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By Adam, November 29, 2011 4:40 pm

Once again, users and developers all around the Linux desktop community have been provoked by controversial comments from Linus Torvalds, creator and long-time maintainer of the Linux kernel. Back in October, Linus dubbed GNOME 3 an “unholy mess”, referring to one of the changes as “crazy crap” and demanding “I want my sane interfaces back”. Since then he has gone even further, contending that “for some people, a stable, flexible functional desktop environment is far more important than the latest eye candy or trendy minimalist UI design.”

Reaction from the desktop development community has been swift and mostly unapologetic. Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, responded “Once again, Linus is underestimating the importance of aesthetics in computing. You only have to look at Apple to see that people place more importance on visual beauty than the kind of efficient work processes that a flexible and reliable desktop environment enable. This is why we’re pushing our new Unity launcher as a mandatory part of Ubuntu. We’re confident that people will quickly overcome the initial shock of everything taking longer to find and access because they’ll be too busy admiring how beautiful it looks.” He then cited the latest 11.10 release as an example of this. “If you look in the release notes for [Oneiric Ocelot], you’ll see a new Alt+Tab switcher at the top of the list of highlights, and below it other radical changes such as renaming ‘Places’ to ‘Lenses’. Frankly, most people lap up this whizzbang shit, and as long as it looks cooler than their friend’s Windows 7 netbook they’ll be willing to tolerate some minor annoyances which are unavoidable when making immature software a critical component of the desktop. Sure, we could prioritise boring bug-fixing over innovation, but that just doesn’t excite the teenagers on the web forums, and we have to think about the next generation of users. Besides, if you want a dumbed down system that mostly works, there’s always Mac OS X.”

Havoc Pennington, a GNOME developer well-known for initiating the war on Linux desktop flexibility by drastically reducing the number of preferences and replacing GNOME’s default window manager, the high-performance scriptable Sawfish, with Metacity, commented: “It’s about achieving the right work/play balance. If your desktop allowed you to get stuff done too quickly, it would just increase your stress levels. Some ‘power’ users think they want to be able to stream-line their workflows, but we know better, so we are doing them a favour by making this customizability harder. After all, everyone needs basically the same things. Rather than trying to be different, these people should instead learn to enjoy the cute visuals and focus more on having fun. Life’s more than just work, work, work, you know.”

The KDE camp has been slightly less vociferous, perhaps because it’s old hat for them – back in 2008 they pioneered the concept of intrusive redesigns and ended up the wrong end of one of Linus’ rants as a result. “With KDE 4.0, we did our best to prevent people achieving real work, and I think we largely succeeded”, one of the KDE team leaders recalls. “I mean, there was a significant period of time where neither the KDE3 version of knetworkmanager nor its KDE4 rewrite worked properly, so for many wireless networks, the only way you could connect was to disable NetworkManager and write a shell-script to interface directly with wpa-supplicant and ifup. And that’s just one small example.”

Despite Torvalds’ comments, the move towards form over function has been witnessed elsewhere outside the desktop software space. For example, Apple have introduced the MacWheel, a move so bold that it makes innovations such as Unity and the GNOME Shell look positively conservative. However there is no clear industry-wide consensus; in fact companies such as Ebay and Sony are beginning to experiment with rejecting both form and function, turning conventional wisdom on its head.

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By Adam, September 25, 2011 3:00 pm

Amazon MP3 store – a phenomenonly popular online music store. Ubuntu – a phenomenonly popular version of Linux. 64-bit x86_64 CPUs – been around for years. You’d think this was a good combination, wouldn’t you? Wrong Amazon, along with Spotify and countless others, is dismally failing to support its rapidly growing set of customers who run Linux. As I’ve said elsewhere, even if 2% of your customers use Linux, that can still be a huge number. Hopefully some day these big companies will acquire some common sense.

Anyway, in the mean time a quick google brought up the following solution:

• http://www.dgf64art.com/2011/07/05/installing-amazon-mp3-downloader-on-ubuntu-11-04/

Unfortunately it doesn’t work – the step which installs the manually downloaded .deb files fails due to broken dependencies. However further googling found a post from 2008 which revealed a technique based on the very useful getlibs utility.

So here’s my solution:

1. Download the 32-bit Amazon downloader app for Ubuntu 9.10.
2. Run sudo dpkg -i --force-all AmazonMP3DownloaderInstall.deb
3. Run sudo apt-get install getlibs if you don’t already have getlibs installed.
4. Run sudo getlibs /usr/bin/amazonmp3 and answer yes to the confirmation.

At this point if you try to run /usr/bin/amazonmp3 you’ll probably hit Ubuntu bug 781870. The workaround is as follows:

export GDK_PIXBUF_MODULE_FILE=/usr/lib32/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache
/usr/bin/amazonmp3

You’ll still get an error that it’s trying to load the 64-bit version of libgvfsdbus.so thanks to Ubuntu bug 369498. I had hopes that export GIO_EXTRA_MODULES=/usr/lib32/gio/modules would fix this, but it seems that this variable only gets honoured too late. However, apparently this issue doesn’t stop the program working so can be ignored.

Another option is to use Banshee’s built-in Amazon downloader, but even without all the politics surrounding Ubuntu’s version of Banshee this didn’t suit my tastes.

UPDATE: Wow. Just found out Amazon doesn’t support re-downloading stuff you’ve already bought. This is truly pathetic, especially considering their Android app kind of implements a locker service. From now on I’ll be using 7digital whenever I can – unfortunately their selection isn’t as big though. The quest for the perfect music services continues … :-/

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By Adam, August 1, 2011 10:17 pm

When flying, most cellists are faced with either buying an extra ticket or getting a flight case, paying oversized baggage fees, and praying. Experiences vary widely and are in places well documented and full of useful advice, e.g.

• http://cellobello.com/blog/chamber_music/cello-is-my-co-pilot/
• http://cellofun.yuku.com/topic/4483

My situation is different because I have a Luis and Clark carbon fiber cello which is incredibly robust and generally does not even go out of tune when checked in as normal baggage and placed in the hold of the aircraft in a normal hard case. My case is a Bam Hightech measuring 54.5 × 21 × 88.7″.  It seems virtually all airlines policies regarding oversized baggage operate in “linear” or total dimensions, i.e. by summing up the 3 separate dimensions together.  This means my case has a linear dimension of 88.7″ which unfortunately is outside the 62″ standard limit, and even just outside Delta’s second tier limit of 80″.  Having said that, so far I have always managed to get it treated as normal sized baggage simply by confidently pointing out that the height is 55″ which is under 62″. In my experience, most staff at the check-in gate are not familiar with the exact terms in their airline’s policies, so having the right attitude (confidently knowledgeable and up-front but non-confrontational) can go a long way.

I’ve done some research on the policies of some popular airlines and referenced the relevant extracts below, with one section per airline. The quotes I’ve taken are focused mainly on national flights within the USA, because despite being from the UK, I’m currently flying around the USA a lot. However the policies for international flights seem similar, although sometimes with higher fees.
Continue reading 'Flying with a (carbon fibre) cello'»

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By Adam, July 25, 2011 7:31 pm

Dear Sir/Madam,

This is absolutely appalling support – all FIVE methods I tried for contacting BT regarding this issue failed:

1. I responded to the email regarding incident number [CENSORED] providing a time and method for calling me as requested, but noone ever called back.
2. I rang 0800 731 0286 and selected option 1 – it rang for several minutes with no answer then hung me up.
3. There is a bug with your login process on btvoip.custhelp.com where the password dialog box is not shown alongside the username dialog box, so I could not log in.  Additionally  requesting a new password failed, as did re-registration.
4. Clicking “Contact Us” on btvoip.custhelp.com does nothing.
5. Clicking “Live Chat” on btvoip.custhelp.com results in the error ”There was a problem connecting to the Chat Server”.

All this is in regard to attempting to switch my landline back from Orange to BT.  Now I am beginning to wonder why I should bother.  At least I can talk to Orange, even if they get everything wrong.

If this ever reaches a human being, please call me as requested in my original email!

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By Adam, October 7, 2010 8:18 pm

In my recent work I have encountered Apache Maven, and I think the following snippet of real-world Maven code nicely sums up why Maven is not the idea replacement for the horror that is ant:

  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>unix</id>
      <activation>
        <os>
          <family>unix</family>
        </os>
      </activation>
      <build>
        <plugins>
          <plugin>
            <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
            <artifactId>exec-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <executions>
              <execution>
                <id>set-run-file-perms</id>
                <phase>generate-resources</phase>
                <goals>
                  <goal>exec</goal>
                </goals>
                <configuration>
                  <executable>chmod</executable>
                  <arguments>
                    <argument>0755</argument>
                    <argument>${project.build.directory}/foo.sh</argument>
                  </arguments>
                </configuration>
              </execution>
            </executions>
          </plugin>
        </plugins>
      </build>
    </profile>
  </profiles>

Dear god. 34 lines and a plug-in, just to change the permissions on a file in a platform-specific way??

I should add that the above was written by an extremely smart guy who is a top-notch programmer; no, I don’t think the author is at fault here. Even if there’s a more concise/portable way of achieving the same result in Maven (and there might well be – I admit I’m still a Maven newbie), there’s still the undeniable fact that XML is horrendously verbose, and any code written in it is by nature unnecessarily difficult to maintain. To this end I applaud the ongoing efforts supporting the use of YAML to implement the Maven POM.

It’s worth seeing what the above would look like if we wrote it in rake:

require 'pathname'

desc "Make binary executable"
task :chmod do
  File.new(Pathname.new(build_dir) + "foo.sh").chmod(0755)
end

I don’t think I need to make a case for which is more legible or maintainable. Oh, and the Ruby version is cross-platform.

To continue an anti-XML rant which has been made countless times already: what the ant and Maven people don’t seem to realise is that XML is not a real programming language and is therefore not expressive enough to deal with many cases that a build system needs. The clue’s in the name, guys! “M” is for “markup” not “Turing-complete“. That’s why every time you need to do something vaguely unusual for which there isn’t an ant taskdef or Maven plugin, you have to write hundreds of lines more Java/XML just to cope with that case. That’s why Maven needs so many damn plugins.

The accidental silver lining to this is that because it takes so much effort to accomplish simple tasks, Maven developers find themselves compelled to reuse and share plugins, and to be fair, Maven has some good ideas on how to do this, even if the implementation isn’t always the best. For example, the built-in plug-in repository management and plug-in dependency management seem to work nicely, but unfortunately for some reason it has a propensity to download plug-ins on most runs, far more frequently than any sensible caching layer should.

DSL issues aside, I’m not convinced by the fixed lifecycle philosophy behind Maven either. I wonder if it was borne out of frustration with the lack of proper dependency checking in ant.

That said, I do like how Maven encourages standardization of the build lifecycle and phase namespace thereof, since newcomers to a project immediately know some familiar entry points. But the same could be said of 99% of projects which use Make and use standard rule target names such as install and clean. And I suspect that many developers suffer when they try to shoe-horn their own project’s build requirements into Maven’s standard lifecycle.

My concern with this phased approach is that it is too linear.  The expectation is that a build process is a one-dimensional sequence of steps, and you get to choose your starting point but not much else.  This seems fundamentally wrong to me.  A build dependency tree is well understood to be a DAG, and any build system which doesn’t model this properly seems to me to be burying its head in the sand.  On the other hand, if it does model it properly, which includes implementing proper dependency resolution, the required build lifecycle should emerge naturally without having to dictate that generate-sources comes before compile which comes before test and so on.

I’ve had some ideas of what the ideal build system looks like, and how to get there from the conventional Java world. More on that soon.