Kasperian Moving Parts

kinda like Batman, but with a wife and 3 kids

Sunday October 28, 2007
by Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper
7 Comments

T61, Suspend, and You

So, along with my glowing accolades of a few days ago, I’ll offer a little painful reality.

The T61, as I said, is a heck of a nice little machine. Fast, smooth, quiet, and the works. However, there are a few things that have proven to be not so nice: most notably that which is absolutely necessary in a laptop: suspend and resume. I’ve spent far more time than I’d like searching the ‘net for hints/suggestions/hints/etc., but I’ve not quite found any full, working solutions. It would seem that the problem stems from the fact that I’m using nvidia’s binary driver (100.14.23)… or at least that’s not helping. Also, it would appear that OpenSUSE 10.3, which I’m running on the T61, is using suspend version 0.69.9, which doesn’t happen to know what to do with my T61 model (6549CT0).

Oh, another little gem: apparently using the nvidia driver also means that you can’t adjust the backlight brightness (FN-Home/End) from within X either. Current workaround: switch to VT 1 – 6 and adjust the brightness from there.  This is most certainly an nVidia driver problem, since it works just fine with the VESA driver. 

Well, I would love to have a totally happy story with no such silliness, but such is life and such is choosing to run Linux. =:)

[[ Update: ]] Well, shimber me timbers!  After yet another day of hacking at things, I still can’t get suspend to disk to work on this T61, but I can get suspend to ram working (!!!!!) by putting:

S2RAM_OPTS=”-f”

into the on-OpenSUSE-10.3-non-existent file “/etc/pm/config.d/defaults”.  Yay!!  This makes me much happy.  Oh–and don’t even try using the “nv” driver… you’ll lose your screen entirely.  =:/  Progress comes in small steps, apparently. 

Saturday October 27, 2007
by Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper
5 Comments

3d Desktop : Does it make sense?

Okay, first off, the ScribeFire Firefox extension is pretty cool.  It would be a good thing for some Open Usability folks to help out, but the extension itself seems pretty functional.  One large thing, though, is that there is no “New” button for Posts.  This functionality seems to be accomplished via the “Clear Content” button, which is very non-intuitive.  “Clear Content” is typically associated with a destructive operation which removes something.  “New” is a creative operation, which will also technically “clear the content” in the editing fields, but the mindset is a very different one.  An interesting usability issue, to be sure.  =:)

Secondly, this YouTube – 3d desktop video prompted an impromptu debate in #kde4-devel with zorg_the_false, which was the original impetus for this post (the “hey, dangit, I should be able to click a ‘blog this’ button somewhere was what caused the ScribeFire extension download…). 

Don’t get me wrong, I think the video is really cool and for eye-candy alone, it is slicker than hot butter on a bald monkey.  But I think this comment says what I was thinking:

This does look fairly cool and imaginative…but its just useless. The whole point of a computer desktop is that its efficent and easy to use. They don’t even have the file names on the files. This is just imitating the unwanted qualities of an actual desktop.

And, I might add, that most similar concepts will suffer from one problem: you simply do not have the real-estate that a physical desktop will have on an electronic desktop.  While you might have a pile of papers and books on your physical desk, you can easily see each physical thing that you have there.  An electronic desktop (unless we get to the point of having 30″ x 50″ electronic desktops, in which case we’ll have a new set of issues…) simply can’t afford that.  So we have to shrink things down in our electronic world and then zoom in when needed to make things recognizable again.

But this particular attempt at a 3d desktop strikes me as taking the advantages that computers provide and throwing them away in an attempt at trying to represent the cluttered world of a desk.   If I could organize my physical desk the way that I can organize my computer desktop or filesystem, I would much prefer to.  The organizational concepts that this video speaks to are things that people have done to get around the limitations of the physical space in their environment.  And it’s only a pretty small subset of people who do some of the things they talk about too (do you turn magazines in different directions on the stack on your desktop??).  Computers have allowed people to think differently about how their information is stored, presented, and organized.  It is indeed a new paradigm.  Trying to make a computer environment mimic a cluttered desk of yester-year seems extraordinarily backwards. 

Think back 100 years… this is analogous to the guys who made the typewriter trying to figure a way out to make it look and feel like a quill pen, just so people don’t have to learn how to use a new thing.  There are times when paradigm shifts are extremely good and evolutionary and should not always necessarily be viewed as bad just because they force people to learn how to do similar things in a new way.   This kind of desktop might have been revolutionary 20 years ago–before we had a different model to use for organization and information.  But to step back 20 years and say that we now want the computer to try to model a cluttered desk before there were computers is a tad silly. 

And to clarify:  I am definitely not saying we shouldn’t keep trying to make computer systems usable and intuitive.  I am also not saying that this video in particular is bad.  But I do think that this is a good thing to keep in mind as we shape user interfaces and try to make them as user-friendly as we can.  There’s a common misconception that says that we shouldn’t try to get people to learn new things just because there’s a learning curve.  I don’t always agree with that sentiment.

Anyway, the triune purpose of this post has been accomplished:

  1. Find a “blog this” Firefox extension
  2. Try out said “blog this” (ScribeFire) Firefox extension
  3. Capture an impromptu (yet still very relevant) friendly debate on irc.

=:)

Saturday October 27, 2007
by Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper
8 Comments

GMail Now Does IMAP!

Since I have several times been rather loud in my… we’ll call it “encouragement”… for Google to provide IMAP access to their hosted GMail mail, it’s only fair that I’m equally loud in my gratitude and accolades now that they’ve done just that!!

Woot!!

Although they don’t explicitly list KMail as a supported client on their setup page, it, of course, works just fine.  And I’m ecstatic that I can now get rid of one more layer of technical complexity (okay, it’s a stupid, ugly, storage-duplicating hack, just like everybody else has had to do) in my email setup.

Again, Woot!!!

Google: you have made a big step just now in not doing evil.  Thank you!!!  Please give everyone involved in GMail over IMAP a big raise.  =:)

Friday October 26, 2007
by Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper
15 Comments

Truecrypt versus LUKS Speed Test

I did a small performance test yesterday and was very surprised by the results. I wanted to see which encrypted filesystem was faster betweeen Truecrypt and LUKS. I created 2 20-gig files, one with Truecrypt and the other with LUKS encryption. Then I mounted the encrypted files and copied a 180 meg file 10 times, synced, and then reported the time taken. Here’s the results:

Truecrypt test:

time (for f in $(seq 1 10); do; cp bigfile truecrypt-mnt/bigfile-$f; done;)
0.22s user 26.30s system 15% cpu 2:47.06 total

LUKS test:

time (for f in $(seq 1 10); do; cp bigfile luks-mnt/bigfile-$f; done;)
0.20s user 8.40s system 15% cpu 55.169 total

Wow. Now, granted, this is a simple enough test, but does anyone have any ideas why LUKS would be 3 times faster in writing 1.8 Gigs than Truecrypt?

Thursday October 25, 2007
by Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper
4 Comments

Thinkpad T61 and a Blond ‘fro

Technology had several glorious victories at my desk today. First, I was fortunate enough to get a very nice dual-head GeForce Nvidia card installed on my 4-way AMD 64-bit cpu server at work. It goes very nicely with the two beautiful 1600×1280 monitors that are now hooked up via twinview. This is by far the coolest working environment I’ve ever had (okay, ever seen).

Secondly, I got my new work laptop today, and it is hella sweet. It’s a Thinkpad T61, and I think I’m in love. About my only complaint is that the thing must weigh 50 pounds, but what can you expect with these specs, I guess. Sweet, sweet, sweet laptop. Oh, also, it’s by far the smoothest Linux installation I’ve ever done. I put OpenSUSE 10.3 (64-bit, baybee!!) on it, and nary a hiccup, complaint, wrinkle, nor hassle! Even the wireless card worked perfectly and out of the box. Nice!!! For all the unsexiness (compared with the Vaios, Macbooks, Alienwares, etc.), this Thinkpad is a solid little machine. And now I’ll get to work purtifying it up with some stickers…

Third, I am officially if not impressed, at least very relieved to see how mature Perforce is. I’d read a couple of really scathing discussions about it last week (which I won’t link to, being that the authors are serious potty-mouths…), so I was a bit wary of it, but from what I’ve seen thus far (having not actually used it yet), it seems pretty slick. Thiago, I understand what you were saying now… =;)

Oh, also, during my little transition period here as I blogged about earlier, I’ve been using the Gmail interface to my little domain’s e-mail, and seriously like it. What I’d typically do, now that I have a laptop again, is to start using a thick client again (kmail), but I’m kind of unsure where I want to go next. There are some definite niceties that the Gmail interface offers that kmail (and honestly, any thick client that I’ve seen) does not. And I wonder how far one could go in the “keeping all my stuff on Google’s servers” model. Being that I’m a Palm/PDA geek, it’s still important to me to be able to sync the big 4 with my Palm (Calendar, Addressbook, Memos, and ToDos). I wonder if Google is planning on augmenting these and providing solid, open API’s for syncing them… ‘twould be really, really cool to build on top of Bertjan’s SOC base conduit with some Google API syncing code. Which reminds me, I wanted to look at syncing with Tomboy from Kpilot too….

I also do like Google’s Reader. Some very nice UI choices made there, and extremely slickque AJAXey sweetness.

supafro_bndAnd I’m going to need some ideas on how to let my hair grow out and not look stupid during the process. Hair gel just doesn’t work unless you’re going for Ace Ventura. Maybe blow-dried and blond ‘fro? =;)

Phew. Long, exciting day. Sleep needed.

Um, and no, this is not me. Just some wig advertisement….

Wednesday October 24, 2007
by Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper
11 Comments

VMware, Day 3

This place is SO amazingly, refreshingly, awesomely, mind-bogglingly, ground-breakingly (yes, that’s a new word), life-changingly (write that one down), career rejuvenatingly, totally, totally cool.

I am seeing the world through new eyes, truly. I am in awe. I am absolutely having the time of my life.

Maybe some of it is due to the “having been hitting one’s head against the cement wall for so long, anything else feels downright wonderful” syndrome, but I think it’s more than that. VMware actually gets Open Source. The movement, the power, the people, the world-wide community, the whole thing. For the last three days, I’ve constantly been thinking how refreshing it is to not have to fight my employer every step of the way, trying to introduce Open Source solutions, getting permission to use Linux, getting support for it, etc. I’ve been fighting that uphill corporate battle with little support and few victories for so long that I’ve not fully realized how tiring it is before just now. But here, to not only not have to fight policy, culture, etc., but to even be encouraged and supported in using Open Source and Linux… it is wonderful. Like coming home to a family that you never knew you had (see paragraph 1).

Thus far, (3 days into it, all brand-spanking new, wet behind the ears, and what-not), I’ve managed to uncover a small inconvenience in our gtk24 wrapper script that shows up when you don’t have libgtkmm installed at the system level, as I do not being that I am infinitely more comfortable using KDE with a small smattering of GTK-based apps (xchat (hi Thiago! please fix the SOCKS proxy issue so we can get app-specific settings! =;)) and pidgin mainly). So I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to poke enough at that one to be productive on my first week at work. =:)

But I digress…

Oh, by the way, San Diego (my home until 9 years ago) is on fire. Film at 11.

VMware is beyond uber-cool. Unspeakably so. I love it here.

Friday October 19, 2007
by Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper
5 Comments

Movin’ on Up (Sing it with me, Weezie!)

Today was my last day with my (before today) current employer. It has been a really, really, really bizarre and surreal day. 2 weeks for that matter. I caught myself several times shocked that I wasn’t more overwhelmed by the huge transition that we’re now embarking on again. And I think the fact that I wasn’t more worked up about it was all the more jarring.  Maybe it’s because I just went through this whole thing only 2 years before, so now I’m a hardened expert.  Or maybe it’s because I’m just at peace with where God is moving us.  Or maybe it’s because I’m thrilled like I never have been before about my new job.  Or maybe I’m just suffering from severe lack of sleep, allergies, and general numbness.

But I am extremely excited about working for VMware!!! I’ve accepted a (totally cool) position with them as a Linux UI Engineer, and will be working on the Player team. Awesome!!! =:) Open Source && Linux && C++ && an awesome team && a company that just might actually get Open Source == 1 happy me.  I am stoked.  =:)

However, this means that my focus will be diverted from KPilot for the next few weeks, at least.  The last time we went through this transitional period 2 years ago, we ended up with KDE 3.5.5’s version of KPilot which caused no shortage of problems.  I hope that this transition period will be smoother and less disruptive.  But I can say that I will have zero time to work on getting KPilot in shape for our KDE 4.0 release, which unfortunately also coincides with Adriaan’s complete lack of time due to work and Bertjan’s lack of time due to school.  So KDE 4.0’s KPilot will ship with our new Keyring conduit and the memofile conduit working, but precious little else.  You can call this a regression, failure, disappointment, or whatever else you feel like, and believe me when I say that there is nobody more disappointed in this little turn of events than me.  I’ll also say that I would thoroughly relish any and all help that would step up and help us get the Calendar, Addressbook, and ToDo conduits ported, if nothing else, for KDE 4.0.  =:)  If you care, can code, and are willing to help, please let me know.

So, stay tuned to this channel for more updates as time goes by.  I find myself having to use my old Powerbook until I get my new work laptop (hopefully Monday!!), so I’m limited on how much I can do outside of checking e-mail, etc.  Oh, speaking of…  I believe I’ll be getting a Thinkpad T60 (yeah, I know, very unsexy, but pretty Linux friendly and decently speedy), and I’ll most likely install OpenSUSE 10.3 64-bit on it.  Anyone have any good/bad experiences with any of the afore-mentioned mixture of hardware/software?

As Bowie sang… Ch… ch… ch… ch… changes….

Strap on yer seatbelts and hang on tight….  =:)

Thursday October 18, 2007
by Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper
10 Comments

Using Gmail for mailto: links

Blame it on Seb, but I’ve been using Gmail’s web interface lately. This is partly because I’m in the middle of another life-changing job transition (but this one I’m really excited about, aside from the great white sharks and the triangle of death), partly because I like change (and after having used nothing but kmail for a few years now, I’m ready for a change if for nothing other than to see how we in KDE PIM land can do things better), and partly because I’m trying to keep less personal data on my work laptop. I have been using Google’s Apps For Your Domain for the last year or so, and I like it much good. However, one thing that Gmail lacks is any IMAP interface whatsoever, which means that I’ve had a really convoluted setup going on which uses GAFYD for my MX handling, and then involves a subdomain on my regular web host server which I forward all e-mail to and subsequently access via IMAP. Ick.

(Google people: PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE add an IMAP interface to Gmail!!! The workarounds suck!)

Anyway, I digress…

The second thing that irks me about Gmail’s web interface is that it has no API for syncing contact information whatsoever. This absolutely sucks, but I expect that with Google trying to position itself as an online “all your information are belong to us” provider, that they’ll either remedy the ridiculously bad contact handling themselves or replace it with an acquisition. Please? And let me sync it with my Palm PDA??

But back to the point, one thing that is lacking in using Gmail’s web interface is the ability to click on a “mailto” link (or right-click in Firefox and do “send link”). Apparently, there are Google-provided solutions to this on OS X and Windows (Google people: please treat the Linux desktop as a first-class citizen too??) but they’ve not done anything for this functionality on Linux. However, I came across this nice little HOWTO from the Gentoo folks, which does the trick quite nicely. I’ve modified the shell script slightly to try to stop Gmail from going into some kind of a loop and not actually working if there’s no recipient passed to it (like what happens when you RMB click in Firefox and do “send link”), but I’m not sure if it’s something goofy with GAFYD…:

#!/bin/sh
BROWSER=”firefox”

ME=$(basename $0)
DEBUG=/tmp/$ME.debug

echo “$(date)| incoming uri: [$1]” >> ${DEBUG}

# remove the ? and mailto from the uri and convert “subject” to “su”
uri=$(echo “$1” | sed -e ‘s,subject=,su=,’ \
-e ‘s,\?,\&,g’ \
-e ‘s,^mailto:,,’)

echo “$(date)| outgoing uri: [$uri]” >> ${DEBUG}

if [ “$uri” ];
then exec $BROWSER “https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to=$uri”
fi

exec $BROWSER “https://mail.google.com/”

[[ UPDATE ]] A zillion thanks to Giuseppe D’Angelo, who pointed me to the Better Gmail firefox extension.  This rocks a LOT!  =:)  So the above shell script still has relevance for KDE/GNOME url handling, but isn’t as necessary for firefox mailto’s…  =:)

Thursday October 18, 2007
by Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper
6 Comments

Great White Sharks And You

My darling daughter was quick to fill me in on a bit of news garnered by some educational television programming the other day: I’m apparently relocating my little brood to The Red Triangle.  Oh good.  And here I was, just saying to myself: “Boy, Self, this is REALLY cool!  You finally get a chance to move back to California beaches again and can enjoy some good surf!”  Hm.  It’s always nice to find out you’re moving to a triangle of death.

I had no idea that there was such a thing as the Red Triangle, but apparently it’s named that because it’s the highest concentration of Great White shark attacks in the world.  Oh good.

This tidbit of news prompted me to search a bit for shark-related news in the San Francisco area and I came across this really interesting page from the Monterey Bay Aquarium that describes the Great White shark research that they’re doing.  I find this page that shows the path traveled by a tagged & released Great White fascinating and uber-geeky-cool.

Awesome!!

And we’ll just have to see about buying a suit of armor to go surfing in…