Use Tables!

(posting to planet in the hopes that some kind soul has a clue what’s going on)

So most eyes these days seem to be firmly focused on that other operating system release, but I want to talk about Gutsy for a bit. A few nights ago I updated my machine to it, and there are quite a few new problems, and also quite a few old ones that are still not fixed.

Update 2007-10-31: Most of the below is now fixed. For explanations, see the comments at the bottom of this post.

• [FIXED] Somehow whenever I boot, my system believes it’s necessary to make my harddisk churn continuously. It didn’t use to do this on Feisty, I have a gig of RAM on this machine and am only running a webbrowser and Gnome Terminal, so I doubt my ‘extreme use’ is the cause of it all. System Monitor manages to tell me that udevd is eating CPU, at least (I can’t figure out how to monitor harddisk activity). “man udevd” seems to be telling me “it could be anything telling me what to do, I’m just a humble event daemon”. So no clue where that’s coming from.
• [FIXED] I can’t mount my other partitions anymore. Windows has no trouble finding them though, and Feisty had always been fine with them. The three partitions in question are formatted using NTFS (1) and FAT32 (2). Running “sudo mount /winC” manually gets me:
  
fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy
FUSE mount point creation failed
Unmounting /dev/sda1 ()
• [FIXED] Somehow I now have a huuuge submenu “Other” in my Applications menu, containing things varying from “Browser Identification” to “Zeroconf Service Detection” to “Fonts” (twice) to “AdBlocK Filters” (To my knowledge, I’ve never installed this) to “Joystick” (I don’t have a joystick). This didn’t use to be there on Feisty, either. It doesn’t seem to serve any purpose whatsoever. Why did it pop up?
• [PROBABLY FIXED] It seems to believe that, if there is still a cd(-rom) left in the drive, using the Eject button on my cd/dvd-rom drive really means I want it to show me how fast it can open and close the drive in succession. I’ve almost lost a cd like this, and have no clue where to look for info on why it behaves like this. It shouldn’t have any reason to keep the disk in there - it’s not writable, so there are no writes left so unmounting should be quick and painless (and even if it weren’t, it should keep the drive shut tight, instead of being all weird about it).
• [POSSIBLY FIXED] GRUB sucks, or Ubuntu’s use of it sucks. Whenever I update this machine, it adds two boot entries for the new kernel (one is ‘normal’, one is “Recovery Mode”). It doesn’t remove old entries. If I remove entries manually, they reappear the next time the kernel is updated. I have edited menu.lst to boot my windows install by default. Whenever these two entries get added, the default boot index is off-by-two, causing it to start memtest86 if I’m not at the machine to correct it. Why is it smart enough to remember the value I set it to, but not smart enough to update it when it changes the list?
• This machine is slightly over two years old. Ubuntu is still not able to shut it down correctly - I always have to press and hold the power button for five seconds after I hear the harddrive shut off (without Ubuntu telling me “you can now turn your machine off” - it seems to think this will happen automagically). Back when I just got this machine, I installed debian stable on it (I believe that was Sarge, back then, but I’m not sure). It never had a problem with this (nor does Windows). So clearly it’s not just that it’s not possible, but that Ubuntu somehow isn’t using the right version/type of acpi or whatever. This machine has an ASUS P5AD2-E motherboard, if that is any help.

All in all this means I really don’t want to use Ubuntu anymore, as it’s downright painful to get anything done (without access to my windows partitions, most of my documents, patches, photos and other personal things are out of reach, and with my computer busy with some invisible SomeThing, getting other work done becomes painfully slow, too). Solutions appreciated.

I would be most interested in any (semi-)official documentation on this particular icon overlay, and when it is used by Mac OS X. I was unable to unearth anything - possibly because I don’t know what to look for.

I’m not sure who made this joke up, but it’s not funny. I already blew at least one of the courses I had the first part of this semester (because thanks to United Airlines I missed the exam), and now the schedulers have been conspiring to make me fail more of them this part of the semester. Oh, and I don’t know if this is just me, but there’s this day called “Friday”, which you can actually USE if you’re having trouble scheduling…

So I’m home a day late because United Airlines delayed my UA934 flight from LAX to LHR by 20 hours. So instead of leaving at 17.02 PDT on saturday, I left at 13.00 PDT on sunday. I was supposed to leave at noon, but the plane was delayed a bit longer that day. So United gave me vouchers for a hotel, transportation to and from the hotel, and dinner/breakfast vouchers. Because of the 1 hour delay I missed my scheduled flight (8.25 GMT+1) at LHR to AMS (though just barely) and had to get the next one (10.40 GMT+1).

As far as backlog is concerned: I realize this probably doesn’t measure up to what other people get, and that part of the messages are there due to the fact that I did actually use email while away, but here’s some frightening statistics on what Thunderbird reported when I turned on my home desktop computer today. (Thunderbird is my email program of choice. I use it to get copies of everything that hits my 2 gmail accounts and an old account at my parents’ ISP. While on the move, I use my laptop and gmail’s web access to stay on top of things)

Unread Mail: 297

Unread Blogposts: 88 (some duplication here, but not too much)

Unread Newsgroup posts: 347

I’ve kept on top of Facebook myself while away, and somewhat the same for bugmail, so that’s a large number of those emails gone out the window - still a lot of newsgroup posts though.

What scares me most is that I’m planning to leave for 6 or 7 weeks this summer - without email/internet access. So multiply the above by that… and you get an idea of what I’m worried about

I’ll write a more coherent post about my stay in the US and the CSUN conference later. Right now it’s time for sleep - I’ve been up for 24 hours by now.

Because bulleted lists rock:

• The Hilton is not for me. I’m struggling with the luxury nature of most things. For instance, this morning I wanted to have breakfast. Which of the four eating places inside the hotel should I use? Breakfast is not included in the night’s stay, so how does paying for that work? Is it a buffet or do I just get stuff from the waiters? It’s all solvable, and fortunately everyone there is paid to help even though I’m ignorant, but it’s annoying at times.
• “Public transport” is not part of the standard Southern California vocabulary. Getting around without a car and without spending a ridiculous amount of money on cabs is hard.
• “How are you, sir?” is the standard substitute for “How may I help you?”. This is confusing.
• Obesity is a real problem. After having breakfast, the ‘why’ for that is readily apparent as the continental breakfast I took was considered “a base” by the waiter, who told me at least 2 or 3 times I could get more stuff if I wanted to. I did not finish this “base” alone, though that admittedly might have something to do with my jet-lagginess and generally confused stomach.
• Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands should start being real Chinese restaurants, instead of serving all this stuff we call “Chinese” which is actually Indonesian/Malay (Babi Pangang, Nasi Goreng, Bami, etc.)
• Some stereotypes are not stereotypes, they’re simply true.

That will do for now. I’m off to see the Queen Mary.

One more thing - it amazes me, as it has for some time now, that as one travels to different places across the globe, every place has its own “colour scheme”. The easiest examples close to my home are the fact that brick houses make up most of the (nothern/middle) Netherlands, and once you cross the border to Belgium and France, the omnipresent red brickwork is replaced with grey/white plasterwork, the colours and fonts used on roadsigns change, the wildlife/trees are different… For some reason this and the different plants/nature/cars around mean the atmosphere changes. Perhaps this is what other people think “feeling on holiday” is all about, I’m not sure. I just find myself thinking, at times “gosh, this place is ugly” and then remembering I should really be thinking “gosh, this place is different“.

For those who didn’t know, I picked up a brand new shiny black Apple Macbook last thursday. I bought a black one because it meant I could get it three weeks earlier (that is, I would have had to wait 3 weeks to get a white one for an actually lower price). (more…)

Using the mildly interesting Google Webmaster tools, I was astonished at some of the search queries that land people on this site:

• ie7 “new tab” greyed out
• find out who blocked “you msn”
• onkp

These are supposedly first page hits (ie, my site ranks in the top 10 for those queries), as opposed to relevant things like “chatzilla” which apparently gets me roughly the 43rd position. Right…

Well, it was bound to happen sometime. I just removed 256 spam comments. I hadn’t cleaned up for 4 days. Which is not too strange considering I don’t have internet at home, but still. I need a good way to shield this blog from spam, apparently. Suggestions are welcome.

In other news, I moved succesfully. I have tv by now, but still no internet or landline phone at my new home. Which is a shame, but oh well. Otherwise I like my new place. I have a couch now! If you’re in the area (Amsterdam) and want to drop by, let me know.

In other social news, I turned 19 a little less than an hour ago. I’m not sure what there is to be excited about, but the rest of the world seems to disagree. So be it.

Public discussion about some issues is here. I filed that bug over a month ago. Nothing is happening. I am, needless to say, annoyed, because:

• There is still no consistent policy about how to review extensions. If there is one, undocumented, saying that you just need to check the little boxes on the reviewer page if the browser works, and the extension seems to work, and you can uninstall it and everything, then that’s not enough. By far.
• There is no policy on how to review comments, and way too many comments, imho, get pruned because they are critical of the extensions. There are very few extensions that have a rating below 3 stars, mostly because of this.
• There are not enough reviewers, and it’s not publically known that anyone can apply, it seems.
• On the other hand, I suspect several of the people who applied of late are applying just to approve their own extensions. There is no safeguard against that currently. The background required is also not sufficient in my eyes. Right now just about anyone can apply, and that’s wrong. We shouldn’t restrict it to just extension devs either, but these people should have a clue…

Bleh. I don’t have the solutions, I’m just annoyed right now.

Yup, I’m officially healthy again. No school yet though, except for my honours course in the evening.

So now I just downloaded IE 7. I kind of like it, I kind of don’t. Here’s what I don’t like so far:

• It still requires a reboot of my machine to install (and probably the same to uninstall). I know, OS integration and all… it still sucks!
• It looks awful, in my opinion, on the Windows classic theme in WinXP. Especially the new tab… thing, which is just a dark grey, well, blob, kind of thing, without any clear function. Unfocused tabs are the same kind of dark grey.
• It thinks about:blank should never end up in the back/forward history.
• I can’t set my homepage to a URL from the clearly visible UI (ie, there’s probably an option in the Options dialog, but the homepage UI only cares about the current tab).
• Not having the menu bar there unless I press the Alt key is inaccessible. It also leads to page shifts when I do want to use it, so that’s kind of annoying. The only way to make it always appear, as far as I’ve been able to figure out, is to right-click the toolbar on the tab bar (not anywhere else, as you’ll get no context menu or the window bar’s context menu) and select ‘Classic menu’. This is not really discoverable either, and I’m wondering how I’d get there without a mouse. Lastly, the menubar is positioned oddly, snuggled in between the url bar and the tabs and other useful buttons.
• The import feature failed to detect my Opera, Firefox, Flock and Seamonkey installs. I’m struggling to understand what else it would want to try to find to import bookmarks, cookies or feeds from (though I suppose for feeds there’d be certain feedreader stuff).
• I said ‘failed to detect’, what I mean is, the option to import from an application is greyed out, which I take to mean (without further indications) that it didn’t find anything I could import from.
• The favourites organizer thing in the menus is fugly. The buttons are badly anti-aliased, for some odd reason because ClearType is now enabled by default, just for IE. The favourites organizer popup in the toolbar closes whenever I delete something, making it hard to remove multiple things. I can’t select multiple items in it, and I can’t delete folders without using the slapped-on-very-long file context menu (why the hell is that there - I don’t want to virusscan my bookmarks, do I?).
• There are no addons for blogging, del.icio.us, Technorati, anything remotely ‘interesting’ from a web perspective. What I did find were various download managers (why do people need those, incidentally?), and an 89-dollar “HTML and Header inspection application”. I’m already missing my Launchy menu, my webdeveloper toolbar (editing the CSS and seeing the results live - Microsoft, catch up here please!), ChatZilla (of course), BBCode formatting, and being able to write my own stuff for it. (I probably could write my own stuff, but it’d be run natively/compiled, which means mistakes you make can easily lead to crashes (such as with the 89-dollar app, according to the reviews)).
• Half the app is in Dutch (my Windows XP, and accordingly IE 6, is in Dutch), half in English (there was no language-specific IE 7 beta download, as far as I’ve been able to find).
• They stashed the Go menu in the View menu (which is large already, and that with 6 submenus too…)
• Unlocking the toolbars doesn’t allow me to move items (at least, I can’t figure out how to do so). By default, my tab bar has a >> sign at the right, under which are the Help and Windows Messenger buttons. I can’t remove these buttons, as far as I can tell, nor can I make them appear on the toolbar normally. OK, it turns out I can make them appear after I right-click the toolbar and uncheck the ‘Lock position’ item. On that context menu, there’s also a Customize… option which allows me to remove them. However, the back/forward/urlbar/refresh/searchbar toolbar thing doesn’t have a context menu (it has the window bar menu, so I can close the application from there…). I’m still puzzled about what ‘Lock toolbars’ does in this case. I can’t move the toolbars above or below the menu bar, from what I can tell, nor can I have a toolbar on the same bar as the menu bar.
• It doesn’t ship Google Search by default (huh?).
• Where is my bookmarks toolbar?

I’m done for now. What I did like was the feedreader. Firefox/Mozilla/SeaMonkey really really really needs something like that. All the Opera and IE people are going to be laughing their butts off every time we open a feed and get a nice display saying that this XML document doesn’t appear to have style information associated with it… We also can’t make live bookmarks from rss urls. Why is that? Firefox won’t even recognize the feed: urls this blogging software comes up with!