Fitting the battle of life

Well, it’s that time in Ubuntu’s 6-month release cycle that I update my old laptop to the latest beta release, and that now is Jaunty – Ubuntu 9.04.

Everything that worked fine under Hardy (8.10) still works fine – indeed, I feel it’s all a bit speedier. The only bootchart I’ve generated so far gives a boot time of just over a minute, but I think that’s partly because it was trying to run a disk check as well. Resuming from hibernate, however, is lightning quick (although the first time it decided to fail to resume and booted normally, which wasn’t much of an issue as I had no work open).

The only problem I’ve had, which I would assume is because I’ve done a fresh install rather than an upgrade, is the performance of my Dell 720 Printer, which used to work flawlessly using Lexmark drivers originally intended for Red Hat. Now, however, following the same instructions I have before, there seems to be a problem, and by seems to be, I mean there is: I can’t print.

I know this is something to do with CUPS, but I have little time spare to look into it in much detail. My first final-year exam is later this month, and the last one almost a month later. It’s mostly annoying because there’s no support for the same printer on a Mac, which is my other laptop at the moment. Oh well – it might act as incentive for me to actually go to the library.

Well, I asked a flatmate if I could listen to some of his music earlier, and he said ‘Sure, it should be on the network through iTunes.’

I fired up Rhythmbox and, sure enough, there his name was, under ‘Shared’. I clicked on it, expecting it to show me his music and allow easy navigation to The Feeling. But oh now, it stayed stuck on ‘Retrieving music’ in the status bar.

Of course, I checked to see if it would work the other way. I quickly turned on my own sharing, and it popped up in his copy of iTunes, streaming flawlessly. (We then had ‘a good laugh’ at some of the music in my ten-gig collection, but that’s a story I’d rather not share.) So Rhythmbox -> iTunes works, but iTunes -> Rhythmbox doesn’t.

Apparently this is due to some way in which DAAP, the Apple-owned protocol that enables ‘easy’ sharing of music across a local network, changed in iTunes 7 (after working fine before that). The implementation in Rhythmbox (and other open-source, non-Apple apps) doesn’t work as a client (i.e. receiving music across a network), which is annoying.

A silly little proprietary protocol from Apple, trying to lock people into using its products. Apple basically wants me to switch to iTunes to hear music from the room across the hallway, when I run Ubuntu Linux and have no intention of going back to Windows (or onto a Mac). The simple thing to do would be to use an open protocol, so anyone could implement it perfectly. Then we’d see a real market in software, competing properly on features and aesthetics. Is it that Apple are afraid that, given half the chance, people would switch from iTunes to something else? They can’t be that unconfident in their own product, can they…?

This is a bit late, and I apologise. I apologise also for the lack of photos – there’s a very good reason I forgot to take more, and it’s to do with the beer, and all the kind kind folks (Daviey, Popey, Kirrus and a couple of others) who bought me beer. In addition to the few I got myself.

(There is one photograph that has been censored and is not available to view. The person responsible knows who he is!)

Anyway – the night was great, the people friendly and the cake delicious. Now, if only I could remember more of what happened, that would be awesome! It’s a shame Popey and Daviey were not in a, er, able state to record any interviews for the podcast, but I’m sure it’s probably best they didn’t. The Canonical peeps were all really good fun to chat to, and the rest of the community I met (including Wubi guy, who has made it a lot easier for Windows-types to try Ubuntu out), were all fantastic.

Bring on Intrepid Ibex and more Belgian beers!

Or, how I learned that the newest isn’t always the best.

Firefox got an upgrade last night, to beta 5 (the final beta before release later this month) – and my two favourite extensions – in fact, the only two I ever really use – are incompatible. Yes, AdBlock and Twitterfox are no longer my friends. This is bad for a few reasons:

• ads are evil, obtrusive and just plain annoying
• the web looks so nice without them (oh, I remember the singing ads on facebook…)
• I am getting addicted to twitter.

I look forward to seeing these fixed sharpish!

Would have been better two release ago, and it would have been facebook and f-spot in feisty for alliterative goodness, but oh well.

The previous facebook plugin for f-spot (0.95) was pretty broken, and the online facebook uploader won’t work with Firefox 3 at the moment, which sucks a little because photos is an application I use quite a lot – I’m now up to 35 albums, many of which have the full 60 photos in them.

So imagine my delight when I realise there’s a new version of the plugin available (0.96) which does indeed work. I had a few glitches getting the log-in working, but once it did I was able to export photos to facebook without a hitch. The plugin allows you to create a new album or add photos to an existing album, add captions, and right-clicking brings up a ‘Who’s in this photo?’ dialogue, although that’s quite buggy (and by quite buggy, I mean, I won’t be using it because the dialogue doesn’t seem to work at all, and doesn’t come off the screen until you close f-spot).

Uploaded photos require your approval when you open the album online, but this is standard facebook behaviour.

I saw a friend exporting photos to an album from iPhoto (is it called that?) on his Mac last summer, so we’re a little behind with a fully functioning version, but at least it now works for me.

[On a side note, f-spot very rarely exits gracefully on my system, always requiring a force quit. Anyone else have this problem?]

You know, I’ve had enough of Ubuntu. I realised today that I feel guilty.

Even as a student, I’m expected to get things on cheap. Sainsburys basics food, cheap pints at the Union, that kind of thing. But the thing is, however cheap we students get, we never sink so low as to take something for free. It’s an unwritten rule: if it’s free, it’s wrong. You’re probably stealing. And stealing’s a Bad Thing, trademark.  (To say nothing of the patent issue…)

Ubuntu may looks shiny and be fully functional. But a Jaguar is shiny and fully functional as well. Don’t see me just taking one of those without paying for it, do you?

No, Ubuntu is making me feel guilty. I want cheap computing, not stolen computing. Today I am going to back up all my documents (taking care to re-save all my odt files back into doc format), find my old XP install disk, and blast Ubuntu off my computer. Mark today in your diaries: it’s when I start going clean.

jerichokb, 1/4/08

…that if you hover your mouse over an audio file in nautlius, it starts playing the file for as long as your mouse is over it.

[Couldn't capture the mouse as well, for some reason - but just try it yourself]

Pure genius for previewing music files, pure genius. Maybe I should have asked myself why that speech bubble appears a long time ago, but hey, you learn something every day.

Update: This seems to be an option in Nautilus’ preferences, under the ‘Preview’ tab. Mine was already set to ‘Local files only’, but since some people don’t seem to have it working, you may need to turn it on. I guess you’d also need the right codecs, of course.

The trouble with Monopoly. (Warning: rant follows.)

Yes, the board game. I bought it at the weekend for our flat, and there’s only been one night since that we’ve not played at least one game. We really do enjoy it; it’s a great game that relies on cunning negotiations and all that, even if a little luck is necessary to start with.

Anyway, I’ve realised I just don’t like it. Not as a game, oh no, I still enjoy it. It’s the concept that we should be finding market domination fun that’s slightly worrying. (It was at this point I found myself worrying that I might actually be Marxist-influenced, but more on that later.) Why must we teach children (aged 8+, according to the box) that you can be a ruthless capitalist and have a great fun time with the whole family? Well, you can’t. I don’t know about your childhood but mine was fraught with arguments at my grandparents’ house, where Monopoly was eventually effectively banned. It’s not good.

You’ll never find a game of Monopoly that’s going to end while everyone’s happy; they always end in an absolute Monopoly (unless you play a timed game, in which case well, you’re a loser anyway) for one player. Mergers are not permitted, I learned in the rules. (I read rulebooks. So what?) Co-operation can only be employed in order to eliminate another player – trading between two parties to keep a third party from gaining possession of a property, for instance, that would help him.

Then again, Monopoly wouldn’t be fun if you just perpetually circled the board, paying no rent because everyone’s nice and doesn’t charge.  And yet, there exists now an entire culture based around things being free. This blog is free, for instance. I neither pay wordpress.com for hosting it nor charge you for the the (dubious) privilege of reading it. Ditto facebook, google, and myriad other web services.

And then there’s Linux. Some people charge for it – Red Hat the first example to spring to mind – and other’s don’t, charging instead for premium support. But there’s still lots of different free distros – and yet a market remains. It’s a market where the`best’ distribution wins the largest market share. It’s not a market based on who can force their way in through underhand mean, but an actual meritocracy. What else can it be when it’s all free anyway? Only the best will do the best. (For a definition of `best’, of course – people who operate with a different definition will find their way to Gentoo, and still be happy. Just not right.)

Sometimes having the same price point can be damaging to competition, apparently. The loss of the net book agreement that led to the rise of 3-for-2 offers and the decline (not death) of the indie bookshop, for instance, was meant to encourage competition. Personally, I think it’s damaged the book market. Instead of marketing good writing, witness the books on the offer tables. Timeless classics yes – they’d have been bought anyway – but the hideous array of celebrity autobios, shitty poplit like Dan Brown, and countless other genres I’d rather see consigned to the eternal flames of Pandaemonium.

This is all turning into a bit of a rant.

What am I trying to say? That a zero price point encourages creativity and competition. There’s so much more to play for when you know your market share has no financial incentive to stay with you, just a purely functional incentive. With linux, as soon as something better comes along, migration is easy (for a given value of easy, of course – but a lot easier than switching from Windows to Mac, for instance). You’ve got to be at the forefront of development to retain a market share.

In Monopoly, all but one player loses. There’s no second place. It’s an old-fashioned market, and one that I think – hope – is a dying breed.  The new markets we can see emerging everywhere point to increased co-operation and competition, which can only be a good thing. Nothing moves forward while a monopoly exists.

That’s it. I’ve blitzed my Windows partition. I now run an Ubuntu-only system, and once I’ve finished installing the 196 updates (!) I’ll start getting my newly installed OS back to how I like it.

I don’t think I missed anything in my pre-blitz back-up – I even remembered to back up my Evolution settings, so I didn’t need to go through the pain of setting up e-mail accounts.  The only thing I’ve forgotten is my log-in details for the AIM account I use for talking on rare occasion to one person, so I’ll have to trawl through my email trying to find the relevant information.

The first time I tried to install, the installer hung at 90% for about 15 minutes (while I cooked myself a celebratory fry-up!) – the clock had stopped, no windows were responding but the mouse worked. So, very hesitantly, I hard-rebooted and tried again, but this time it was flawless.

Needless to say, I am happy to be Windows-free.

This time in two weeks, I will have successfully run my third and final debating competition of the year. Unfortunately, I decided early on in my tenure that I would be using a Windows-only piece of software (running it under WINE didn’t work properly, and unfortunately I don’t have the time or skills to get that sorted). There is an open-source solution, tabbie, but the Windows software I have automatically generates a powerpoint presentation showing which teams are in which rooms being judge by whom, which is something tabbie does not (it does something similar, but not as sophisticated).

Anyway, Sat 16th Feb is the date of my last tournament as IV Convenor this year. Next year will be someone else’s turn, and I’ll let them use their laptop for running the tournament with whatever system they wish (within reason and after discussion with all involved parties, of course). After that, I shall back-up all the files on both my Windows and Ubuntu partitions onto an external hard drive and take the decision to start over or not.

I’m not running out of room on either, but very rarely use Windows. I have only used it once or twice since November (the last competition I ran), and don’t use it to play MOHAA any more, simply because I have moved on from gaming for the time being (and I can always play enemy-territory on Ubuntu!). The only reason I might need it is for iPod management (I have a couple of DRM’d tracks – literally two or three), but I mostly do that in Exaile (although it’s been strangely broken of late; perhaps I’ll go back to Amarok).

I may just defer the decision until Ubuntu 8.04 is out,  because it would give me more of a reason to wipe clean and start over. I still have the xp discs somewhere, so could always set it up in a virtual machine if I needed it (and I see no foreseeable need anyway). Hmm, we shall see.