The Mandelbear's Musings

This marks the first week for which, at N's suggestion, Colleen and I prepared a weekly menu in advance. It came out fairly well -- you can see it at the end of the notes. There were a couple of substitutions, but on the whole it was a success. We did the same this week.

I got a fair amount done. Unfortunately, very little of it was my taxes; that's the top project for this week. I did, however, get the Mac set up and the program I still think of as TaxCut (currently called "H&R Block at Home" or something like that) updated. The Mac, Whitewood, is set up on my desk, with (ThinkPad) Raven next to it on a tray table. There's a little story about that...

You see, sometime Friday morning I managed to spill some coffee onto my little ThinkPad, Cygnus. I shut it down and left it to dry out. An hour or so later, it booted, but some of the keys on the lower right-hand corner were flaky, and I couldn't get it to accept my hard drive password. That's when I set up Whitewood and Raven. Fortunately I had pushed recently, so Raven was able to sync right up and be productive.

Then, since I had a Linux laptop and a Mac mini with a nice large monitor, the obvious next step was to install x2vnc and share the Mac's keyboard (a ThinkPad keyboard, of course -- I'd had it at work), trackball, and mouse. I put those all on a KVM switch (which I don't use for monitors, only for USB, because switching a VGA monitor confuses my computers). Win. It took altogether too much time to figure out that the reason x2vnc didn't seem to be connecting was that Apple's implementation puts up a lock screen when you first connect. :P

x2vnc is pretty cool -- it lets you share a keyboard and mouse between two computers, using VNC's screen-sharing in the input direction, but not actually viewing the screen. Instead, you just move the cursor onto the other machine's screen, across whichever edge you specify.

The other tech-related failure Friday was that my attempt to replace the charging port on Colleen's old tablet was unsuccessful. Quite possibly the flat cable isn't seated correctly. It was a bit of a long shot, though I would have liked to be able to at least do a factory reset.

I spent quite a lot of time Friday looking up ways of unlocking a password-protected hard drive when one doesn't have a working computer to enter the password into. Apparently Lenovo changes their password hashing algorithm every so often, so you have to get a ThinkPad that was made close enough to the time your dead one was. Ouch! I didn't really care too much about the data, since it was all backed up, but that was a comparatively new SSD and I wanted to at least make it usable even if that included wiping it.

Around 9:30 Friday evening I turned Cygnus on again and it booted. Not wanting to push my luck I turned it off again almost immediately, but not before I'd removed the password on the hard drive.

It turns out that password-locking a drive is a massively bad idea. Among other things it means that you can't use it in an external enclosure, and might not even be able to use it in another computer. It's better to use your OS's "whole-disk" encryption, because that actually encrypts everything but the boot partition, and it does so in a standardized way so that you can use it anywhere as long as you have the password. You can use a variant on the same encryption technique to encrypt a single home directory, or even a single subdirectory.

Also Sunday, I discovered when I went to post last week's summary that my client, ljupdate.el, doesn't work any more because Dreamwidth has gone to SSL everywhere. I made several attempts to fix it, but so far no joy. I'll probably have to cut-and-paste again. After I get my taxes in, the first thing I want to do is write a new -- and more general -- posting client and integrate it with my build system (see MakeStuff).

This Saturday, though, N went to the Seattle Home Show and found a company that was having a 2-for-1 deal on some pretty awesome scooters. They're not exactly travel scooters -- they fold a little but don't come apart, and they're pretty heavy, but they're designed to be roadworthy. 18mph with a 25-mile range. We'll probably have to replace the seat on one for Colleen to be comfortable, but... She can definitely ride to Freeland and back in one.

In all, a rather frustrating week, but it could have been a lot worse.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Yet another reason, if any were needed, not to like Macs. I pulled out my shiny new Lenovo thinkpad keyboard, which works like a dream. Nice touch, no errors. Trackpoint far enough down so that I don't touch it accidently. Three buttons. I've typed this entire paragraph with no errors due to missed or doubled keys. Perfect.

...but there doesn't seem to be an Apple key. Blerg. At least, if I use it for text, I won't go hitting Apple-W when I want to delete a word and end up deleting the window I was typing into.

There's a Thinkpad in my future, I suspect.

Would have been less if I hadn't counted the laptop I have from work.

After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced. However, while navigation has been improved, Vista isn't a breakthrough in ease of use. Overall, it works pretty much the same way as Windows XP. Windows hasn't been given nearly as radical an overhaul as Microsoft just applied to its other big product, Office.

Nearly all of the major, visible new features in Vista are already available in Apple's operating system, called Mac OS X, which came out in 2001 and received its last major upgrade in 2005. And Apple is about to leap ahead again with a new version of OS X, called Leopard, due this spring.

After spending much of Sunday afternoon trying unsuccessfully to get my DeMuDi laptop (Debian-derived, sort of Sarge-and-a-half) to recognize my new Edirol UA25 audio interface (ALSA recognized it but Audacity, which uses OSS, didn't), I tried it on the Mac laptop I "borrow" from work. Audacity hung -- this is not a good sign. Finally I downloaded the beta for Audacity 1.3, and it worked like a charm. OK.

I've loaded up the Mac with a fresh copy of my working set. Really need to automate that sometime -- it's just a bunch of cd and rsync commands.

My underwear, socks, and shirts are in the drier even as I type, the rolly has been packed, I've practiced the dicey songs from my concert set tomorrow, and I've printed pre-preorder fliers (see next post downwhen from here), my set pages, a clean new songbook, and business cards.

As of this morning I was seriously doubting that I'd be ready. Still need to sort the laundry, pack the suitcase, package up my meds (tomorrow), and pick CDs for the trip.

I love it when a plan comes together!

Here's an interesting exchange of blog posts on open formats and why they matter. I found it through a reference in this post on O'Reilly Radar, which is interesting in its own right; it's about the fact that Flikr and Picasa are opening their APIs to allow users to transfer their pictures between them.

That leads to "When the bough breaks" by long-time Mac guru Mark Pilgrim, explaining why he's just switched to Linux on a new Lenovo ThinkCentre after 22 years on Macs.

In fact, I spend the vast majority of my time using these and other open source applications (Carbon Emacs, Colloquy, Audacity, Seashore, Python, and a variety of command-line tools). Why keep running them on an operating system that costs money and restricts my rights and my usage?

...

I'm creating things now that I want to be able to read, hear, watch, search, and filter 50 years from now. Despite all their emphasis on content creators, Apple has made it clear that they do not share this goal. Openness is not a cargo cult. Some get it, some don't. Apple doesn't.

It's all about lock-in due to closed, undocumented, proprietary, binary file formats. As we'll see later, he was bitten one too many times. The next post is And Oranges by John Gruber, which is mostly an excellent discussion of the difference between the high-quality Mac user interface and the others, which are "good, but not great" -- and how that wasn't the main factor in Mark's decision.

Telling Pilgrim that he's making a mistake because Ubuntu doesn't have as refined or cohesive a UI as Mac OS X is like telling someone who is switching from a Chevy Tahoe to a Toyota Prius that he's not going to have as much cargo room. He knows it.

... but then he goes on to say that

Admitting that he has a point, or several points, or that he may well be correct that he's going to be more satisfied with Ubuntu than he was with Mac OS X, does not imply that Mac users are wrong or stupid or foolish.

And the truth is I'm not entirely sure he's making the right decision, even for himself. Forget all the niggling details he cites, and focus only on his central beef -- that Apple is a company that does not "get" openness, and that this deficiency is going to hinder Pilgrim's long-term access to the data he's creating. But if that's the case, and Pilgrim has been using Apple computers for 22 years, why hasn't it happened already?

This is what Mark takes issue with in the last post of our series, Juggling Oranges:

It has happened already, John. Over and over again.

He then goes on to list the occasions, dating back to the years he spent between 1983 and 1989, writing software for the Apple //e, "a platform that doesn't exist and can only be emulated with the help of ROMs which are illegal to redistribute."

And then came Tiger, and Mail.app 2.0. In Mac OS X 10.4, Apple deliberately changed Mail.app to use their proprietary .emlx data format, apparently to work around the limitations of Spotlight. Mail.app 2.0 helpfully auto-converted all my wonderful mbox files into Apple's shitty undocumented format. I'm now in the process of undoing the damage. I tried an emlx-to-mbox converter program, but it has bugs that ruin certain mail messages and corrupt the resulting mbox file. (Specifically, mail messages that contain a line that starts with the word "from".) Perhaps JWZ's emlx.pl script will fare better. JWZ knows mail.

He ends with:

Which brings us back to John Gruber's oranges. His counter-argument -- that lock-in hasn't been a problem for me yet, so why all the fuss now -- could not be further from the truth. It's been a constant problem for 22 years. Much of the data I've spent my life creating has been lost or seriously degraded through a series of proprietary formats and forced migrations. This is why I felt so betrayed, in particular, by Mail.app "upgrading" me away from mbox format. It took a lot of forethought on my part, not to mention actual time and effort, to convert all my disparate mail archives from all those different mail programs. I finally got everything into a single archive in an open, stable format... and just 3 short years later, Apple found a way to screw me one last time. It'll be the last time they get the chance.

And that, children, is why open formats are important, and why neither Microsoft nor Apple -- nor, ultimately, any proprietary software -- can be trusted to use them: it's all about lock-in. The greatest superiority of open-source software is that by construction it uses open formats. I have email and Usenet archives dating back to the mid-1980's that I can still read and search. My filksong lyrics date back to 1982, with only a single format transition (from plain text to LaTeX). I have programs and Makefile's that I wrote for long-obsolete Apollo workstations and the original 8086 PC that I can simply recompile and run two decades later. I have 15-year-old configuration files for X and Emacs that I'm still using.

I'm a proud, happy user of open-source software and open data formats, and when they pry my keyboard from under my cold, dead fingers, my children will still be able to read my files.

... and of course it doesn't bother to check for software updates after you install the upgrade. It's already connected... how hard can it be? Debian, as usual, has been doing this all along. And I had to check for updates yet again in order to get Java 1.5.

The Bear is not impressed.

I'm most of the way through the process of upgrading my (work) mac laptop to Tiger, which I had to do because it's needed for a demo on Monday. It's a lot like watching a snail crawl across your screen, with only a little dramatic tension added by the knowledge that, if it falls off, it will explode messily and get little bits of snail pulp all over your hard drive.

Right now I'm installing "xcode", which is what they call the development package. It's been telling me "Time remaining: less than 1 minute" for about 10 minutes now.

It's times like this that remind me why I use Debian as my desktop OS.

update: 14:31 ... and why does it take a fscking reboot and a fscking hour to install X11?? And how do I know it's not leaving little bits of snail pulp all over while it's doing it??? And why did I have to agree to their stupid licence for the fourth time in order to install software that's under the MIT license????