Two Slashes

I’ve had my Creative Zen MicroPhoto for several years now; I think I’ve had it just about since they came out, in fact. It’s been a great player; it does everything I want (plays music), and everything “just works” (yes Apple, I just used your marketing ploy describing a competitor’s product, shoot me). However, there comes a point where technology becomes outdated, and you need to move on.

In this case, the limiting technology isn’t anything that can be fixed with firmware…I’m simply running out of space. When I bought the thing in the first place, my music library sized up somewhere between 4 and 6 GB in disk space, which was decent enough for me at the time, and fit easily into the player’s 8GB. So I was happy, because I had room to expand.

Well…come forward to today. My media library certainly isn’t 6GB anymore…heck, I couldn’t fit it on any less than about four or five ZMPs. Which of course means that with my increasing library, I have a choice to make in regards to how best to utilize the space I have and what gets prioritized enough to get cycled on and off the player. But it gets really disappointing when I go to look for a song, then have to remember that I cleared it off last week to make room for some other song.

Thusly, I’m in the market for a new MP3 player. And of course, I’ve been looking around and comparing, as any semi-intelligent person would do, at any device that satisfies my needs.

But with the newest generation of players, I think several engineers forgot what the word “standards” meant. And I mean that in a big way.

One of my bigger gripes is with the connectivity of these devices. Go back to a few years ago, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a non-iPod player that didn’t have a standard USB connector on the end. Now, it’s almost the norm to require the use of 2½ breakout dongles just to hook the blasted thing up to your computer. But not only does that mean you need special accessories for each device you get (because face it, they’re already ignoring one standard, what would compel them to come together and develop another), but some of the features they advertise and provide are utterly useless.

Take, just as an example, the all-too-common concept of the mass storage device on the MP3 player with exorbitant amounts of space. By definition, this would be something that I could carry around with me and use to carry around documents and whatever other files I needed to have with me. With something as standard as a USB port, I could simply find a compatible cable (or borrow one from another device I’m carrying around with the same connector, such as a camera) and use that temporarily if I’m away from home. Not so with the proprietary crap of this age, not at all. If you want to store something, you’d better have the cable for your particular device on you, or be able to acquire one in a flash…or you better not even be considering your “proprietary-connector-enabled” device as a storage option. And let alone people who like having a clean desk with few cables laying around – because you can’t use the same connector for multiple devices, you’re either forced to leave a USB port on your desk, or have all the connectors bunched together in one area and connected to a USB hub so that you can pick-and-choose without having to

I was reading some stories on Digg today and came across a rather interesting comment on one of the stories (don’t ask me to link to it; my history list is a mile long) in which someone pointed out a “standard” with smartphones: you can run third-party applications on them. Oh, wait…let me revise that. You can run third-party applications on non-Apple-iPhone smartphones (at least, stock/non-jailbroken ones) . Where along the line did the definition of smartphone move from an easily-expandable, wide-platform device such as a Palm or (uggh) a Pocket PC to something as shallow as an iPhone? Yes, indeed, standards my ***.

If you don’t know what Linux, Ubuntu, or Gutsy mean, or you don’t feel like reading an incredibly painful and technical post, you probably want to read something else.  Might I recommend one of the links at the bottom of the page?

This week was supposed to be a big excitement for Ubuntu users, what with the release of Ubuntu/*ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10.  For many people, it’s been a fair experience.  Especially if these people are newbies, I’m talking of the perfect experience to get them into the Linux camp, and keep them for years to come.

However, Gutsy’s name has a double meaning that not many people are as willing to consider.   In a way, most people are correct in that the only real significance the name has is to differentiate versions and continue the trend of alliteration in the names set way back in the time of the “Hoary Hedgehog”.   However, I see a further significance to the name, as do many other people with (often unheard, or not-well-known) complaints about the new release.

Now, to be fair, I guess I owe a bit of back story before I launch into a ridiculous rant.  Since the time of Dapper Drake, I’ve kept an install of Kubuntu as my default operating system on my laptop (only using XP as a dual-boot option for times of necessity, like to use external video for reasons I won’t get into now).  This means that the majority of my work ends up being based in Linux.  With no problems, I’ve successfully used Dapper Drake and (with one small installation quirk) Feisty Fawn (6.06 and 7.04; I skipped 6.10 Edgy for reasons I don’t recall).  Anyway, since the release of Dapper, I’ve been pleased and more than happy to use Linux for the fact that everything worked, was recognized, and I really didn’t need to worry too much about what I was mucking around with because things usually ended up working (with only one or two notable exceptions).

Now, having had successful experiences with previous versions, one would assume that there would be nothing but good news surrounding updates.  Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for me, and several people just like me.   And I’m not inexperienced with Linux at all either, but the problems I’ve had are really turning me away from Gutsy and making me regret attempting to upgrade more and more as time progresses.

I’ll try to recap some of the more interesting of the problems I’ve had trying Kubuntu Gutsy here (while I reinstall and see if anything changes for the better), but there are so many it’s hard to even think to recount all of them.

• Shutdown no longer works.  At least, not without ugly hacks.  Yes, this is a very big, and seemingly very well-known issue.  Every version of Linux I’ve used on here in the past, be it Ubuntu or not, has worked perfectly in the power department, with no complaints whatsoever.  That is, until Gutsy.  Even the Live CD fails to power down the laptop when it should, instead giving me a black screen.  The hard drive is parked (as noted by the absense of being able to hear it and the distinct clicking sound it makes when you normally abruptly power off the machine) and nothing, including the keyboard, is responsive…but the only way the machine actually quits eating power is to physically hold the power button until it does so.

  Like I said, this appears to be a popular issue, with plenty of people suddenly in a similar situation.  But I find something as big and as common as this unsuitable for production-level software.  If you pride yourselves on having just released five alphas and some release candidates, one would expect the final product to uphold the standards set forth in them.  Feisty powered everything down fine; having to resort to holding down the power button not only is annoying, but it’s a great way to let your laptop overheat in your bag when you forget, and the thing sits there with the fan spinning full blast.

  Some people have reported being able to fix the issue by disabling ACPI support.  I tried it, and it worked for me.  However, this is unacceptable as ACPI is almost a necessity on a portable machine, which is why I’m not going to recommend it unless you’ve no need for what ACPI provides.

• Using a screensaver apparently causes the laptop to quit responding.  Yet again, this is another issue that I never had with Feisty.  Not that there’s much else to say than that.
• Suggesting that there’s a distro upgrade available when I’m running the latest build isn’t exactly helpful. Let me rephrase that:  Adept keeps suggesting that there’s an upgrade to Gutsy available.  Which would be helpful, say, if I was still on Feisty.  But seeing as I’m already on Gutsy, and the little tool it downloads to “continue the upgrade path” already sees I’m on Gutsy, it makes sense if everything else could seem to see that too.
• Where are the Kubuntu desktop effects? Exactly what it sounds like; I want to make my windows wobble on command.  Instead, Compiz seems to enjoy making sure I don’t have a window manager by the time it quits (Emerald starts with it, but doesn’t restart KWin at the end of the session).  Which is funny, because everything seems to be enabled by default on the Ubuntu Gutsy CD and working better than I would have expected.  Why can’t this methodology be easily applied to the KDE crowd?
• Hamachi refuses to start without beating around the bush.  Once again, there’s something changed between Feisty and Gutsy that plays with how well Hamachi functions.  While I don’t exactly blame either party for the break (it’s an OS upgrade of sorts, stuff happens), it shouldn’t take a ghetto hack involving decompressing Hamachi with UPX (which should be a non-issue at this point anyway) to get things working again.  Seriously, if people wanted that kind of thing, they’d probably be compiling their own kernel with Gentoo by now.
• I no longer seem to be able to add local printers via the Printer settings panel in the KDE Control Center.  Wait a second, it’s my machine.  Why am I no longer able to add printers to it unless those printers exist on a network connection (at least, using the GUI; there’s always the “edit-CUPS-configuration-files-and-pray-everything-works-when-you-restart-the-daemon” approach which still seems to be a viable option) is beyond me…what happens when I need to hook up to a printer directly?
• Strigi is annoying to no end when you trigger it accidentially.  Searching is a necessity, but I don’t call it efficient when I decide to reuse a tab Strigi is running in in Konqueror, only to find that every time I try to type a new URL, it overwrites it with one of its own.  It’s not exactly funny, now, is it?  Should I start taking things like the gas pedal off the developers’ cars?
• OpenOffice toolbar icons?  What icons?  Yup, there’s a bug in the included version of OpenOffice that for some reason makes all your toolbar buttons the text equivalents.  Yes, I’m aware it’s a configuration option to make them look like that anyway, and I know all about the different icon themes.  But flipping with the settings doesn’t work.  You’re stuck with the text.  (Hmm…for some reason setting the theme to Crystal suddenly allows about one of three different themes at the bottom of the list to work again…)

Given all the negatives, I must say that I have noticed that installing packages (once downloaded) appears to go a lot faster for me than it used to; even installing a big clump of packages doesn’t take more than a few seconds.  And I also enjoy the fact that the included version of KNetworkManager now seems to support VPNs through the aid of VPNC (or, I don’t remember having this capability before), which helps enormously considering my school requires one to connect to the campus wireless network.

However, also seeing how the *.04 releases seem to run better for me, I think I should stick with those for a while.  But if you’re one of the people who’s gutsy enough to put it all on the line for Gutsy…go ahead…be bold, be gutsy.

Tech support. Not one of the happier places for a geek of any kind to work, considering the fact that most people call up with a very poor attitude and about as much patience as a bull, and the dread of every consumer, knowledgeable or not, for fear of long hold times and the chance of getting someone who’s already irritated or has about a day and a half of total experience, mostly in topics unrelated to the product at hand.

When something happens, they’re your second stop, right after a more knowledgeable friend. We all know someone we can turn to for help with this or that (or perhaps you’re the person everyone turns to), and everything seems to work out in turn. But when they fail, the next stop is a bit of wasted time on the phone.

You’re probably wondering where I’m going with this, but if you’re going to know what I’m ranting about, you need a little backstory. So here goes…

(continue reading…)

For those of you with a Motorola Razr V3x and some interest in toying with what the external LCD displays, I’ve written a short how-to on the matter. It’s available right here.

EDIT:  My goof.  Some simple searching would have shown that there is a huge difference between the V3x (what I was calling the collection of phones, which ironically turns out to BE a phone) and most of the other Razr V3 phones.  So instead of referring to them as V3x, I’m going to just call them V3′s or V3*.  Makes things easier to comprehend at least.