Quick and Dirty Hacks

I’m terrible at following mailing lists, really, really poor at it I think this is related to the low signal to noise ratio when you’re subscribed to many lists. A thought occurred to me, and I wanted the tubes to give me their opinion.

Lets take for example there’s a load of mailing list messages coming in to my inbox, anything that catches my eye I read (I don’t have a problem with this so far), if it’s important I flag it for replying to later (this doesn’t always work as things drop below the inbox horizon), when a mailing list message is flagged I have a virtual folder with mailing list messages which are flagged in it (this can this be done now with evolution, with search folders although I just tried it and the search folder never appeared). Now, when I reply to a message the mailing list thread is flagged by the mail client in such a way as all followups which are in response to my original email are highlighted say in yellow (nice non threatening colour), and messages which are related are in a more washed out, but still noticeable lighter yellow.

This means that I can both keep track of which messages I feel the need to reply to, and also the messages which are in response to my messages. Some people rave about threaded views, but I still find that threaded views are difficult to navigate, also conversation views like googlemail don’t really work for me.

In order to make this work there’s one last feature  I don’t think evolution has (correct me if I’m wrong) which would be “Highlight messages with this header, or that header as this colour” – bears some thinking about I feel.

Along side this, having some default search folders configured in evolution could probably help usability, e.g. in apple mail there’s a combined inbox for your accounts which is essentially a search folder. Also, I’d like to be able to have search folders at the top, and switch off the “On this computer” menu, neither of which seem to be possible

I’ve just gotten a comment on my last blog post that reads;

“Why is this on planet gnome? Who gives a shit about you and your proprietary OS?”

Now, I’m not adverse to taking acerbic comments, I write some pretty provocative posts from time to time, expressing my opinions, ranting about this or that and to posts like that I expect a certain amount of debate and argument. I even come to expect threatening and purely insulting comments which are redirected to dev null.

However this comment, which flies in the face of;

“Planet GNOME is a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors.”

is more than a bit much. Not only does no one apparently care about OSX, but nobody cares about me either…

To clarify, I use MacOSX and Windows as well as loving Linux and GNOME. Linux doesn’t do everything I need to do so its necessary from time to time to use a proprietary OS… However, as OSX is built on top of mostly open source software, adheres to open standards is generally accepted by GNOME developers as something worth taking a look at I don’t think I’ve crossed any ideological divide here.

I feel like I’ve just had to defend myself for doing nothing wrong *sigh*

Anyway, the point of this post is to call out the hostile readership of planet gnome. Those readers who will personally attack people ‘anonymously’ (henry.tss.usg.edu), need to be made aware how they damage the community, damage developers perception of who we are doing this for and in the end do nothing to make themselves heard, in this case the hostile reader got to be heard, because  I honestly think it’s time we outed them for what they are.

Also, this little bit of wordpress comment info made me chuckle;

“User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.219.4 Safari/532.1″

I guess this hostile reader didn’t realise that chrome is built on apples webkit project, and relies on EVIL PROPRIETARY CODE!!!! Oh, no wait… Erm Apple kept webkit nice and open didn’t they.

To end, here’s a note to pigeons in the wise words of Fletch from Porridge;

“One – bide your time. Two – keep your nose clean. And three – don’t let the bastards grind you down.” – I’ve searched for the video for this to no avail. Hopefully someone can poke a youtube link of it into the comments.

Update: This isn’t going to turn into an ideological debate about apple and their practises either so you people can stop commenting about that.

So I bit the bullet and got a copy of snow leopard delivered this morning.

Apparently it can’t install because the computer can’t start from my hard drive… Well obviously that’s false.

The problem seems to be related to partitioning, I did have a triple boot, leopard, xp and ubuntu. So after reading a few articles about this particular problem I started playing around (tweaking the disk size won’t work because of some bizarre journalling problem apparently, or mediakit something something depends on when you run it), deleted ubuntu and tried to put windows back in its original partitioned space, fail, as apparently you ALSO need 128Mib free between partitions using GPT for OSX to be happy…

One more moving of the NTFS partition to give it that 128Mib space and still nothing… I don’t know whether I should bother the 3+ hours it takes to move the NTFS partition to give it more than 128Mib space see if that helps but I’m at the point of futility :/

I have a feeling that I’m going to require a full re-install of all 3 os’s because apple love their quirky one size fits one approach to installers and the boot process.

The worst thing about it is that it took me days of playing around to get a triple boot working, now I’m probably going to have to do it all over again…

So to finish off this little post of futility and arguing with apples weird disk utility I add;

Dear Steve Jobs,
Please can you fix it for me to be able to install a triple boot with osx, windows and linux without me having to bend over backwards. Essentially get your installer team a clue and some error messages that can help diagnose and repair faults like this without me having to backup all of my data from my windows install and my mac osx install (which I really don’t know if I actually have enough space for).

Thankfully in this instance ubuntu was a fresh, unused install, so that wasn’t so hard to nuke and carry on.

kthanksbye

Update: If anyone else gets this problem you will have to ensure that there is LARGER than 128Mib of space between your Linux/Windows partitions and your OSX one before you can proceed. I’ve now managed to get the upgrade done

Havoc, for all I understand your post and what you’re getting at I’d like to point out something that is an increasingly painful thing to see coming from the US.

Socialism isn’t necessarily a bad thing; capitalism doesn’t work as it just lets the rich get richer and the poor get the picture. It’s time to wise up to REAL WORLD politics rather than still continuing this hatred for socialism and communism caused by MCcArthyist witch hunts and the fear and panic of an empire big enough to slaughter the US.

(and yes, the former Soviet Union could totally have destroyed the US, just take a look at Tsar Bomba if you don’t believe me, the US had nothing close to this weapon that knocked Stalin off his chair from 110km away, a couple of these things would have annihilated the US power within only a few minutes).

Increasingly in the UK we’re seeing complete morons in the US screaming about how free health care is communist and communism is bad. Wise up for crying out loud! Just because these people are afraid of something they don’t understand doesn’t mean anyone should continue feeding this fear. Socialist objectives are very egalitarian, favouring economic equality where the top 1% don’t own 90% of the wealth. From the wikipedia page verbatim;

Socialism refers to various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with an egalitarian method of compensation. Contrary to popular belief, socialism is not a political system; it is an economic system distinct from capitalism.

Socialists mainly share the belief that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through exploitation, creates an unequal society, does not provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximize their potentialities and does not utilize technology and resources to their maximum potential nor in the interests of the public.

Is that such a bad thing? Seriously, start thinking about other people, and not the size of your bank balance.

P.S. This isn’t directed at your political views Havoc, as I don’t know what your stance on socialism is. Personally I’d prefer a socialist society to a capitalist one any day, especially as I come from a working class background in a country that has over my life become increasingly capitalist.

Update: I forgot to mention something that’s quite important to understanding how implementation of socialism works; the extra money required to run a socialist society does not come out of YOUR pocket. The money comes from increases in capital gains taxes, corporation taxes etc… The whole point of socialism is distribution of wealth, not making individuals poorer by increasing income tax.

Update: Moron, a definition: “Idiot, someone of sub normal intelligence”, I think this adequately  describes the people I’m talking about, uneducated people publicised on the BBC News who see communism as evil without even knowing the difference between communism and totalitarianism… Not that the US isn’t _TOTALLY_ under the control of corporations, I mean that seems to me to be totalitarianism of a different form… Hopefully Obama will change that, as it seems he is willing to take the risk of assassination (by corporations who do not like his new ideas) over protecting the freedom and liberty of the US population.

Recently I’ve been helping my friend ‘Spud’ with a little project unrelated to software. After a little work and a little time we’re proud to announce impshum.co.uk – A new comic site for those looking for something to blame.

I won’t republish the comics here as they are surreal, bizarre and at times profane.

A new comic is published every week day which is totally in the style of Spud’s humour. So head on over to impshum.co.uk – WARNING: Offensive and confusing material

So as many of you will be aware I’ve been suffering from Firefox problems, these problems persisted without resolution, various updates were released which didn’t correct the problem. I was suffering from complete lockups of the browser with complimentary slow cursor and frozen computer, X crashes, typing lag and various other quirks.

As far as I’m concerned, firefox has gotten to a point on Linux where I’m reminded of Internet Explorer 6. That’s right, I just compared firefox to IE6… It’s seems to have been under development in the same direction for so long that the code is rotting. This is only my opinion, and the code is probably really clean but this doesn’t excuse the sluggish nature of the browser the repeated failures and the appearance of “Oh this is embarrassing” in the browser after repeated crashes.

I remember when firefox first launched I jumped on it like a flash saying things like “wow, have you seen how fast it is” and “it just works!”… This was during a time where I was switching from IE6 and old Mozilla.

Well, as it was back then, it is again; the new kid on the block has arrived, developed from scratch with solid engineering principles and a fundamentally better architectural design.

Enter Google Chrome…

I’m now saying the same things about chrome that I once said about firefox. I don’t think I’ll ever switch back full time, only to use those sites which chrome has trouble with while the development continues. I’ve managed to get chrome configured nicely with the –enable-plugins hack and a link to the /opt/google/chrome/plugins/ folder for libflashplayer.so so I’m happy, I have flash, a browser that starts in less than a second, and handles plugin and page crashes independent of the browser, better memory management and general slicker experience, with the tabs right across the top of the screen my browsing experience is delightful.

Google chrome is my new friend

There is no end to the praise that I’ll bestow on chrome now, I just hope that in 5 years time it’s still the same quality, or whether there’ll be yet another new kid for me to switch to.

Thank you google for giving me a browser that works!

Unfortunately I’m unable to comment directly on Andrew Cowie’s post. But it’s nice to see the railway station from my home town. The station shown was designed by John Dobson (a famous northern architect) and constructed by Robert Stephenson (that’s the bloke who invented the train).

Now for all this set of tracks may look overly complex it actually isn’t, the reason it hits such a weirdly dense set of tracks at the station is quite simple, there are two railway bridges going south, originally only one, these bridges were pretty much the only way to connect the north and south for a long time (well until IKB got his act together and finished the great western). From Newcastle the railways would carry coal from Spital Tongues and the Rising Sun coal mines, and from further north in places such as Ellington, to the south of England.

Essentially Newcastle central station became a major crossing point between the north and south. You can see that on the left of the picture Andrew posted there are 4 sets of tracks which don’t even stop at the station. I’ve heard that some trains did stop, on the bridge that they are visible on, toward the back of the station. From there a crane would load up the trains with goods, including coal. When it was built it was one of the most heavily used stations in Britain, and incredibly important to the industrial revolution. These tracks have now been replaced with another platform and it doesn’t quite look the same anymore;

Newcastle central station, C.1990s

Obviously this happened as a result of the closing of both the Spital Tongues mine and the Rising Sun which is now a nature reserve and country park. Now if you go down to the Rising Sun, you can see the original train tracks (there are earlier tracks of course, but these were the first to run locomotives) from the first test railways and you can walk down Middle Engine Lane where the Rocket was tested at 30mph! All just a little bit of awesome in my backyard…

The Rocket, the first one made, with a hack to allow the piston to move from the original 45 degree position.

Yes, I am a bit of a geek about this stuff… Point me at the Clifton Suspension bridge and I’ll probably sing a song from the animation “The Great IKB”

But when it makes my computer grind to a halt and the hard disk go nuts in a way only recoverable by powering it off. It really messes up my day.

The latest ubuntu firefox release makes this web browser completely unusable, breaking after about 30 mins of continuous use. Mostly on facebook, is this the fsync bug? Strangley though it doesn’t crash X anymore… This is worse, I don’t just need to restart X, the whole computer needs rebooting.

CANONICAL PLEASE PUSH 3.5 TO REPLACE 3.0 ASAP!

What I do care about is when it takes X.org with it… Which it has done twice today, and killed my work both times. Firefox is fine, recovers no problem, but gedit or anything else I have open?

This bug is probably fixed in firefox 3.5 but ubuntu are holding back the 3.5 release for some reason and for now I’m stuck with 3.0. I think this bug is related to nvidia proprietary drivers, which doesn’t explain much, either way, firefox causes the crash, and we all know that firefox developers don’t really seem to care too much about Linux these days, so what’s the point in reporting a bug…

So instead of filing a bug report, which is probably a dupe of a dupe that no-one cares enough about to fix, I’d like to introduce international punch a firefox developer day.

If you have one near by, commence punching.

*This is joke btw, I don’t condone unnecessary violence against firefox developers*

Facebook became popular not because of the almost universal and explosive adoption but because it provides something that had been missing from communication on the internet for a long time. Most means of internet communication are centred around knowing people and having them in your MSN/Googletalk/Y!Messenger contacts or email address book, or whatever means of storing the people you know are. These are referred to as strong links, and strong links are good, because they allow for communication direct with those that matter to you most.

In a social perspective, these strong links can be identified mostly as close friends, family and work colleges. There are of course also weak links, these weak links are generally friends of friends, acquaintances, and professional contacts of various forms. The irony of this is that weak links are actually more important than strong links in many ways, social networking being a perfect by the numbers example of how, but we can also see town markets and church congregations as other ways that these weak links can become more powerful.

The importance of weak links is related to the value of strengthening the link, if you strengthen a strong link not much is achieved, a further solidification of the already existing relationship. Strengthening a weak link creates a new strong link, and therefore the value of this is immeasurably higher than a strengthening of a strong link.

At GCDS an example of google shooting themselves in the foot in this regard came up, although I didn’t have much time to explain my dislike for the feature I’ll cover it all here; Robert McQueen brought up that googletalk has a feature that will hide the contacts that you don’t speak to often, these people aren’t important and therefore shouldn’t be shown in the main UI, although you can jump through a hoop to find them if you need them. To me this is a fairly senseless feature as it takes away from the table the impulse action which can lead to the valuable result of strengthening a weak link.

What would be more interesting is if google had a sorting method based on your frequency of communication, but also promoted those weak links that may be relevant, relevancy could be based on the number of shared contacts, suggestions for new contacts could also be made; however, we’re now talking about social networking not just communication, instead of locking it down, expanding instant messaging to incorporate social networking features in the same way that the social networks are incorporating instant messaging features.

Google failing to do this already is unbelievable, Microsoft were talking about a 3 degrees style instant messager a long while back so the idea isn’t new. However developing the client in the completely opposite direction is a bizarre detour from the obvious.

How does this relate to search? and why on earth would I group the two of them together? In many ways search is broken as a concept, the most obvious problem with search, as I’ve heard brought up over the years is;

You need to know something about what you’re looking for to find it.

This doesn’t mean that all kinds of searching are bad, for instance if you do know enough about what you’re looking for, search is great. But in most cases a better solution is filtration, for instance filtering a list of files to produce a specific subset.

This all boils down to the one problem that computers have never really solved which is locating things, and making sure that you can find them again and again without ever really loosing track of them.

Solving this problem of locating things is a very difficult one, and is generally based on one of two methods, browsing or searching. These are polar opposites but are also very similar.

• Browse as neatly defined by googles define command is; feed as in a meadow or pasture; “the herd was grazing”. This implies a systematic method of acquiring an item
  with regard to the “locating things” problem, in essence, I look in one folder, it’s not there, up a level, next folder, it’s not there; ad nausium.
• Search again defined by google is; the activity of looking thoroughly in order to find something or someone. Sounds pretty similar to browsing right, but, in this case, the computer does the systematic locating of the thing, not us.

This isn’t the only solution, there’s also a slightly more powerful solution and that is to make sure that relationships between items are relevant, that strong and weak links describe and inform, and assist in discovery.

By solving the problem of “locating a thing” with a focus to the relationship between items of interest we’re actually offloading the task from our wrists in the case of browsing, and our memory in the case of searching, to our ancient inbuilt ability to forage for things.

A good example of where filtration and grouping assists in foraging rather than browsing is in the gnome-main-menu produced by Novell. Specifically in the control centre and application browser windows. These tiles have a nice large target size which is always a good start, but they’re also clearly grouped, and those groups are jumpable from the side, filtration is provided but as we’re not starting from a blank canvas we don’t necessarily need to know exactly what it is we’re looking for. This probably the earliest example of utilising the skill of foraging over systematic approaches like simple search and browsing.

In this instance foraging can be defined as; Locating an item of interest by following paths of highest probability utilising experience and understanding to locate the item.

This is a fundamentally different way of addressing the problem. Happily this is the direction that GNOME-Zeitgeist and Tracker VStore are headed in, using strongly described content in a space which allows us to use a probabilistic reasoning to locate items.

With foraging, again we’re exploiting the strength of weak links, allowing us to follow interesting paths to arrive at our target, or targets and possibly find new interesting things along the way.

For more information please read;

• Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks
• Wikipedia on information foraging
• Interaction Design on information foraging theory