Jason S. Wagner

My Personal Homepage

How To Destroy Your Social Network, Google Edition

May 16th, 2013

Google pushed out a huge update to (web) Google+ yesterday, and after just 24 hours, the verdict is in: it’s terrible.

It’s often difficult to tell the difference between “I hate change terrible” and “quantifiably terrible”, so I’ll just make a list of problems and let you decide:

Google “solved” the whitespace problem by simply shitting posts all over your page, which looks like beautifully rendered chaos (or, Android design language).
The new design actively forbids automatic updating to accomodate new posts to your stream, because it would have to refactor how the posts are ordered just to fit them into the Jenga tower. If it’s not clear enough to you: You might be in the middle of reading a post when your entire page is refreshed and now that post you were reading is somewhere else (or may have fallen off your feed entirely).
Normally, I’m all for animations. Animation communicates to the user how one element becomes something else. But in the ‘Share what’s new…’ box, try clicking ‘Photos’, then ‘Cancel’. Do it a few times in both Firefox and Chrome, and just observe the ‘animation’. There’s gotta be a better way to deal with that.
There doesn’t seem to be any logic to the order of things in your home feed. You’d expect things like “new posts you haven’t yet seen” or “posts with lots of activity” or “contains keywords the Google overlord knows you are interested in” would float to the top, but the posts I’m looking for are always at least a scroll away.
Comments are now collapsed for being too long. Even if you click to expand all the comments, any comment over three lines is still collapsed and requires an individual click to expand it. This is really tedious and feels like Google is encourage users to turn Google+ into a fancy, threaded Twitter.
The notification bar is so broken, even though I am going to rail on it for the next few points, just it shipping in this state is worthy of its own point.
Viewing posts from the notification bar wraps them in a huge border that makes viewing posts this way feel like they’re second-class citizens. It really feels like Google is punishing you for revisiting old content you’ve already interacted with rather than going and finding new content to comment on.
Just looking at the notification bar once clears all unseen notifications. You have to remember where you were in the stack in order to see everything.
Scrolling the main page while the notification bar is up will close the notification bar, losing your place and any text you might have typed into a comment box.
Scrollbars within scrollbars! Especially within the notification bar. I can get three scrollbars up on the screen just by reading a post from the notification bar. Some users have reported up to eight visible scrollbars on the screen at once. Just figuring out where to place your mouse in order to scroll the content you’re trying to read becomes difficult.
The +1 buttons on comments have been greatly reduced in size, so expect fewer people to bother +1′ing your comments.
Font rendering is very different between Firefox and Chrome. Ironically, the rendering in Google’s own browser looks worse (Firefox applies a lot of anti-aliasing, and while I don’t really care for that, Chrome has lots of very ugly kerning and edge clipping issues).

For now, the Google+ app on iOS is the best way to use the service.

EDIT: It turns out Hangouts are now poisoned by Pony.

I’m Not Sorry

May 11th, 2013

I keep saying I’ll blog more. And then I don’t. And then I beat myself up for it, which lowers my self-respect, and that feeds on itself. That’s a really dumb cycle to suffer through.

So, you know what, I’m not sorry.

It will happen when it happens. Thanks!

WIP: SAMBA Active Directory Domain Controller on Arch Linux

May 6th, 2013

(update at end of post)

Last night, I decided to take a stab at setting up a SAMBA4-based Active Directory Domain Controller. I first tried this on the newly released Debian 7.0, but quickly noticed it was still shipping a pre-4.0 beta.

Realizing I was probably going to have trouble finding a current version, I took off the training wheels and pulled a basic Arch Linux appliance into VirtualBox. To my surprise, almost all the content on the Arch wiki for SAMBA still relates to 3.x versions, or is limited to just “how to set up CIFS shares”.

Provisioning a SAMBA-based domain controller is simple enough, but Arch’s packagers have removed the startup scripts, preventing you from running the software (this doesn’t affect file shares, of course; that would have been noticed immediately). After voting on the bug, I manually worked around the issue by pulling the original configuration files from SAMBA’s tarball. I now appear to have the software running, but hit another roadblock in the final stretch.

AD or Kerberos or whatever (I don’t even have it installed yet, give me a break) requires signed time responses from the local NTP daemon, but Arch’s NTP package is compiled without that feature. I quickly stole the package’s build file and add the option and compiled the daemon for myself. The wiki says I shouldn’t submit it to the AUR, instead, that I should file a bug against the already existing package. So, I’ve done that.

I’ve been documenting the whole process, using the official HOWTO as a guide, and will publish it to the Arch wiki once I have actually completed and tested the installation.

Update: The bugs were resolved overnight. Let me restate that — I encountered two small bugs. One had already been reported, so I simply left a comment on it. The other, I had to file myself. While I slept, all necessary changes were committed, new packages were published, and the things I couldn’t do last night are now no longer problems. Even though these were “small” things, I wonder how long it would have taken to resolve the same issue in Debian or Ubuntu. Many thanks to the Arch Linux package maintainers!

Review: Das Keyboard Ultimate S

April 15th, 2013

I’ve been floating from mushy keyboard to mushy keyboard for quite some time, and generally, I’ve been OK with it. I’d read people swearing by IBM’s Model M and kinda chuckle to myself. Loud, clackin’ keyboard is probably the last thing I need. I do quite well with chicklet-style keyboards, including those currently in vogue on cheap laptops. My Sony Vaio SC has one, and I’m pretty fond of it.

But, on my desktop, I’ve been struggling with Logitech boards that want to redefine the standard 105-key layout, or add superfluous features, like solar-powered wireless transmitters. I’ve been through maybe five or more keyboards in over a decade, while people are still banging away on their Model M’s. So, I started wondering.

I’ve been aware of the Das Keyboard line for some time, and decided to revisit them recently. While they offer a couple variants with varying degrees of click and clack and ugly lettering branded on their keys, their Ultimate S appealed to me because its keyfaces are blank, and is “quiet” (it’s not, but I’ll get to that). Anyway, I took a chance and made the $135 purchase. And when it arrived, I got.. a Das Keyboard Professional, with the ugly font. I checked my receipt, which said I had ordered the “Ultimate S”, so ten minutes on the phone later, I had the right keyboard on the way. Thanks to Erin at Das Keyboard’s excellent support for sorting the issue out right away!

Anyway, I received my Ultimate S today and have been using it for a few hours and wanted to put my thoughts down. For me, this really is just a typing exercise.

First, and I feel most importantly, it’s not quiet. The switches are “silent”, but the keys bottoming out are what make the noise. It does relieve you of that terrible click, and hopefully this tradeoff will allow others to work in the same room as you. The sound it creates is not the tapping or plinking of screwing around on Facebook, but the sound of real work and progress. So, I “get” the fascination with the Model M now, it’s an appealing aesthetic that won’t endear you to anyone nearby. Despite needing to make longer and more deliberate throws, the action is quite exciting, and typing at a good clip just “feels better”. I’m writing this post directly into WordPress and editing it on the fly, and it feels like driving a sports car through downtown; you can’t help but be impressed by the tight control and speed, even though otherwise capable vehicles do the same thing adequately.

Functionally, I’m struggling. Years of saggy keyboards and bursty typing have ruined my speed. I make a lot of typos. I’m going to run through a few internet typing tests, and try to blog more regularly so I can get back into the habit of making more deliberate typing. The 105-key layout couldn’t be any more deliberate and well-known, the problem is me and the destruction of my good typing habits.

For example, I haven’t had the Windows Menu key in a logically accessible place for half a decade, and now I have it back — on my last keyboard, a Logitech mini keyboard, the menu key was an Fn-Shift away, ridiculously mapped onto some key above the 10-key. Trying to reach it was a gesture certain to induce CTS, so I started reaching for the mouse instead. Now, I need to re-learn walking through file managers, selecting files and triggering that menu key without taking my hands off the keyboard.

The Ultimate S has a powered USB 2.0 two-port hub, and an extra-long cable. At the end of the extra long cable are two USB connectors, one for the keyboard, one for the hub. The keyboard connector comes with a USB-to-PS/2 adapter affixed, so if your system still have a PS/2 port, you can use it to save a USB port for yourself. These features solve a few problems for me. My current distance from my desktop was often testing the limits of my old keyboard, and made re-positioning myself difficult. I can also now plug my iPhone directly into the side to charge and sync. The USB ports are on the side of the keyboard, where cables and connectors and USB thumb drives will poke into my mousing area. I wonder why they aren’t coming out the rear of the keyboard.

One other downside I’ve found so far is a faint but audible ringing caused by pressing any large key (Space Bar, Backspace, Return) with any significant force. It’s admittedly minor, and I only noticed it now that I’m typing this without any music playing.

This isn’t for everybody. It’s pricey, and again, it’s certainly an aesthetic. This is not going to solve your typing problems, or take your typing speeds over the top. But it does feel great, and it built like a tank, hopefully lasting you many years, and I have a good feeling their support team has your back. Consider it if you spend a good amount of your time cursing at your mouse.

New Arrivals: Mouse Trap and Cosmic Avenger

April 9th, 2013

(I intend to update this post with pictures — if you don’t see any, I just haven’t got to it yet)

Three of us took an extended road trip south to Medford, Oregon to pick up a few new arcade machines, which was live documented on KLOV by Tom.

We left my house around 7AM, stopping a little north of the Washington/Oregon border where Gary scored a Stern “Elvira and the Party Monsters” pinball. Heading onto a flea market in Portland, Gary bought a Time Pilot, and I bought a hacked up Cosmic Avenger that had Rygar in it. Finally, we made an extended drive south to Medford where I bought Mouse Trap. We only stopped for gas and bathroom breaks, and a quick meal after picking up the last game in Medford, and we still didn’t get back to my place until 5AM. Too tired to unload anything, I just received my games last night, where Tom and I had a chance to pour over them.

This Cosmic Avenger has been shuffled around, operated hard, and converted at least once, probably two or more times. While I like this game, one of the biggest motivations behind getting this was to see what a complete Universal cabinet looked like inside. For example, we now know that the back is segmented into three pieces, not two, and what the monitor plinth actually looked like. Hopefully, we can take this information and complete my Lady Bug, another Universal machine I own that is missing a lot of parts. Of course, I hope to end up with two complete games.

Mouse Trap was the main reason for this trip. I’ve wanted one for quite some time now, and it should look great sitting next to my Pepper II. Aside from a little water damage on the right side of the cabinet, it’s actually in very good condition and should clean up nicely.

I’ll make individual “Repair Logs” about each of those games later with more detail.

Many thanks to Tom and Gary for helping me put this trip together. Without either of them, this wouldn’t have happened, and I am very grateful.

Hydorah (PC)

January 5th, 2013

Sorry for the short post, literally running out the door in about 10 minutes. But, I’d been following this game for quite some time. It seemed like it was never coming out and eventually I forgot about it, until today, when I stumbled across some video of it on YouTube. I may have even posted about it in the past. Anyway, it’s out, and you can grab it here. Soundtracks are hosted on BandCamp, if that’s your thing.

PC only. I have no idea about its WINE compatibility.

Post-Christmas Computer Cleaning Club

December 27th, 2012

I just took a hard look at my data storage situation.

In my NAS, an Ubuntu server with 5 1TB disks in a 3.63TB RAID 5 array (is ‘NAS’ the right term for this? I can’t keep my network storage acronyms straight), at this writing, I have only 271GB free.

On my desktop machine, I have a 256GB SSD for a boot disk that contains my operating systems, as well as 1TB and 3TB disks for local storage. Between those storage disks, I have <500GB free.

Look, I’m an old DOS guy. I never adopted the “My Documents” way of life. It makes a lot of sense to shove big data sets in there in order to keep things organized, until you encounter something like, “Unable to extract xxx-xxxxx-xxxxx.zip because the path name will exceed 255 characters” — well, “C:\Users\Jason\My Documents\” is 29 of those characters. And the next thing you know, you have things like “D:\!BACKUP\OCTOBER BACKUP” and “D:\Old Edrive\External Disk Backup\” just sitting around.

So, I think it’s time to start the Unfuck Your Habitat club. But for computers.

I’m going to be spending the next few days organizing my data, taking a hard look at some of the stuff I’ve been hanging onto for years, extract the gold, and organize into recognizable hierarchies. A lot of this stuff belongs in my Dropbox, forever accessible from any of my machines. And the rest gets nuked forever.

And this appears to be the perfect time. Work is slow because people are off celebrating and traveling. The house is still clean, and unless something tragic happens, nothing around the house needs serious consideration.

If your situation is like mine, maybe this would be a good time to jump in and clean up your computer!

Early Impressions of New Spyware Distribution

December 13th, 2012

I skipped Ubuntu 12.10 almost entirely. In VirtualBox, with the Guest Additions installed, mousing was completely broken due to a bug in the X Server. While I understand it was an issue affecting an upstream project, I felt it was unfortunate that it shipped that way, and it appears that it may never be fixed. (This bug affects many more distributions than just Ubuntu — Debian Wheezy appears to be shipping with it as well, which is preventing me from doing any kind of testing with it or with distributions built on its foundation, like Crunchbang)

I’m always interested in what the Canonical folks are up to, especially now that the spotlight is shining on them to deliver a solid gaming desktop in a potentially post-Windows world. I grabbed today’s daily image of what will become Ubuntu 13.04, “Raring Ringtail”. Mostly, I wanted to know if the above issue had been worked out. It has.

But I was also interested to see first hand what all the hubbub was about. If you’re not aware, Canonical’s Dash (a launcher/desktop search feature, similar to that found in the Windows Start Menu) sends your queries to one of their servers, and feeds back Amazon results below those from your local computer. Early demonstrations were not so good, but quickly whipped into presentable shape. Linux users being Linux users (which largely seems to feed off of hatred of anyone making more money than they are), ravaged Canonical for the decision, finally resulting in the ‘hubbub’; Richard Stallman, Linux’s cranky granddad, labeling the entire distribution “spyware”. Hmm. I try not to pick up troll bait too often, so it seemed imperative to take a look for myself.

My initial reaction was that it was really not so bad. The Amazon search results are clearly labeled “suggestions”, they appear below the other search results, and because they are live queries, it takes a few moments for them to appear — I can usually find what I’m looking for on my local system before the results even appear.

One change I noticed from Ubuntu 12.10 was that the online results were not returned on certain queries. For example, I banged the letters ‘term’ into the Dash, and waited several seconds. The Dash’s animated icon communicated to me that it had finished searching, and no Amazon search results ever appeared. I added a ‘p’ to the end of my query (now ‘termp’), and the Dash responded by searching online and returning a book. I’m assuming this is a new optimization of common or well-known program titles to reduce quibbling amongst power users. It seems to be based on executable name rather than shortcut description, as searching “libre” (LibreOffice), “ged” (gedit) and “fire” (Firefox) produced searches with no Amazon results, while “write” (LibreOffice Writer), “text” (Text Editor) and “browse” (Firefox Web Browser) did.

Ubuntu 13.04 doesn’t ship for many months, and things here may improve, or still take a turn for the worse. But if you’re already a user of just about any popular website, you’ve long ago handed over your interests, online activities, and search queries to data miners. I’m not excusing it, I’m saying that we as people have allowed it, and Canonical are not the first (or last) people to implement it. Did Android get this kind of backlash? Google’s use of data mining are much more well known, well integrated, and potentially more devious.

Another complaint regarding Ubuntu 12.10 was Canonical’s decision to remove Unity 2D (a version of their Unity shell that didn’t depend on compositing). Previously, Ubuntu would ‘fall back’ on Unity 2D if hardware acceleration was not available. But this meant there were two branches of Unity in development at all times, which is pretty stupid. This change brought the entire shell together under one code base. Rendering of the full shell is now offloaded on the CPU, meaning a severe performance hit for low-end users. Ubuntu has never been considered a minimalist’s distro, and hardware accelerated desktops have been with us for half a decade, so I’m not really sure why people are complaining here.

That was until I was able to see this first-hand. VirtualBox’s Guest Additions are clearly installed and working, and therefore should accelerate Unity (I’ve used it with GNOME and Unity in the past), Unity’s fade animations on menus and other elements clearly suffered. The performance was admittedly poor, despite my hefty host machine which had little to no difficulty with Ubuntu 12.04.

I’m not sure what else I should be looking for. We’ve been told that the majority of upcoming changes in Ubuntu will be related to power management and optimization (to improve mobile experiences), but running in a Virtual Machine, these changes will be transparent to irrelevant. But it’s nice to know that I’ll at least be able to track its development.

Ringtails and Routines

December 13th, 2012

I’m waiting for an Ubuntu 13.04 daily build VM to install, so I thought I’d get around to drafting a new post.

I’m stuck in a rut.

My last post here showed an effort to move to Linux. It usually starts with an exciting new Ubuntu release, and usually ends with me micromanaging configuration files in some completely different distribution, wondering how I ended up there. The reasons for stepping away from the smoking pile tend to shift from “well, I needed X and couldn’t find X or Y-like X replacement” to “I appreciate that this exists but I don’t have the time to tweak this into submission” to “Well, it just stopped”. Fatigue can vary, but the result has always been failure, and I’m pretty sure nobody is surprised by that turn.

My current issues are these:

Arch is fantastic, but I’m pretty sure my installation will completely ruin itself and I will need to spend three hours figuring out how to conform to some unexpected upstream change because nobody on the Arch team pauses to think, “maybe actively breaking machines without warning could be prevented” instead of blaming users for not researching each package upgrade before applying it (I love you, Arch, but you must know that this is ridiculous).

GNOME is fantastic, but both the open and proprietary drivers are garbage, aggravated by adding a secondary display.

I tire of this. I want to move in full time. How am I going to get this done?

I suppose the solution will be to build a new system that utilizes the integrated Intel video solution (HD 4000, right?), and move completely into that.

I hate the idea of throwing away this almost four year old machine that has served me well, but I think it’s time to move on. After the holidays, I will start pinching pennies and get myself a great little Linux machine as my primary desktop. I’ll hang onto my current desktop as a “heavy” machine, for Windows gaming and tasks like audio and video editing, where I will have both the tools that I’m comfortable with and the power to push it.

Well, the install is done, back to my rut.

A New Home — Ubuntu 12.04 Released

April 26th, 2012

Just a quick post to mention that Ubuntu 12.04 was released yesterday. I decided to dump Windows 7 and moved in this evening.

So far:

Really wish I had an SSD.
Social media, email and instant messaging integration is good. Not great, but good. Of course, Win7′s is non-existent, so this is a plus.
Multi-monitor experience is a bit underwhelming, and very jarring when you add workspaces. Things not lining up when you engage the Workspace Switcher is one ugly papercut.
~~Wish there was a hotkey to activate the Workspace Switcher.~~ There is one. It’s Super+S. Rad.
Getting VirtualBox running and re-adding my existing machines was a bit of a hassle, and getting USB pass-through up was another, but everything seems happy now, so I’ll chalk it up to learning curve.
Shoved my work VM onto the second monitor in the fourth workspace. Now, when I need it, I know exactly where it is, and when I don’t, it’s far away.
~~Video tearing feels like vsync is off, need to figure out where to check this. I can tolerate it for now but this will irritate me beyond belief the next time I try to play back a movie.~~ Found it buried in ATI Catalyst Control Center. Video playback is perfect now.
Very disappointed that the GNOME 3.4 virtualization and remote administration application, Boxes, did not make it into the official repositories. It looks like a beautiful application with excellent integration. I actually spent a few hours under Arch, Fedora 17 Beta, and looking into unofficial Ubuntu PPAs; as of this writing, you cannot get it without compiling from source, which isn’t an acceptable solution when using a package-based distribution. I’ll keep an eye out.

I’m not sure if I will eventually abandon Unity and go back to GNOME 3, which I have fallen in love with. I realize that Unity is really maturing at this point, and I want to seriously give it a chance, but some nagging issues (that I’m only just now identifying after running my everyday applications natively on real hardware) may make me want to jump:

It eats the Super key. I can’t trigger the Start button in my Windows 7 VM from the keyboard; Unity insists on catching the keypress and opening the dash.
It eats the Alt key. I can’t trigger many keyboard shortcuts. Most annoyingly, Firefox’s “Remember Password” button is Alt+R, but simply pressing the Alt key now opens the dash and dismisses the bubble where the “Remember Password” button lives! To workaround, I have to dismiss the dash and quickly press whatever “login” button triggered the dialog before the next page loads to get the Remember Password button to re-appear. Nasty.
Ubuntu’s notifications are really dreadful compared to GNOME 3′s beautiful notification handling.

I may install them side-by-side and test my uses out on each, but for now, I will stick with Unity for a week or two and see how things pan out.

In the event that something goes really wrong, I’ve also got a Windows 7 installation that can service my needs (currently a platform for running games) on disk. But after moving in, I think I’m hooked. It’s sad that it has taken so long, but desktop Linux really is shaping up, and if you’re even the least bit reserved about the future of Windows, I think you should take a look.