Now, first of all, this watch band is made from ballistic nylon, and while I don’t know exactly what that means, I’m pretty sure I can use it to deflect bullets like Wonder Woman. And when the description includes words like James Bond, NATO-style, military, police, and divers, that makes my inner geek stand up and take attention. Here’s the description from the website:

Like I stated earlier, the fact that there is no watch band buckle on the bottom of your wrist means that instead of fighting with the watch band like every watch band I’ve ever had since the beginning of time (because resting your wrist on that buckle for 8+ hours a day ends up causing pain and anguish and such), you have just a single layer of ballistic nylon which causes zero interference or discomfort!

The only problem for me was that I didn’t have a watch face that would fit in this band, having previously purchased Diesel DZ7134 Watch (shown at the left). Like most digital watches out there these days, this Diesel uses a very tightly-integrated watch band and won’t work with the new James Bondy watchband I had my eye on. And while I loved the Diesel watch, I was really tired of constantly fighting with its watch band while resting my wrist on it as I worked.

But then I found a new watch that would work with the James Bondy watchband and looked every bit as cool as the Diesel: the Nixon Unit Watch (shown at the right). And it comes in blue! And it uses a more standard watch band that works beautifully with the James Bondy watchband I wanted to try! And seriously, I really do like it a lot. Even with the default watch band, it is probably my favorite watch ever.

But coupled with the ballistic nylon watch from The Watch Prince, it is the most awesome watch in the entire universe. So if you’re a James Bondy guy like me, or a hacker like me, or a fashionable dude like me, or a guy (or gal!) who’s tired of fighting with your watch band while trying to work, you might want to give this watch band (or something like it) a closer look.

After all, it’s what James Bond would do.

If “it’s a funny thing when you start getting older”, it’s an even funnier thing when you get older and work from home 100% of the time. And if you think that’s funny, it’s an absolute riot when you get older, have a sit-down job, have a wife and 3 kids, work from home 100% of the time, and have no reason to go outside your front door more than once a week.

Unfortunately, as much as I have tried to deny, ignore, argue against, and shrug off these things, it’s not actually all that funny, and it’s high time I start doing something about it.

I had an awesome Dad growing up. He was my hero, truly. He was larger than life, powerful, strong, forceful, loving, gentle, kind, and caring. Oh, and he was a bodybuilder and worked out with the likes of Jack LaLanne, Lou Ferrigno, Arnold, and a bunch of other really awesome names that have long since faded into the sunset. But my Dad and I worked out together as I grew up and he taught me to take care of my body. And though I never took things to the level of bodybuilding competitions like he did, the years I spent with my Dad laid down a solid core to my physique that have lasted me my whole life since. So far at least.

And then I got married, and finding the time to work out regularly became pretty tough. And then we had kids and that time disappeared again. And then I got a job in IT where instead of walking around for 10+ hours a day constantly, I was now parking my butt in a chair for 8+ hours a day. And then I got an AWESOME job (my current job with VMware which I cannot even explain how much I love enough) where I get to work from home (stupid housing market crash *spit*) doing programming and such 100% of the time, from my chair in the basement.

And now I look in the mirror as I walk by and wonder who in the heck that chubby older dude is and why he’s in my bedroom, wearing my underwear and the Woot shirt I just picked out this morning.

It’s a funny thing when you get older and you find that you have to figure out how to take care of your body again.

So I’m taking a stand against these long stories that end badly and make people cringe and vow silently to themselves. I’ve been doing little bits and pieces of this incrementally through the last couple of years, but I’m getting more serious about it now. Especially since I’ve lost exactly zero pounds since the same date 1 year ago. I’ve also gained exactly zero pounds since the same date 1 year ago, but that’s little solace since the kindly-yet-roundly gentleman keeps showing up in my bedroom mirror.

I still need to actually sit down and write up an official “this is what I’m going to do every day” routine, but thus far, here’s what I have:

Every day, Monday – Friday, I’m planning on doing this stuff:

1. Yoga for at least 20 minutes. I really enjoy Rodney Yee’s videos and I’ve been using A.M. Yoga for Your Week for a year+ now. It has a different 20-minute routine for every day of the week (M-F). I highly recommend it. I also think that maybe it’s time for me to grow beyond these rather beginner-level routines, so if anyone has advice on the next place to go here, I’d appreciate it.
2. Running on the treadmill or biking for at least 20 minutes. Been doing this for a while now too and I’ve been catching up on Netflix videos while doing it and it’s pretty enjoyable and I get a good sweat going.
3. Ab-Doer core and abdominal routines. My Dad had already bought me the Ab-Doer Professional workout equipment years ago (it was the earlier version of the Ab-Doer Twist Abdominal Trainer), and while it may look kind of goofy, I do believe that it offers a really good full-midsection workout. So I’m going to try working my way through the videos John Abdo did again and see if I can stick to it and see some progress. Sadly, I lost the original VHS tapes that I had for my Ab-Doer Pro and had to re-order them from Mr. Abdo. These videos are 10 – 20 minutes long as you work your way up.

So there’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I think that if I can be consistent with this and actually do it well for a year or so, I should be in a much better physical condition. Really, I’d just like to stop seeing that portly dude who keeps stealing my underwear and Woot shirts.

Of course, that was several months ago and I’ve had it on my ToDo list ever since. But better late than never?

So, it’s not like anyone reads my blog anymore anyway, but in the off chance that you do and you have thoughts about it, please speak up. In general I try to not annoy people as much as possible, so if I’m annoying you now, I apologize; and if there’s something I can do to make things less annoying, please let me know.

From what I understand of the process, my AdSense account is active, but not really active, for the next 4-5 days or so while Google AdSense peeps review my stuff.

It would surely be swell if I could kick myself in the rear enough to make my web space useful again in this here age of Facebook and Twitter and such. And if I can earn a little bit of $CASHDOLLARZ while I’m doing so, all the better. =:)

Hrm. Speaking of “what the heck am I doing with this here website thing anymore”, I’m wondering why I’m bothering with Categories at all anymore. Aren’t Tags all the rage these days?

But lately, I’ve been finding myself getting more and more frustrated by the direction Street Fighter play is taking these days and this article on BitMob said something that struck a nerve:

Now players are combing their way through Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition Version 2012, a free patch that came out in both arcades and consoles. Previous SF4 games have been criticized for rewarding safe defenses over aggressive play, while Arcade Edition tilted the balance too much towards offense. Version 2012 will hopefully create a better harmony between the two approaches.

Street Fighter Arcade Edition was just a huge joke, really. If the only purpose of Arcade Edition was to introduce extremely overpowered and unbalanced characters, why even pretend to have a fair game anymore? AE 2012 claims to try to restore balance, but it did far too little to achieve that.

Anyway, I know I’m going to sound like an old fart here, but I really dislike the current direction of Street Fighter play I see. You can say that previous versions of Street Fighter rewarded safe/defensive play over aggressive play, I suppose. If by safe/defensive, you mean more careful and methodical, then yes, I agree. I’ll refer to this gameplay model as CrouchingTigerHiddenFlashKick.

But the most fashionable way to play Street Fighter today is non-stop, in your face, constantly bullying, constantly rushing down, make one mistake and you’re dead, don’t give your opponent a chance to think, mash buttons faster than the other guy, and in general behave like you’re OD’d on Mountain Dew, Coffee, NoDoze, Monster, Jolt, and PCP all at once. I’ll refer to this gameplay model as MashUntilItWorks. And I really hate it.

The BitMob article pointed this out too with the following video and quote:

The most-telling example of Arcade Edition’s balance comes from an exhibition at Norcal Regions 2011 between Street Fighter grandmaster Daigo Umehara and Dhalsim expert Filipino Champ. In the beginning Daigo used his famed Ryu, and the two fought on even ground. In this video, Daigo switched to Yun and easily smothered the yoga master. The only round Champ won was when he connected both a Super Combo and an Ultra Combo.

Here’s a video to show what I’m talking about. Note that up until about 21:20 of this video, the fighting is more like an exciting chess game. You can just feel the tension and see the thought going into each move. If you’ve been playing Street Fighter as long as me, you can feel the frustration as Filipino Champ correctly guesses and counters each of Daigo’s moves on screen before he does them. It’s exciting. I love it!

Now skip to about 21:20 of the video. From that point on, you’ll notice that the game play is completely different. The focus now is more like beating your opponent over the head with a 2×4, daring them to make any move or guess wrong just once and then you kill him. I hate it.

Now I’m not saying there’s no skill involved in MashUntilItWorks. And yes, I know that it’s an insulting way to refer to 100%, non-stop rush-down play, because there’s a lot of science and practice and plinking and skill in it. But it’s really frustrating to play against people who play like that. And MashUntilItWorks certainly favors younger eyes and brains and hands and reflexes than I have. And I feel a lot of times like I just can’t compete and that’s extremely discouraging. And for the first time in 20 years of playing fighting games, I quite often honestly feel like setting fire to the video game console and trying to find another hobby.

My first and main tablet is my iPad (first generation) with 32 GB of memory and built-in GPS/3G networking. I bought it on May 11, 2010. At the time, we were just about to head across the country on a family driving-across-America vacation for two weeks. While I was definitely enamored with the iPad, I was trying to justify its $729 price tag by loading it up with movies and then having the kids watch the iPad as we trekked across the lower 48. While we did do this a few times during the trip, my shiny new iPad didn’t really serve this purpose as I had originally imagined and for the most part, the kids just did their own thing while we were driving. But it is smooth and stable and functional and does just about everything I could want in a tablet.

The second tablet I have is the Nook Color. I bought two of these off eBay on February 28, 2011 when they were $199 a piece. At the time, my wifey was asking for a tablet to play with and I’d been following the news of the Android hackers who had gotten a whole lot more functionality out of the Nook Color than it had been intended to provide. My wifey still uses her hacked Nook Color every day now, running CyanogenMod 7.0.3 Stable. I chose to keep tinkering with mine, however, so I’ve been running the CM7 nightlies for a while and now have CM 7.1.0 Stable installed. To be fair, I think I’ve pushed my Nook Color well past what it was designed for, so I think that quite a bit of the frustrations and complaints I have with my Nook Color are due to the inherently unstable hackery therein and are not indicative of Android tablets as a larger group, or even of the experience one would have running the stock software on their Nook Color.

But I think I’m through with trying to keep tweaking my Nook Color. $199 was a pretty inexpensive price to pay for a 7″ Android tablet, especially at the beginning of this year when there weren’t nearly as many options for Android tablets in the market. But I think I’ve reached the limits on how functional and stable and optimized and fun I can make it and am now tired of banging my head against this wall that won’t budge. So I wanted to list out some things about both tablets that are both good and bad below, and I’ll probably keep adding to them as I think of them over the next couple of months.

iPad – Pro’s

1. The little dude is really, really stable. Even though iOS 5 seems to have some twitchiness that Apple hasn’t quite ironed out fully yet, my iPad1 almost never gives me problems with stability. Apps may crash every once in a while, and this probably has as much to do with iOS 5 as anything else, but the overall device stability is fantastic. Apple did a great job of protecting the core OS from app instability and I think I’ve only had to reboot my iPad a handful of times in the year and a half that I’ve owned it.
2. Battery life is really good. It got worse with iOS 5, but it still lasts me a few days between charges with quite a bit of use throughout the day.
3. Having an on-device GPS is really nice. While I typically been using my HTC EVO 4G as my GPS device and mapping solution when I drive, the big iPad screen + GPS Drive HD makes for a really nice GPS/turn-by-turn-map solution.
4. Video playback is superb. My darling bride and I typically end our days together in bed, watching Snooker or some TV on my iPad, hooked up via Bluetooth to my Jawbone Jambox. Aside from some obnoxious video buffering problems that pop up every once in a while, the iPad1 plays back videos of all kinds (especially with the VLC iOS app) flawlessly.
5. Bluetooth works flawlessly. This I especially appreciate because the Nook Color has a Bluetooth range of (no, seriously) about 10 inches. My iPad1′s Bluetooth stack is extremely stable and I can easily sit my Jambox down in one room for my wife to listen to and take my iPad with me into another room and still have a flawless music connection going over Bluetooth. Using my external Bluetooth keyboard with my iPad is quite enjoyable and accurate.

iPad – Con’s

1. It’s not very customizable. In the customize versus stability trade-off department, this is understandable, but still kind of irritating. I love to tinker with my devices, so this bothers me every once in a while. And it’s sad, really, but I get bored sometimes with an otherwise perfectly working and stable device. I wish I could change UI themes and such on my iPad.
2. Well, sort of in the customizable department, but I really wish you could change the keyboard on iOS devices in general and the iPad in particular.
3. Hm, also in the customization department, but I really wish Apple would let you access things like music controls from the lock screen of the iPad. Android does a really nice job on this.

Nook Color – Pro’s

1. I kind of like the 7-inch form factor. It’s different, at least. And you can conceivably throw it in a purse (which my wife does) and take it more places than you can a 10″ tablet like the iPad. Also, the little corner loop thing is cool, as are the lanyards you can easily put on it. It is definitely smaller in my SackPack than my iPad is.
2. Extremely easy to customize and root and it’s just about brick-proof. If you’re looking for a toy to hack and play with, this is a really nice one. Of course, the flip-side of this coin is stability, so YMMV (mine certainly did).
3. Customizable on-screen keyboards are really cool! I love SwiftKey on my Nook Color and Android phone. It is SO nice and I really wish iOS let you change keyboards.

1. I don’t think I like the 7-inch form factor. I know, this contradicts what I said above, but the difference in screen-render-and-view size as well as room-to-interact size between 7″ and 10″ tablets is pretty significant. I don’t think I’d want anything smaller than 10″ for a tablet I’m going to use every day.
2. Not very stable. At least, I’ve given up trying to get the CM 7.1.0 Stable ROM to be stable and reliable on my Nook Color. I know, this is more a statement of the stability of the CM 7.1.0 Stable ROM than it is of my Nook Color, and I could probably have a stable device if I just ran the CM 7.0.3 Stable ROM like my wife does, but that bothers me. If it’s a customizable toy then I want to run the latest and greatest on it, and that doesn’t work for me. From the widely-known Sleep Of Death problems to app crashes to bad battery statistics/voltages, etc., stability on my Nook Color is nothing like the stability of the iPad.
3. Bluetooth is a joke. This, again, is because the Nook Color wasn’t even supposed to have Bluetooth at all. The Nook Color hackers found a way to get Bluetooth working, but the range is limited to 10 inches (no, seriously, 10 inches!), so it’s all but useless.
4. Screen responsiveness and precision is bad, compared to the iPad. Now, this, I think, is maybe more true to all 7-inch tablets? Or at least, I would think that the precision required to click on things on 7-inch tablet is much higher than that on a 10-inch tablet. At any rate, I am constantly finding myself clicking on something other than what I intended to click on on my Nook Color, and only rarely find that happening on my iPad.
5. No built-in GPS. While TetherGPS lets you use the GPS from your Android phone on your Nook Color, it’s not nearly as nice as having GPS built in on the Nook Color.
6. The CPU seems to just not be able to keep up. Even overclocked at 1.2Ghz, my Nook Color hits 100% CPU usage an awful lot and it freezes the entire tablet very often, which makes for a pretty unreliable experience.
7. Battery usage is really bad, especially in the CM 7.1.0 release. I think it was much better in the 7.0.3 release that my wifey is running, but I can’t let the little guy go for more than a day and a half, it seems, before he’s dead.
8. External keyboard support is really bad. I’m not sure how much of this should be chalked up to the horrible Bluetooth support on the Nook Color, versus problems with the keyboard software on the NC reacting badly to the external keyboard input, but using an external keyboard has never worked out well for me on my Nook Color. I’ve even had the Android keyboard software force close on me a few times while I was using my external bluetooth keyboard.

I guess that’s all I’ve got for now. Again, I’m not trying to sell you anything or sway your mind at all. I just wanted to jot down the experience I’ve had with both of these tablets and keep a running list somewhere to remind myself why I’m using what I’m using now. =:)

And finally, yes, I’m aware that it’s not entirely fair to call the Nook Color an Android Tablet. It was never intended to be one, and it was meant primarily as an eReader with limited other applications. But it’s all I have to go on for a comparison.

I think that from the experience I’ve had with these two tablets, I truly would like to try a new, full-featured Android tablet that has built-in GPS, Bluetooth, and a 10-inch screen. My concern is that rooting said tablet and tweaking the UI too much or installing custom ROMs, etc., is going to end up in the same instability that I have with the Nook Color, and that would make me über sad. But maybe not? I’ve been told the Xoom is the most dev-friendly and kept-up-to-date Android tablet right now. Any suggestions?

At first, it was mostly about the freedom to run what I want, where I want, how I want. Desktop Linux has always been exciting to me for that reason.

But then it grew beyond that and enabled me to contribute back. Open Source allowed me to teach myself new programming languages. It allowed me to make friends literally all over the world. It became the thing that I enjoyed doing most, technically, especially since my daytime jobs didn’t let me do the kind of programming and development that I wanted to do.

It helped me to get the best job of my life.

I’ve been working at VMware for more than 4 years now. I only have this job because I’ve taught myself everything I know about programming languages, and most of that has been through my work in the Open Source communities I’ve participated in over the last 15 years.

Most recently, I’ve had a blast as a KPilot/KDE PIM developer. I’ve met more people from all around the world and I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. But KPilot and Palm Pilots in general have long since lost relevance. And sadly, I was never able to find a new itch to scratch and a new area to start contributing to. It’s been years now since I’ve contributed any sizable amount of code to any Open Source community. I’ve waited, hoping that I’d find more time, or that I’d find a new itch to scratch, or that I’d get the urge to start hacking on Linux Desktop stuff again. But it hasn’t happened, and I have no reason to think it’s going to anytime soon.

Over the past several years, I’ve become increasingly irritated and frustrated by the ever-changing-and-not-always-in-good-ways Linux Desktop. I’ve blogged before about this and got quite a bit of feedback about it. That was two years ago, almost exactly. What has changed since then? In my mind, absolutely nothing. Now we have Ubuntu turning the desktop on its head again with Ubuntu Unity and destabilizing applications that have worked perfectly well for years and years. I know this because I’ve been working on VMware’s Workstation and Player products for the Linux Desktop for the last 4 years and I can’t tell you how much time and frustration and energy I’ve had to put into last minute bug fixes to work around new and broken in “exciting ways” behavior in Linux Desktop Environments. That’s the kind of thing that really sucks the life and soul out of you, especially when it’s something that you’ve cared so deeply about for so very long.

You have to understand… I have been one of the most outspoken and zealous of Linux Desktop proponents you’d ever want to meet. And I do believe that the Linux Desktop is awesome and a worthwhile thing to use, if only to keep down on the amount of ongoing upkeep you have to do to your PC thanks to viruses, malware, etc. But I have decided to move away from caring about Desktop Linux and I don’t know if I’ll be back, personally.

I’ve always looked at jwz’s “final straw” rant and thought that I could never get there. I’ve invested too much time and energy in Desktop Linux and cared too much about it to give up on it, right? Well, I was wrong, I guess. =:)

So, this isn’t meant to be a slam on Linux or a slam on KDE or a slam on Open Source or anything else. Just chalk it up to an old, cranky dude who became disillusioned with the Linux Desktop if you want. Or chalk it up to said old, cranky dude finally having enough money to buy a Mac and seeing how beautifully it runs and really enjoying it and not wanting to deal with for Linux Desktop on his personal daily equipment anymore.

But anyway, I just wanted to put this out there. I feel like I’m losing part of who I am by doing it officially and all. But I have been using and developing on Apple’s OS X lately and I’m thoroughly loving it. A couple of months ago, the opportunity presented itself at work and I made the switch from the VMware Linux Workstation/Player team to the VMware Fusion team, and I’m really loving it. I had been feeling like I’ve been stagnating lately and not learning or growing as a developer. I had been wanting to make a change and learn new technology and languages. And thus far, I’m really liking Objective-C and Mac development.

So at this point, I’m going to remove myself from planet KDE and take a break from Linux Desktop for a while. I’ve actually been not blogging for quite a while now because I know it’s not going to be relevant to planet KDE and that’s been another source of frustration, so I’m going to rectify that now too. I’ve been meaning to remove myself from the planet KDE feed for a while now, but 1) I felt like I should say some kind of goodbye and 2) I can’t seem to be able to log in to my svn+ssh account anymore to remove myself from the planet feed. =:/

Anyway, sorry to all my KDE friends. I feel like I’m letting you guys down. But truth be told, I haven’t been doing anything in the last couple of years anyway. =:/ I guess it’s just a normal part of life and different phases of it or something. We’ll see where this road goes. I’m hoping that at the very least, this will let me feel like I can start blogging again. =:)

I almost broke down and bought a new Kensington trackball mouse like the Kensington K72337US Orbit Trackball with Scroll Ring for PC or Mac, Kensington Expert Mouse Optical USB Trackball for PC or Mac (this one still really tempts me), or the Kensington Slimblade Trackball USB 2.0 for PC and Mac, (this one is sexy as hell!!!), but they each have their flaws. The Orbit is awesome and seems to work in Linux, but it only has 2 buttons. The Expert has 4 totally programmable buttons, and I think it has a physical scroll ring, but I’ve read that the new model is really bad on your wrist due to the elevated angle. And the Slimblade Trackball looks just amazing, but from what I read, the scrolling is done by twisting the trackball and that’s done completely in software, which of course Kensington hasn’t provided for Linux.

However, I did find one suggestion that got me to a 95% working solution by reading Google’s cached copy of the second page of this expired Logitech forum post. (UGH!) Specifically, Another_User says this:

I found one that works pretty good using a combination of Smart Scroll and ControllerMate.

In controllermate “trackball button 4″ box is connected directly to a “toggle” box which is connected to a “button output” box. Properties of the “button output” box are: “when turned on : button down”, “when turned off: button up:, “with mouse button: button #7″

Smartcontrol actived grabscroll with button#7, check wihtout moving cursors and reversed axis.

So I gave this a shot and got it working! Actually, you don’t need ControllerMate. I got this to work by using Logitech’s Control Center for OS X, configuring the two small buttons (button 5 and button 4) to report themselves as buttons 7 and 8 by using “Advanced Click”, and then I used SmartScroll to pick up on button 7 to do the grabscrolling.

This seems to work really well in OS X applications, like Chrome, etc., but the scrolling doesn’t translate well in X apps like NX Client or VNC even. But it’s better than it was before, so I’m definitely happier than I was previously.

I’d still love to get the Kensington SlimBlade Trackball working in Linux though. Anyone out there have success getting scrolling with the trackball to work?

1. The venerable FAT32 filesystem. Yes, it works. No, it doesn’t work like you’d want a UNIX filesystem to work. You can’t store files that are bigger than 4 GB on it, and the whole lack of permissions and filename length limitations thing just really sticks in my craw, so this isn’t a viable option for me.
2. The newer and even more proprietary NTFS filesystem. Come on, seriously? Why would anybody pick NTFS, which is native to only one proprietary operating system in the world (hint: not Linux and not OS X) and try to use it in Linux and OS X? Insanity, I say. Moving on.
3. ext2/ext3. Thanks to FUSE and fuse-ext2, the native-to-Linux ext2 and ext3 filesystem can be accessed in OS X. Of course, it works perfectly in Linux. However, in testing, it feels like trying to navigate through the ext2 partition in OS X’s finder is REALLY slow and choppy. I’m not sure what’s going on, and it doesn’t seem like the CPU is getting pegged or anything. But it felt slow enough that I don’t think I want to put all my data on it and hope it works right.
4. hfsplus. Now this one actually works (or seems to thus far) really well. Reading up on it a bit after having been using it makes me a smidge nervous, since it would seem that it’s extremely unloved from the Linux kernel devs and currently unmaintained. Yay! But if you set up an unjournaled hfsplus partition from OS X, Linux can very happily read/write it and it seems to be very stable and fast in both Linux and OS X.

Great. So why am I blogging about this? Well, like I said, hfsplus access in Linux is working almost perfectly. Except for VLC. Apparently, hfsplus has some nasty problems and isn’t actually POSIX compliant when it comes to opening directories. Due to how VLC handles “files” that it is asked to play (it accepts both directories and files as playlist arguments and VLC chooses to try to open the playlist element as a directory first, and this doesn’t fail with hfsplus the way it should in POSIX-compliant filesystems) VLC is unable to play anything that’s on an hfsplus partition. This is quite a bummer for me and others who use hfsplus as a filesystem and also like to use VLC.

Enter this bug report and Tobias’s awesome little patch for VLC. After using his patch and applying it over the top of my 1.0.3 VLC here in Kubuntu Karmic, I am now able to watch movies and listen to music stored on my hfsplus shared partition again from Linux, using VLC. Huzzah! Maybe this’ll help someone else out there struggling with this (or just generate a lot of “you suck, why would you use proprietary Apple hardware or OS X?!?!” comments).

Oh, and while this is a hfsplus filesystem problem at the root, because of how Kaffeine or KDE’s own Dragon Player open files, they are not affected by this bug. Only VLC is. So…. yeah.

I am curious, though… I know I’m not the only KDE hacker out there who’s using a MacBook or MBP, and who *gasp* also has OS X and Linux sharing the hard drive. What do you guys use for a shared partition between Linux and OS X?

1. Frustration with a particular admittedly proprietary application that didn’t use to have any problems in Ubuntu 8.10, and since then has been nothing but trouble for me and roughly 90,000 other people. You may say that it’s unfair to fly off the handle at one proprietary application having problems and condemn all of Desktop Linux, but I do not think this is limited to only one proprietary application.
2. A shiny new MacBook Pro in my possession and an epiphany of “this is what we’ve been working for, guys and we’ve been doing it for more than a decade and we’re still not there yet, why?”  And I’m not talking about the pretty UI or shiny buttons. You can argue all you want about OS X being the best in the UI/shiny/usability categories. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the increasingly growing market share of OS X and the (generally speaking) more polished and well-thought-out and 3rd-party-developed/supported applications. Being able to go to Flickr, for example, and download an actual client for OS X is pretty darned cool. Sure would be nice if Linux had the same mind/market share.

Now, having spent a week with my MacBook Pro in both Linux and OS X, I have a few more thoughts to add to the fire. Some of these have been results of discussions had as a result from my earlier post on this subject and others are more related to time spent with said shiny new laptop. But I think these are more constructive and less inflammatory. =:)

1. The MacBook Pro is truly a nice laptop and Linux, for the most part, runs really well on it. The Karmic wiki page got me 95% of the way there. Unfortunately, rEFIT doesn’t understand GRUB2 at all, it seems, so to just get Kubuntu Karmic to boot, I installed the old GRUB 0.97 instead (sudo apt-get install grub). Getting sound to work requires alsa-driver-snapshot, so that’s a little painful but not too bad. More painful was the hour I spent yesterday trying to figure out why sound stopped working (and this time it wasn’t pulseaudio’s fault, but rather something weird with the ALSA driver that plugging headphones in and removing them seemed to fix). Getting click+drag to work on the MacBook Pro 5,5 (since there’s no physical buttons anymore, but just one big touchpad (WHICH IS REALLY NICE!!)) requires a custom bcm5974-dkms driver. I’m using an unjournaled hfsplus partition to share data between OS X and Linux. And “setxkbmap -option altwin:swap_lalt_lwin” (or setting the same checkbox in KDE4′s System Settings) lets me use the command/apple/squiggly key next to the space bar as my Alt key (for alt+tabbing, etc.). All in all, I’m REALLY happy with Linux on this MacBook Pro. It seems to work every bit as nicely as Linux does on my work Thinkpad T61.
2. There is something core to my nature that must tweak and hack, and Linux is most conducive to that. Take something simple, like wanting to change the font and font size that OS X uses for window titles, system menus, etc. Apparently you just can’t do it? That kind of stuff bothers me (and this is just one example in OS X that comes to mind). I truly do love Desktop Linux, and especially KDE for this reason. I’m not saying I couldn’t survive in OS X, and I still enjoy it and its apps. And if I have problems with things I need to do (audio/video conferencing comes immediately to mind), I have no hesitation booting into OS X to just get things done. And no, sorry, I just can’t stomach the thought of using Windows because I have to get things done. OS X may not be free, but at least I don’t vomit from just the thought of using it. But if for nothing other than the challenge of trying to figure out how to get things working to my liking, I feel compelled to run Linux on this little wee beastie. And maybe after I get things working to my liking, I’ll even find a couple of itches to scratch again and start being productive again. =:)
3. We’re (Desktop Linux) not there (3rd party developer interest, compared to OS X and Windows) yet, but I think we’re getting closer, and even so, we may just never get there and that’s not our fault, I don’t think. My original line of thinking was that we’re not there yet because we keep changing core system components that prevent 3rd party developers, etc, from taking our platform seriously. And I think that as much as possible, we should really try to stop changing/breaking stuff so that this is not the reason we don’t get there. However, we have other core values and tendencies in Desktop Linux that are most definitely contributing to us not getting there and some of them we cannot change. Let’s take an important one: Freedom. Both parts of freedom matter: both gratis (for zero price) and libre (free to do whatever I want to it). The first part means that 3rd party developers can expect to sell nowhere near as much of their software in Linux as they can on OS X or Windows. The second part means that 3rd party developers can expect to meet resistance to their very existence. I personally side with the former more than the latter on this, since I’m cheap by nature and like to not spend money whenever possible. Also, being that I have to work for a living and support myself and my family, I do not, for a second, fault companies for existing and needing to have me pay for things so they can exist. But I think I’m in the minority on this point in Desktop Linux. Lastly, we’re not a money-making machine like Apple and Microsoft, and we never will be. And that’s both good and bad. It’s bad in that we do not have a big budget to spend on advertising and cute commercials, etc. It’s good in that we’re not going to go out of business just because we’re not “profitable” or growing as fast as OS X in market share. We have and can and will outlast other OS’s and desktop environments that must be profitable to exist (OS/2, Amiga, BeOS, etc., etc.). And maybe that’s why we’ll finally succeed in continuing to gain market share. Or maybe we’ll get there by being stable and good enough for most users and having applications which live on the  Internet being more important than applications that are written for Linux (Google OS, perhaps?). And maybe we’ll still not get there for another decade. Or longer. But that’s not the point, really, is it? I mean, it would be REALLY nice to never hear “oh, we’re just not even going to bother doing XXX on Linux, but that’s okay because Linux doesn’t matter… heck, it’s only .05% of our sales anyway!” again. But we’re here because we like what we have and we like where we’re going and we like controlling our destiny. I totally get that. And maybe that’s good enough.
4. OS X really does have some nice apps that Linux has no counterparts for, but for me, there are not that many (Tweetie comes to mind) and the good news is that we (Desktop Linux) can fix that ourselves (and we are). One of the big things that people point to in this whole OS discussion is that OS X has more polished apps than Linux. And I must agree with this. But I think the reason is less because of OS superiority and more the nature of apps on OS X. Developers actually make money selling software on OS X *shock*, so they have a vested interest in polish and user experience, and spend a lot more time on it than Linux projects typically do. Heck, they even pay people to help make their apps polished and highly usable. The good news is that we’re in control of our own destiny here and can do (and are doing) better.
5. We’ve come a long way (baybee), and I think we’re on the right track. It’s pretty amazing to think how far we’ve come in the last decade. It seems only yesterday that Blackbox and Bbkeys were the coolest thing in the world to me, and that the big Linux Desktop Environment projects just were nowhere as fun, exciting, or good-looking. We’ve come a long way since then. I’ve always preferred KDE to GNOME, but both DE’s have made HUGE improvements–both to the core Desktop Linux technologies that we share and to UI and polish and usability on top of those technologies. KDE4 has not even been out for 2 years already and the difference between what we have now compared to what we had 2 years ago is phenomenal. I absolutely agree with the sentiment that Desktop Linux is now, more than ever, ready for the world to use and ready for 3rd party developers to start writing for. I think this should drive us to be even that much more cautious as we push out new distributions and make sure we don’t break stuff just because we want something new and shiny.
6. I haven’t left, nor do I plan to, Desktop Linux (I know, who cares), but I think it’s important to think about what might be broken in our development model and figure out how to fix it, else we’re shooting ourselves in the collective foot and preventing all our hard work from reaching beyond our little geekly communities into more mainstream adoption, and that would be truly sad.
7. This MacBook Pro still has problems with Linux and that sucks, but also not our fault… sorta. And I’ll figure out how to work around all of them and so can you. As an example, as I’ve been typing this blog post, I have brushed the touchpad about 10 million times accidentally and ended up clicking somewhere entirely else, and in general disrupting my work by having to keep undoing the garbage that just happened. And yes, I’ve added a HAL fdi file to enable SHMConfig and tweaked syndaemon and synclient and yes, I know I need to still do more. But here’s the point: this does not happen in OS X. It just works. It would sure be swell if we could figure out how to make this work out of the box for Linux users. Similarly, suspend seems to work just fine, but I’ve had several issues with X/keyboard/mouse stability upon resuming. Not surprising, being that Apple hasn’t tried to make sure that its hardware works well with Linux. But annoying all the same.

Anyway, life is good, and I have a new puzzle to figure out (this MacBook Pro). =:)

So, I’ve realized that I need to buy a personal laptop for a while now but have been putting it off because it’s expensive and a big ordeal. I don’t do anything that involves money quickly or lightly, so kicking down a big wad o’ cash for a laptop is not something that I can just do whenever I feel like it. For the last few months, I’ve been agonizing over what I should get and researching and pricing and comparing. I knew that I wanted something that stood out and looked good and felt good and was well-built. I’ve been using ThinkPads as my main laptop for the last decade or so, since it’s what my employers have provided me, and while they’re sturdy as heck and are well built and last forever, they’re not really all that sexy. I wanted sexy.

I also knew that I wanted some nice features that Apple provides stock that most of the other guys do not. Such as a backlit laptop keyboard. I was playing around with the idea of getting a Dell E6500, but 1) not horribly sexy and 2) that requires me to get a 15″ screen. Which is another thing I wanted… to not feel like I’m lugging around an Encyclopedia every time I take my laptop with me somewhere. For the last couple of months, I’ve been using an Asus Eee PC 1005HA netbook for this reason and while I absolutely loved the battery life on the little guy and the portability, the absolutely diminutive screen size is what finally did me in. Well, that and the horribly slow CPU. And the horribly slow GPU. And the really small keyboard size. And the fact that it doesn’t have an optical drive. And the crappy ath9k wifi drivers that keep disconnecting.

So I bought a Mac. Spent a bunch of time before then reading up on whether the MacBook Pros can play nicely with Linux (model 5,5 is what I ended up getting), and felt pretty comfortable that a MBP could be a really nice Linux machine. After waffling and being generally unsure of which one I wanted to get, I finally decided on a 13″ 2.26 Ghz MBP. I knew I wanted a smaller screen size than my previous PowerBook of 15″ and my current work laptop which also has a 15″ screen. So 13″ fits the bill nicely. I was really unsure about the CPU and was really hesitant to get a 2.26 Ghz CPU in the MBP, thinking that it’d be not all that much faster than the T7500  @ 2.20GHz Core 2 Duo I have in my work Thinkpad, but as it turns out, the 2.26 Ghz CPU in the MBP is really nice and fast–feels faster than the Thinkpad. Also, upgraded the RAM from 2 GB to 4 GB and I left the 160 GB drive in, planning on replacing it with a 250 GB 7200 HDD that I already have or maybe even a SSD if they ever get cheap enough.

I spent probably 6 hours or so on Sunday night getting Linux installed onto my shiny new MBP. Installing Linux was the easy part. Getting rEFIT to recognize it and boot into it was something completely else. Turns out that rEFIT does not play nicely at ALL with Grub2 (which is what Ubuntu Karmic comes with), so one of the things I did at the end that got it to work nicely was to boot off the live CD, install Karmic, chroot into my newly installed Karmic partition, uninstall Grub2, install Grub 0.97, and that seemed to do the trick nicely. The other hiccups I had were around getting the MBP’s drive partitioned in a way that OS X and rEFIT could deal with. I ended up resizing the main OS X partition and creating MS-DOS partitions from inside OS X’s disk utility and then just formatted them from the Ubuntu Karmic install process. But now I have a really nicely working OS X and Ubuntu Karmic dual-boot MacBook Pro. I realize my details are pretty sketchy here, so if you’re interested in more details, let me know and I’ll provide more info.

Since my day job allows me to write code for Linux (and don’t get me wrong, this is the best job I have EVER had and have never been happier), I occasionally need to use Skype to teleconference into meetings. And at least five times over the last 2 days, right in the middle of a Skype meeting from my Ubuntu Jaunty Linux laptop, things totally stop working. Sometimes the audio stops working entirely and I can’t hear the people on the other end anymore. Sometimes the video freezes. Sometimes Skype totally locks up the USB webcam and I have to kill -9 it and unplug/replug the webcam. Sometimes I can’t even see video on it at all and all I can see is a black box. Sometimes, it even works as it should and I don’t have problems (but those times are rather few and far between).

So, here’s my rant. I’m sick and tired of this crap in Linux. I have been a VERY vocal proponent of Linux everywhere for more than a decade. I’ve pushed it in every company I’ve worked for. I’ve insisted on using it everywhere personally. I have been searching for a job that would let me actually program on and for Linux for a long time and I now have one (YAY!). But I am absolutely exhausted of things that work on other platforms being unreliable, crappy, non-performant, crash-prone, and in general totally second rate or worse in Linux. In this particular instance, I unplugged my USB webcam from my Linux Thinkpad, plugged it into my new MacBook Pro, installed Skype and was up and running in no time. Skype did not crash, hang, hiccup, freeze, mutilate, spindle, or in any other way be anything other than an awesome application in OS X. And, as an aside, just looking through the preferences section for Skype showed that it was obviously given more love and care than the Linux version. And ya know what? I’m tired of it. I’m tired of even having to think about it. I’m tired of having to apologize for stupid stuff like this, get to a shell and killall -9 it. Or try to figure out what stupidity is causing it to happen. Or try to find workarounds so that PulseAudio can not screw things up for me. Or have to check my xorg.conf to see if I might have enabled something that is causing the bizarre Xv errors Skype spews every once in a while. I’m just tired of it.

Now, the focus of my frustration in this case is Skype. And I know that without even a moment’s hesitation, 90% of you are going to say “oh well, see, that’s what you get when you used a closed-source application! just use Open Source and everything will be better!” And to that I say: bollocks. You’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger Open Source advocate than me. But that’s not the point here. And that’s not the true issue at hand here. Open Source is great. Open Source is cool. Open Source is a whole heck of a lot of fun. Open Source is the answer to a whole lot of problems! But of this I am absolutely certain: it is not the answer to this problem. In this particular instance, and in millions more like it, all across the world, every day, people are going to need to run software that IS NOT OPEN SOURCE. You can try all you want to create the best, most awesome Open Source project to meet a given need, but you will never 100% fill every closed-source software solution need. You might get close. You might even have something that is “good enough”. But the bottom line is that there’s always going to be some piece of software that you have to run that you don’t have the source for. At least, this is true in the world that I’ve lived in for the last decade+.

Now, I am very aware that the Linux Desktop is SO much better than it was even 5 years ago. We have eye candy up the wahzoo. We even have some better applications from commercial companies. Heck, we even had the awesome World of Goo game (which I actually paid money for and LOVE)! We have much more feature-rich FOSS applications and desktop environments than we’ve ever had before. But what we don’t have is a stable platform that companies can count on being able to invest into and reap monetary rewards from. Yeah, like it or not, this is the real world and companies have to make money to stay in business.

We are a bunch of hackers. We love to tinker, to fiddle, to break compatibility in a heartbeat just for the outside chance that it might be better, to change quickly, and to do whatever we feel like. And that’s all fantastic stuff. But at the end of the day, we’re our own worst enemies. What makes Desktop Linux so awesome and fun and cool and quickly evolving is the same thing that keeps companies from investing in us–and even when they do, we end up breaking their stuff and causing Linux Desktop users grief. And we show absolutely zero possibility that this is going to improve any time soon. PulseAudio? Really? I’m so glad it’s the new hotness and is technically awesome. Your new hotness just broke an app I absolutely have to rely on. Guess how much I give a crap about your new hotness now, hm?

Anyway, I don’t have a solution to this. All I know is that I’m really liking my MacBook Pro, and I’m really liking OS X. Is it free? No. Is it Open Source? No. But does it just stinking work? Yeah, it really does. And it is such a drastic and refreshing change from the world of Desktop Linux that I am seriously wondering if I’m going to ever end up using that Ubuntu Karmic install I just slapped on the other partitions of this drive. I don’t think I’m yet ready to send out a jwz-like dissertation and farewell address, but I totally get it now. OS X is beautiful, and it just works. And I don’t think I’ll ridicule anyone for getting an Apple computer and actually using OS X on it ever again. Windows is still another story, but even there I can see what the allure is. You know… you get a computer to do stuff, and you want it to work. You don’t care what it has to do so that it works. You just want it to stinking work. Wouldn’t it be nice if Desktop Linux was like that?

[ UPDATE - 2009-11-20 ] – I’ve received a lot of really great comments on this post, but my initial intent at 1) venting/ranting, 2) comparing Desktop Linux to OS X, and 3) raising issues that I think we need to take a hard look at as a worldwide community were taken in a very different slant than I intended. FWIW, after having spent a week with my shiny little MacBook Pro, I am happily running Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 on it and have blogged again in an attempt to clear up some of the muddiness around this first post. To this end, I’m going to change the title from “I think I’m tired of Desktop Linux” to something less vitriolic for future viewers. And hopefully this won’t cause aggregators/planets to re-publish this. =:/