So…. Ubuntu 10.04 is right around the corner. Awesome, right? Well, they’ve made a number of changes which I’m less than excited about. One of them being moving the titlebar buttons from the top-right of the window (where they have been for ages) to the top-left. When this hit the news, it kinda bugged me on principle because it seemed like a “change for the sake of change” sort of thing. But I brushed it off and more or less forgot about it until tonight. You see, Beta 2 of 10.04 was released this week, and as is my custom I upgraded my “I like it to be stable, but it doesn’t really matter a lot if it breaks” laptop to see how things have been coming along since I last looked at the first alpha. Almost immediately I ran into this:
Can you tell me what’s wrong with this picture?
No?
Well, the problem with this picture is that fewer than a dozen pixels makes difference between clicking on “File” and clicking on “Close”. Perhaps even worse, less than 6 pixels mean the difference between hitting the main application launch button and clicking “Close”.
This is STUPID. This is going to piss off TONS of people. I’m a 15-year IT veteran and within 30 minutes of using this setup I accidentally clicked on the close button twice. What is the “normal desktop user” that Ubuntu supposedly targets going to do?
Ugh… seriously guys, it’s called Fitt’s Law. Look it up. It’s why things like this are BAD IDEA. If you are going to be making changes like this DO SOME FRIGGING USABILITY STUDIES.
I really meant to do a more thorough post on 10.04, but I have to go de-pressurize my brain after actually seeing this first-hand.
I know, the title has probably been used a zillion times. Today I discovered Yeasayer via this video on Vimeo. The video is sweet, though NSFW due to nakedness. I found it on Peanut Butter Pillow, which a consistent source of interesting bits and bobs. I think I discovered that via a tweet from the inimitable Jeph Jacques of QC fame some months ago. Listened to a bunch more of their stuff on Grooveshark while making Valentine’s cookies this evening and it was all awesome. According the their Wikipedia page they describe themselves as “Middle Eastern-psych-snap-gospel”, which is an accurate, though perhaps useless, description.
Also, this may be the linkiest post I’ve ever posted.
So, I was lamenting my lack of a decent place to put my headphones at work the other day. I decided it would be nice to have a hook on the side of the cabinet above my desk, but alas, I lacked a hook. To the office supply closet! One binder clip and extra large “super paperclip” later and we have:
Yay! Nothing beats the instant gratification of using office supplies in ways they were never intended…
I’ve moved my blog over to a self-maintained WordPress setup. If you see this, you are looking at the new site. Oh, RSS might be broken too. Gonna have to update that I suppose. Anyway, if you can’t figure it out or something looks terribly wrong, email me. qhartman@gmail.com
So, the Internet has been full of people from all sides talking about what I’m beginning to think of as the most ironic IT failure ever. I mean really, would you trust your data to a company called “Danger”?
For those not paying attention, last week someone attempted to do some work on the servers that hold the data of every T-Mobile Sidekick customer. That person or persons really dropped the ball, and all that data is gone, possibly for good. This is clearly a pretty big deal. Lots of questions are being asked, one of the more amusing ones being, “Who is really responsible? T-Mobile or Danger / Microsoft?”. That should be entertaining to watch shake out. A lot of people are also arguing over whether or not calling this a “Cloud failure”, as in “Cloud Computing” as in “The Cloud” that everyone is supposed to be buying into, is fair or not.
The opponents to this view are saying that the infrastructure in question was not a cloud infrastructure, so this is not a cloud failure, but simply a very visible normal IT failure. And technically, they’re right. But guess what? That doesn’t matter. This feels like a cloud failure. The service is the model of a cloud application. I have my device “here”, but all my data, all the stuff I really care about is “out there”. Where supposedly it is getting taken good care of. Not the case this time.
I really feel for the people who are investing a lot of time and effort into getting cloud computing into the mainstream. Seeing this labeled a cloud failure must be infuriating. Because it’s not. But very few people, especially tech news people looking for headlines, are going to care about that. The Sidekick model is undeniably a “cloud” model, even if it’s got normal IT guts. Maybe that is why this is a cloud failure. It’s not a failure of a cloud computing infrastructure, but a design failure where a cloud application was run on a non-cloud infrastructure?
In any case, the whole cloud concept just got a big black eye, deserved or not, and it’s going to take a lot of work to shake it off. Particularly in the minds of the people who matter most, the non-techies who ultimately pay the bills.
So, ABC shows are available on Hulu now. Never doubt the power of complaining to the Internet! I’m sure my earlier post was instrumental in their decision.
Went Geocaching this weekend. Meant to try this out for ages, but only just now got to it. Turns out it’s a lot of fun. Totally addictive. I feel a new hobby coming on. Yay! Liz talks about it more over at Modern Crafter.
In other news, it seems that it has become the fashion among OSS contributers / bloggers / fans whatever to get offended on the behalf of other people for things that are said in conference presentations. The latest was an apparently off-hand ( can’t say for sure, I wasn’t there ) comment made by Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxCon. Talking about how things in Linux need to be improved to make it easier for him “to explain things to girls”.
This is something that I find irritating. Seriously people. Has our society really gotten to the point that we can’t let people stand up for themselves, and we have to assume offense for them? I suppose it’s possible that these people are genuinely themselves offended, but I find that unlikely. In any case, there are better ways to deal with it than demanding apologies in public spaces. How self important, petulant, and egotistical is that? I would say more, but a very eloquent summary of my thoughts has already been written over here.
The user experience of watching shows on your website sucks. Even on supported platforms, having to click through the ads is a pain. Why not let Hulu do it for you? They’re better at it.
Liz and I went on an impromptu field trip north today for berry picking and ended up stopping in Aurora. Really cool little town. Pictures up at Flickr. Liz will certainly be posting her highlights over there shortly. The highlights for me were finding a good deal on a 16GB micro SDHC and a real nice butane soldering iron / heat gun at Fry’s.
I help organize (peripherally, Hal really does 90% of the work) a local IT group called the IT Pro Forum. A couple months ago I did a presentation on the fundamentals of Subversion; what it is, why you might use it, etc. Pretty basic stuff. Unfortunately, the audience was already pretty familiar with VCS systems, and in a lot of cases SVN in particular so I don’t think the presentation went very well. In an attempt to keep it valuable I pretty much threw away the content I planned on presenting and dove into more advanced stuff that I hadn’t really prepared for. It ended up being an interesting “conversation” though, and I learned a bit, so it turned out ok in the end.
And now, finally, I am getting my slides up. I’m a slacker, I know. Mea culpa!
I am an Oregonian techno-hippie with a strong interest in ethical independence and responsible freedom of all kinds. This is where I talk about stuff that interests me.more →
Tweets
"Math lessons for Budiansky: Industrial concentration vs. local choice" ( http://bit.ly/a1unyM ) <- Interesting take on local food vs. not. 1 week ago
