), WMI(I) (which suffered from the same problems af ratpoison) and LarsWM (Haven’t tried it yet).
Now, I haven’t yet given up on Tiling window managers, but it does seem that Doing Things Differently causes a variety of problems that need to be delt with. As soon as they are, I think I’ll switch to Ion. Perhaps Ion3 (currently in development) will bring me joy and happiness on my desktop.
Until then I’m staying with my faithfull little Window Maker desktop which stands undefeated at the top of my list in spite of me having tested over 30 different window managers so far.
Tuesday, March 15th, 2005
I liked today’s comic on Pearls before Swine so much, I decided to post it here:
Tuesday, March 15th, 2005
Proms v0.11 is progressing nicely. Some time ago I started the testing phase, but since then have added enough new features to merrit a restart of that testing phase.
Included in the new release will be a lot of bugfixes, security fixes, addition of files and a new and improved interface. For a sample of the interface, check out the image on the right side.
Proms v0.11 will be expected within the next 4 weeks.
Monday, March 14th, 2005
Neal Stephenson, of Cryptonomicon fame, once wrote an article called ‘In the beginning was the command line‘. It’s pretty old, and some of it is very much out of date. It’s still a good read though and he brings up many good points.
One of the best points on Apple and Microsoft he makes is this:
Their continued survival will then depend on these two things: adding more features to their OSes so that customers will not switch to the cheaper alternatives, and maintaining the image that, in some mysterious way, gives those customers the feeling that they are getting something for their money.
The latter is a truly strange and interesting cultural phenomenon.
I’ve always wondered what makes people buy this software. I can understand why home users buy it. Because they believe they don’t. It just comes free with the PC they buy, or at least they think. OEM must be the greatest invention ever. Without OEM, we wouldn’t have had MS-DOS, we wouldn’t have had Windows 95, we wouldn’t have had Microsoft.
But why would corporations buy Windows? Because, like Stephenson says, they believe they get something in return for their money. It’s not about the OS or the features though. It’s about the support. It’s about the pretence that Windows is supported by a billion dollar company that won’t forsake them. Unfortunatelly, they are wrong. But they don’t seem to care, which I find strange. To make use of Stephensons’ analogy between Operating Systems and cars: If I go out and buy a car, I expect to be able to have it fixed even after 20 years.
When I read this, I was really amazed:
I tried it again, and eventually got to a Pay Per Incident screen reading: “OUT OF INCIDENTS. There are no unused incidents left in your account. If you would like to purchase a support incident, click OK-you will then be able to prepay for an incident….” The cost per incident was $95.
I’m not familier with this Pay Per Incident scheme, but it sounds completely rediculous. I assume the idea behind it is that you can pay to have bugs and problems fixed with a higher priority. So, in essence, you’re paying them money because they did a crappy job. If a program I use FUBARs because it contains a huge bug, then the author(s) better damn well fix it Right Now or I’ll go to some competitor. If I buy a car, I expect it to work. If I buy an applience, I expect it to work. If it doesn’t, the manufacturer had better fix it.. fast.. and apologise. But at software companies, you get to pay them for their mistakes. And people accept that! This I truly do not understand.
Stephenson mentions a situation in which he was using Debian GNU/Linux and at some point some program errored. He sent out a bug report to Debian and within 24 hours had 5 responses that each solved the problem. He had problems with Windows NT and tried for months to get support but never got it. Still, people (and companies) insist on using large vendor products because of the fluffy secure feeling they get from it.
One of the reasons GNU/Linux has been more and more accepted as a viable alternative to Windows is because of this false sense of security. Now that corporations like Red Hat are offering that same pretense, companies suddenly feel they are getting something worth the money.
Lately there have been stir ups about ‘Linux on the desktop’ and Linux in the corporate world again. They pop up every now and then, usually in the form of some article that claims that this year will finally be the year that Linux ventures onto the home user’s desktop or why Linux won’t make it. They make a lot of claims and guesses about why Linux won’t get there or why it will. “It doesn’t have enough features!”, “It isn’t user-friendly enough!”, etc. I’ve had people visiting my home, using my GNU/Linux machines and not even notice it wasn’t windows. Ordinary home users don’t install any themselves. It’s just too much work.
You want to know the reason people don’t have GNU/Linux in their homes? Because they’ve already got Windows. Not that they believe Windows is better, faster or more secure! They couldn’t give a crap. Windows came with the machine so that’s what they’ll use. You want GNU/Linux on the desktop? Find a way to break OEM distribution of Windows with new PC’s and convice computer shops that people don’t care if they run GNU/Linux or Windows.
Wednesday, March 9th, 2005
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