Use Tables!

While I was in Brussels for the European Meeting of Taizé, I was co-responsible for the rubbish collection during meals (with 25,000 people eating in big exposition halls, you need people to take care of the trash they create, obviously).

We would separate bottles from all other rubbish, so we could recycle the empty bottles separately. So, we needed some way to label rubbish containers which were for bottles, and containers which were for other rubbish. While worrying about this, I was told that the company providing the containers had already “taken care” of labelling the containers so that some would be used for bottles and some for other rubbish. Curious as to what they had done, I went to look.

Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures, but basically what they had done was taking 2 A4 papers for each container, printed “PET” on them as big as possible, and stuck them on either side of the container with one piece of doublesided tape.

There are several things wrong with this. First, and most importantly, the target audience (young people from all over Europe and in some cases the rest of the world) will largely have no idea what “PET” even means. In fact, I would guess that some part of the people reading this blog don’t. In the Netherlands and Belgium, it is a fairly common abbreviation used to indicate plastic (even if it’s not strictly speaking PET). 9,000 of the 25,000 people were Polish young people. Some of them don’t speak English very well. Even those who did would most likely have been baffled by the signs.

The other mistakes are smaller: the papers had been attached in such a way that some would be upside down on the other side if the container was opened, and in other cases they were only attached on one side, meaning people approaching from the other would have no idea they couldn’t put their rubbish there.

Finally, using one bit of double-sided tape to attach a bit of A4 paper when there are 25,000 young people coming is naive at best. The papers that we did not take off the containers ourselves had, by the end of the meeting, been taken by the young people, or fallen off.

Instead, our team improvised a different solution. We stuck signs with a big image of a bottle, and the phrase “Bottles only” in several languages on the containers, using large quantities of duct tape. We taped shut the bigger openings of the containers which had two, so only the small opening remained, through which people would have more trouble putting their normal rubbish. And finally, we taped actual empty bottles to the top and sides of the containers.

I guess the lesson I learned from all this is that it is surprisingly easy to make stupid mistakes when you don’t realize who will be using your “product”. For the Belgian rubbish collection company, “PET” was probably clear enough in the case of big expositions with reasonably well-educated Belgian people manning stands from where the rubbish would come… For large crowds of young people from diverse backgrounds, clearly it was not.

Update: Patricia Clausnitzer translated this article to Belorussian.

Dear Lazyweb,

For Chrome List, every now and again people report issues they are having on its Google Code website, using the “Issues List”. This is very useful, and I would like this to continue. However, for some reason, I don’t get email for these issues that people report. I need to manually check every now and then, then star new issues so I get email for them.

Can I change this? I’ve googled around, I’ve gone through all the options in “Administer” three times, but I can’t find it. I would really like to have those emails, though, because right now sometimes I don’t check that list for a few days/weeks/months, and people’s problems don’t get solved…

Thanks!

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to your Facebook inbox page, pick a random message, and start typing a reply
2. Halfway through, realize you want to read a different message before finishing this one.
3. ‘Accidentally’ left-click instead of middle-click the link at the top for the inbox.
4. Hit escape to stop the load so as to be able to still have the text you type

Expected result:

Stop loading the inbox page, get to keep your written stuff

Actual result:

This is JavaScript executing. There’s no stopping it from throwing away your text anymore by returning to the inbox – and what’s worse, the back/forward history is so confused by what’s going on (as you hit escape) that it won’t be able to take you back to the reply page and restore your message to the textbox (as back/forward generally does in Firefox). Congrats, you just lost N minutes worth of typing, and who knows what kind of brilliant ideas!

Question to the Lazyweb: whose fault is this? Can it be fixed? How? (Yes, I’d prefer to just use email all the time, too, but unfortunately that’s not always an option, and I’m sure there are webmail implementations which have similar problems, especially once you turn off automatic draft saving)

(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…