Older blog entries for pcolijn (starting at number 155)

Microsoft still doesn't get it. Ars does:

To unseat a player like the iPod and to convince users to ditch any PlaysforSure tracks they might own, Microsoft needed to hit a home run on launch day.

According to the same review, however, the Zune locked up right out of the box and there are pretty serious problems syncing, in addition to the much touted iPod-killing wifi feature being so severely limited that it's next to useless. If anyone is seriously going to "kill" the iPod now, they have to have something that works flawlessly and smoothly, in addition to having some cool new distinguishing feature that makes it so tempting that users just might be willing to throw away all their iPod FairPlay tracks. In short, it's next to impossible to "kill" the iPod at this stage, and MS doesn't get it.

Unfortunately for them, their anger at this situation, which is not unlike the situation they've created with Windows and Office, does not an iPod killer make.

I just spent a delightful weekend with slatepelican in Montréal. We walked around in the ridiculously cold and wet but oh-so-Montréal weather, ate ridiculous quantities of unbelievably unhealthy food and saw some friends. So it was a great time.

But I found it a little odd being back. I remember when I first visited Montréal I thought it was such a big, modern city. And of course it still is a big, modern city. But after New York I feel "dirty" somehow, because the wonder was lost on me this time. Or if not lost, it was at least different. This time Montréal felt like a small, quaint town. Which is not really a bad thing; in some ways that's what Montréal's going for. But I was somewhat stunned with my own changing perception.

Nickel and Diming

In Montréal, slatepelican and I stayed in a fancy hotel. The room was very nice, and we enjoyed it a lot.

However, they charged ridiculously for lots of things. Access to the Internets, for example, would set you back $15 per day. The bottles of water in the room: $8.

Now I find myself in a somewhat less fancy (but still quite nice) hotel in Palo Alto. Fast Internet is included in the room, and the bottled water is free.

andukar and I had a similar experience in Seoul. We stayed at a hostel for a few nights and then moved to a fancy hotel. The hostel had free Internet access, lots of channels on TV (including a Starcraft channel!) and a modest, but free breakfast. The fancy hotel had neither free Internet nor free breakfast, and had a downright awful selection on TV.

Why is it that when you pay more for a place to stay, you get less? In both these cases it is true that the more expensive option had better location and better accomodation, but on the other hand there already is a price premium, so the nickel and diming seems obnoxious.

Random (potentially NY-related) Tangent

Ok, what is it with the giant sunglasses, people? The 70s are calling and asking if we got the memo that giant freakin' glasses are ugly. That is all.

I finally got around to purchasing a bike this weekend. Yay me! I had forgotten how fun it is to blast between lanes on gridlocked streets at 40kph. Whee! In other news, I'm in pretty bad shape these days, having not biked in a while. Need to work on that...

Notifications

Not in the programming sense, but in the UI sense. IMO, notifications have become public enemy number one. There are way too many of them, and they're almost all for stuff I don't care about.

My music player just started a new song? You know what, I know that! I can bloody well hear it! No need to pop up a stupid, ugly yellow box in my face! My software update is complete? Who the fuck cares? Such-and-such program that I manually started needs to access the Internet, and you need me to click "yes"? Would I have started the stupid thing in the first place if I didn't want to use it?

No operating system is immune here: the above 3 examples came from Linux, Mac and Windows respectively.

The thing is, notifications are distracting to the user. If you're going to disrupt the user's train of thought and get in the way of what they're doing, it better be for a damn good reason. "Your battery is almost dead," for example. If I don't know that, my computer will die and that will be even more annoying than getting the notification. But if the notification does not help the user avoid something more annoying than the notification itself, it's not worth it.

BTW, Microsoft has an item about notifications in their new HIG. Though it recommends them for "non-critical" information; I strongly disagree with that. It does, however, say to use them "judiciously," whatever that means. As pphaneuf says, you can tell something is easy when it's done often, badly. Maybe vendors should make APIs that do annoying things like notifications exceptionally difficult to use :P

Shiny Thing

I became one of those people with a vanity domain recently. You can now reach me at caffeine@colijn.ca.

The MTA (aka the NY transit people, aka the only people I know who actually use a .info TLD) hate me. The past few weeks, the train I take home (the L) train has not been running between midnight and 5am. For those who know me, you can understand that this seriously cramps my style. Bastards!

But now, to rub salt in an already painful wound, they've decided not to run the L train all weekend. So I'm essentially stranded in Brooklyn unless I want to spend an altogether rediculous amount of time taking the G and J trains. Grr!

Head First Design Patterns

I bought this a little while after GUADEC and being inspired by pvanhoof. It's pretty good. I've actually used most of the patterns in some way, shape or form before but it's good to put a name to them and get the formal definition in my head. However...

Rant: UnsupportedOperationException

So I touched on this a while earlier but today my hatred for UnsupportedOperationException got some more fuel when I was reading the design patterns book.

In the composite pattern they actually recommend using this exception so an implementation can avoid implementing some of the methods from the interface. They do mention that not implementing some of the interface methods is bad, it's a tradeoff, etc. Fine.

What's evil about UnsupportedOperationException is that it's unchecked. Meaning the compiler doesn't warn you about it if you don't try to catch it. So here you are, coding against some interface and unbeknownst to you some of the methods are just going to bail on you and your app will crash, and you would never know that this will happen by looking at the interface specification or from compiler warnings. Lovely!

Please, people: stop using UnsupportedOperationException! If you really need to leave some interface elements unimplemented make your own checked exception like UnimplementedException or something and explicitly indicate which interface elements are optional by using throws in the declaration.

Unchecked exceptions should really only be for serious runtime errors, like NullPointerException, ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException or ClassNotFoundException. IMO UnsupportedOperationException is a gigantic hack that should never have existed in the first place. And now we're all screwed by it.. sigh.

My iPod just died. It's very sad. It just won't turn on at all, even if it's connected to my machine (so it isn't just that the battery's dead).

Either I've had extremely bad luck with my iPod, or they just plain suck. I bought it less than a year ago and it's already been replaced once. In addition, it skips on mp3s that xmms, mplayer, rhythmbox and my Rio Karma all manage to play just fine.

slatepelican also had her iPod die recently. And I notice that everyone seems to have a pretty new iPod around here; either the nano or the video. You don't see very many minis or pre-video full-size pods. Either people really love upgrading their iPods all the time (Apple's marketing is really good, so this is possible, I suppose) or I'm not the only one experiencing iPod distress.

Is it unreasonable to expect a gadget to last more than a year? Or are iPods and the like just the latest thing to become disposable?

Sometimes I feel like everyone in this country is this guy.

If you use Mac OS X try:

export CLICOLOR=true

In your .bashrc. Why this isn't on by default is a pretty huge mystery to me.

Unfortunately...

There's still lots of suckiness left. People often ask me why I don't like Mac OS X. I have some good reasons, but they're hard to articulate. I'm going to try anyway. Also note that I don't mind OS X for stuff like browsing the web, listening to music or managing photos. Since those kinds of things are where OS X is mostly targetted, I'm not claiming OS X sucks in general. I'm claiming it sucks for me.

1. Not really a feature of OS X itself, but Mac keyboards and mice are annoying, especially if you use UNIX apps. ctrl and fn are reversed, so I hit fn all the time (ctrl is also the way more useful key, so it should be easier to hit). And one button mice.. yeah, lots of fun when you want to use an X11 app. On a non-laptop you can of course just plug in whatever keyboard and mouse suit your fancy, but you're stuck on a laptop.
2. Window management. In short, it sucks. When you have 4 or 5 terminals, plus a few Vim windows, plus a few browsers, it's really hard to get around. command-tab helps a bit but its semantics for apps that have multiple windows (like terminals and web browsers) are never quite what I expect. Exposé was supposed to remedy this, but when I'm working away I don't want to make my machine swap to disk just so I can see all my windows. Plus, on my MacBook Pro it doesn't work for some reason. I setup the hotkeys I want and they just show some weird symbol I don't understand when I push them.
3. The dock. Most confusing interface EVER. You can put files, folders and applications there. Some applications disappear from there when you quit them, some don't (yes, I know the rule governing this behaviour, but it's not intuitive). And if an application isn't in there it's a lot of effort to go and find it and run it. Some apps, if they're running and you click the icon in the dock, they will raise their windows. Some won't. So you can't depend on that behaviour from the dock (it does at least appear to be consistent with command-tab).
4. Speed. This has gotten much better over the years as Apple's hardware has gotten faster and Mac OS X has gotten more efficient, but it still can be an issue. For example, Firefox takes 11 "hops" in the dock before displaying a window on my MacBook Pro after I boot. I have a gig of RAM.
5. Notifications. When an app wants to tell you it's done something, it bounces incredibly annoyingly in the dock for a while, completely distracting you from whatever you were doing. This often happens for seemingly unimportant things, like "we finished installing your software update." You know what? I don't care. I'll reboot when I feel like it, thank you very much.

This entry will be a rant. You've been warned :)

I finally got my new bank card from WAMU (that's Washington Mutual for those lucky enough not to know). This has been a long saga.

Step 1: learn from drheld that WAMU was replacing their VISA debit cards with MasterCard debit cards (which in itself sucks, since MasterCard is accepted in fewer places than VISA).

Step 2: have WAMU cancel the VISA part of my old card before I had received or activated the new card. Incidentally, this happened while slatepelican and I were in Spain. Not the best time.

Step 3: have WAMU assure me, very convincingly, that my card would continue to work in ATMs until I got the new one and activated it. Indeed it did work in an ATM. One more time. And then it stopped working entirely.

Step 4: receive my new card, finally, because Tony was nice enough to bring my mail from California when he was visiting drheld and Don in Vancouver.

Step 5: activate the new card! Yay, money! Order stuff online from Amazon and PalmOne.

Step 6: orders from Amazon and PalmOne not working. Call WAMU. I thought I activated my card? No, we cancelled it. Ah, so when I said "activate" you thought I meant "cancel." I see. Well can I get a new one? Sure, it only takes two weeks.

Step 7: get new card finally today.

Step 8: activate new card. We'll see if they actually did it this time.

The thing that infuriates me the most about this is that to get a new card with WAMU they have to send it in the mail. Pretty much any Canadian bank that I know of will give you a new card on the spot if you go into a branch. WAMU claims they can't do that because all the cards have to come from some central MasterCard place. They should at least be able to give you a new ATM card on the spot. Not being able to get money, especially in a city like New York, really sucks hard.

Things I have learned so far:

• Paris CDG is quite possibly the worst airport in the world. Too ghetto to have the little walkway from the plane to the terminal, incredibly slow busses to take you to the terminal, incredibly slow busses to take you between terminals, glacial immigration lines (though when you finally get to the front, they don't do anything; they just take your little card out of your passport and let you go) and a lossy baggage system. Fun! I keep trying to come up with some funny expansion for CDG, preferably starting with "crappiest," but I can't think of anything good. Suggestions welcome.
• Stores and restaurants and pretty much any kind of business in Spain have the oddest hours. At any given time, maybe 1/3 of things are open. We've gone by a supermarket at many times of day and never seen it open. You can walk down the main street in the middle of a business day, when you would expect all the shops to be open, and only find a few willing to take your money. Odd.
• Evolution uses 80MB of memory. Gahjeebus.
• Happily, tinymail uses 4.5MB of memory on the same mail. I should really check that out. pvanhoof's talk was really good, and I need to check out this.
• Gimmie is pretty cool, and almost makes me want to switch back to a GNOME desktop from ion. Almost :)
• Some very cool stuff is going on in monodevelop. I usually can't stand IDEs because I'm a vi addict, but it turns out the editor in monodevelop is completely replaceable, so you could conceivably just drop in vim. And it's not just for C#. Worth looking into, anyway.

Exhibit A: mrwise

Exhibit B: one chocolate-raspberry cheesecake

Can you imagine the effect of combining exhibits A and B? Well let me tell you, it's glorious. Gloriously flatulent, that is. It also seems to be inducing hysteria:

"I practiced my vagina off, and grew a cock. A healthy cock." — mrwise
"I think that needs to go on PlaNit" — me
"... it kinda hurt, though." — mrwise