ikolar.tumblr.com

Why the Ubuntu release cycle is so utterly and completely broken

Fans of the acclaimed TV series 24 will surely see the point of this youtube sketch:

In it, President Obama calmly tells Kiefer that “no, he isn’t Jack Baur, he’s an actor named Kiefer Sutherland and he’s probably drinking again.” Also, he adds, “I think you’ve done way to many episodes of that show and you need to .. ahm .. STOP”.

The pun alludes to the super-crazy-impossible gigs Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland) pulls in the later seasons of 24, reflecting on his, the writers and the producers tiredness with having to produce 24 episodes of the show, year after year.

Ubuntu kinda is like that:

• they release a version every 6 monts
• will all the planing, bugfixing and testings, that gives them about 3 months of development time per version
• and next to zero time for maintaining older versions, even LTS (long term support) releases
• effectively turning anything that’s more than 6 months old into ABANDONWARE

Now sure, you can upgrade your system every 6 monts (and I mean dist-upgrade, not regular upgrade), but that’s impractical in SO SO SO SO many cases. End users may be willing to do it, but for organizations and companies, it’s a chore.

So, what happens if you don’t upgrade:

root@lab131:~/x264# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS
Release:        10.04
Codename:       lucid

Here, I’m running the most recent LTS version of Ubuntu, 10.04 Ludid Lynx from April of last year. That’s more recent than Microsoft’s current offering, Windows 7.

And on it, I want to compile ffmpeg with x264 support, because my distro ships outdated libraries. But:

root@lab131:~/x264# make

Found yasm 0.8.0.2194
Minimum version is yasm-1.0.0

Neprespanost

Predprejsnji teden sem eno noc malo potegnil in sel spat sele naslednje ‘jutro’ opoldne. Zbujenje je tako padlo sele na 9 uro zvecer, pa se kako uro smo dremuckali ‘for good measure’. Potem sem se spravil delat. Ponoci nisem bil kaj prida zaspan, zato sem mirno zdrzal do naslednjega jutra. Potem ne vec toliko, ker telo pac ne mores v dveh noceh prepricati v premik interne budilke za pol dne. No ampak smo vztrajali. Polnoc je minila, skratka dobrih 24 ur brez spanca. Ob 3h sem se spokal v pipo, kjer naj bi meli zadnji poletni hackdej. Jutranje ure miru mi dovolijo koncentacijo in vecjo produktivnost.

Hekdej je sel solidno, bi pa lahko (beri: moral) vec stvari dokoncati. Zatem sem ostal se malo v pipi, bil je ze pozen vecer. Vsi so odsli (hint hint), jaz se vztrajam. Skoraj smo ze pri 48 urah brez spanca, sans 3 minute z zaprtimi ocmi na klopci.

Spomin je deloval ok, tako pomnenje kot priklic, isto analiticne misli. Ampak cuti so pa ze zaceli delati svoje. Vsake toliko se mi je zascetilo pred ocmi, ali pa sem mel tisti cuden obcutek, ko se ti zdi, da vidis odblisk svetlobe na vseh prasnih delcih v zraku. Se huje je bilo s sluhom. V glavi se mi je zacel igrati - loopati komad Shadow on the Sun (Audioslave). Dan prej sem ga mel na youtubu. Slisal sem ga cesto in moral sem preveriti, ali mi ga mar mobilec ne spila. Ni ga, kako bi tudi ga, ce pa ga sploh nimam gor. Ok. Halucinacije - stvari, ki jih ni, a te glava preprica, da so. To je zadnji znak, da telo rabi spanca.

Prav zanimivo je, kaj vse se rola po glavi methheadom po 5 dneh zadevanja.

The user experience of Ubuntu Unity is pathetic

I sincerely hope that the offering in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty is just a demo and that the good stuff is to automagically arrive with next week’s set of updates. Why, you ask?

The bar on the left, whatever it is called, is completely useless:

• 9 times out of 10, I’ll trigger it by mistake, by wanting to click something else on the left part of the screen. Chrome’s back button, the close window icon, the ubuntu icon, etc. all come to mind;
• There is no easy way to add your own launchers (shortcuts) onto that bar. Left, right or middle clicking on it does absolutely nothing, neither does dragging the launchers from the alt-f2 (run command) dialog, the desktop or anywhere. There are some hack recipes on the net by copying launchers to a hidden directory .local/<somewhere> but that’s about as counter-intuitive as it gets;
• You can’t move it. There is no reason for this other than their perceived self-flattery in the ability to make the right decision for the user.

The apple-style menus at the top of the screen are annoying (if not irritating).

• I liked having menus on top of the app, which is really convenient for small apps where you don’t want to do mouse acrobatics just do perform some basic actions
• Try it with gimp (multi-window app) and you will see exactly what I mean.
• The menu is displayed only if you focus it with the mouse or if you press the ALT button. Otherwise, the window title is displayed there. The transition is not smooth or anything and the flickering it produces annoys me quite a bit.
  
  

The program switcher (alt-tab) does not show window titles anymore. This is really annoying if you have multiple browser windows :).

The desktop notification system (top right tray) is all but useless now.

• it’s reserved for official ubuntu apps with official ubuntu icons (shaded gray). I’ll probably never say this again but here I DO hope that Apple files a suit because they blatantly copied their design.
• Notifications from apps like pidgin or xhat appear only in the left-hand menu, and only for about 1 second. You will start missing messages from your friends. Under the old system, xchat or pidgin would have it’s own icon in the top right tray, a highly visible space, and it would blink until you have it some attention. Why oh why did you take that away from us?
• If you close pidgin or xchat (= minimise them to the tray, they still run), there is no way to reopen them. They aren’t in the top or left bar, and they aren’t in the alt-tab list. You have to kill them and run them again. I can’t even fathom how this got though usability testing. Actually, it probably didn’t, but Ubuntu didn’t care and release it anyway.

The launcher is on the same level that windows XP provided to us back in 2001 with the Start-Run (WIN-R) command.

• There are two ways to access it, but they give different GUIs: alt-f2 and double-tapping the windows key;
• Running something like gnome-terminal or jockey-gtk requires you to fill in the full name of the program. Tab completion doesn’t complete the name of the program, but instead just browses the suggested icons.
• There is no support for friendly names of programs (like “Text editor” or “Terminal”), which is something that we’ve been used to from GNOME for many many years now. Try explaining to a newbie user how to run a terminal or text-editor.
• I can’t, for the life of me, find the settings panel. Does it even exist?
• If you make a typo (say “gnome-terminEl” or “gnome-te”), that goes on the list forever and adds to the confusion.
• It even captures the ALT-TAB keystrokes, and mouse clicks outside of its window. WHAT THE F*** GUYS?
• In short, please bring back the old GNOME menu - user know it, like it, and miss it. The 5-10 icons the left bar features are useless.

I won’t even go into the trouble of using an alternate music player, video player or email client, or the fact that I needed a bit of hacking to get wireless to work (b43) with 11.04 while it worked out-of-the-box with 10.10.

In short, Unity is extremely limiting, has a horrible user experience and is, at best, a half-finished product. Why would that matter? Well, Ubuntu is the most popular distro at the moment and a lot of people have started associating the name “Linux” with them. And what do they do with their newly-found success? They try to make a rip-off of Apple’s MaxOS X. Sorry guys, had I wanted a mac, I would have went out and bought one. This is Linux, an OS based on the ideas of choice, freedom and technical excellence. Please stop messing with that.

I will make a effort to use it for a couple of months, in (dire) hope that the updates fix some of the issues. Everyone deserves a second chance, I guess.

Azerbadžanci vejo za Slovence

Oz. njihova oglaševalska agencija ve za nas. Zdaj, je znano, da nimam najbolj pozitivnega mnenja o tej industriji, ampak ja, znajo presenetiti s kreativnostjo in morda še trudom ^^.

Grooveshark player uporabljam že par mesecev, pa sem videl le malo oglasov za slovenssko tržišče, a tale je kul:

On topic, na pravem mestu iin dejansko dobro preveden, ne tako kot oni bedni oglasi za mobilne klube. Ok, je narejen v flashu, se pravi, so rabili le zamenjati par tekstov in se jezik sam osveži, a vseeno, našli so nekoga, ki zna slovensko (in hrvaško in srbsko in estonsko, in tako dalje) in zadevo naredili. In to tudi nekaj šteje.

Mogoče bom za dva dni izklopil adblock zdaj ^^.

Demonstracije o malem delu in zakaj so kul

Ideja Zakona o malem delu je dobra. Omejiti je treba študentsko delo, ker to prinaša korist delodajalcem in študentskim servisom, ne pa študentom. Študenti ostanemo brez delovne in pokojninske dobe, narud, nočnih ur, porodniške, odpovednih razlogov in rokov - vse to bi delodajalci redno zaposlenemu morali plačati. Zato je logično, zakaj so prvi dvoje tud organizirali protest, študentje in dijaki pa so jim verjeli.

Dobro je tudi, da se narod navadi protestirati. Stopiti pred parlament in pokazati voljo, tudi razbiti kaj če je treba. To je narodova pravica.

Folk, ki zdaj komentira, kako to ni bilo prav, naj bo tiho, in naslednjič pride na lice mesta, s svojimi transparenti, in mirno izrazi svojo voljo.

Compiling codelain.com GHost++ on a stable but old Debian Lenny

A friend of mine hosts 6v6 DotA on US battle.net realms, but his server went down recently. I wanted to help out, so I asked another friend (an admin) for shell access on a US-based virtual hosts. I got it, ssh-d in and tried to compile ghost++ there. Turns out I couldn’t cause:

1. the stable debian lenny there sports c++ libraries v1.34, while the current ghost needs at least 1.39
2. i didn’t have root

So what I had to do is install the libraries locally (into $HOME/usr) and convince ghost’s build process to use them. The solution is bellow and while it wont work out of the box for anybody, it’s principles might help you out. I plan on making .deb / .yum / .tar.gz binaries for ghost in the future, but we’re not there yet.

You will need:

• a copy of the ghostplusplus code. Go to code.google.com and check it out using svn.
• my userapt.sh script to hand-install *most* dependencies into $HOME/usr . It emulates apt-get for the non-root user.

Note that a proper way of doing this would be using chroot and cross-platform compiling, but that’s too much work for now.