Posts tagged technology

… is that there’s too much accurate information about the female reproductive system easily available in popular discourse.

One way to remedy this is for the video game designers designing the sequel to one of the best-selling video games of all time to make sure that children playing the game understand that, if you eat a monkey, an egg the size of your head will pop out of your hoo-hah. Clearly.

Also, while we’re at it, let’s be sure to use euphemisms like “hoo-hah” to let children know that we should never use medical terminology about this part of the body is obscene.

Another interchange with the brilliant minds at UCSB’s Instructional Computing department. Without soliciting any input from the campus community, they announced not long ago that they’ve decided not to provide web space for students, faculty, or TAs.

Here is their original message:

Subject: U-Web Service End-of-Life - February 2013
From: U-Web Service Management <sysadmin@umail.ucsb.edu>
Date: 11/26/2012 04:26 PM
To: “Patrick B. Mooney” <ADDRESS REMOVED>

Just before I went to the other night (Sunday, 4 November 2012, to be specific), my operating system, Ubuntu Linux, popped up a notification that the version I was using (that’s “Natty Narwhal,” version 11.04) was no longer supported and would no longer receive security fixes. It encouraged me to upgrade to the next available version, which is “Oneiric Ocelot,” version 11.10.

I fucking hate this, primarily because although I don’t want to have a whole new set of amazing!cool!Microsoft-inspired!features!, it is of course important to keep receiving security fixes for my operating system. Being forced to upgrade the operating system when the Ubuntu release cycle dictates that support for my current version has ended — which is generally every six months, since avoiding feature creep involves staying about eighteen months behind the bleeding-edge release — generally means I’m strong-armed back into “default settings” for the OS, regardless of how much time I’ve spent changing them, and means that I have to figure out a new way to alter those settings, because Canonical seems to believe that every release requires a new way of altering basic settings and that the OS should make zero effort to detect if a user has already altered settings, and should change the basic ways that users indicate what their preferences are as often as possible. So, for instance, having disabled the spiffy new scrollbars that got used by default when I was forced to upgrade to version 11.04, I can look forward to a totally different way to do it when I’m forced into 12.04 in another six months (I’ll need to install and remove packages instead of editing config files).

At the same time, being strong-armed into upgrading means that my computer slows down just that little bit more as feature creep loads new capabilities I don’t want onto my computer, because Canonical apparently wants to compete with Microsoft for the most complete set of eye candy. (One of the things I used to love about Linux: it was fast on old hardware. But recent Canonical releases not only remove useful features by default, but also enable the most processor-intensive features by default and make it difficult to figure out how to turn them off. I’ve done a dozen Google “how to X ubuntu 11.10” searches in the first six hours after upgrading, and I’m not done yet.)

A short list of things that have pissed me off so far:

• The box encouraging me to update contains a link that purports to describe the new features I’ll see, but the link actually describes the latest available version of the operating system, not the version to which I’ll be upgrading. This is confusing, especially because the link launches in the updater window, which is small and can’t be resized, instead of in my default web browser, and because the “new features you’ll love” burble only includes the version number for the version it’s describing in a part of the page that’s initially hidden off to the right and can’t be seen without scrolling. (I’ve filed bug #1074982 about this.)
• The “swappiness” setting that’s configured by default in the /etc/sysctl.conf file is 60, even for desktop versions of Ubuntu. The “swappiness” attribute indicates how eager the system is to swap chunks (well, technically, “pages”) of memory out to the virtual memory swap file on the hard disk. Of course, it’s in the best interest of most users to always keep some physical memory free, but a swappiness value of 60 is much too high for desktop users (the Ask Ubuntu community says that an ideal value for swappiness on desktop systems is 10; other people in general agree, i.e. here and here. Nowhere have I been able to find anyone who says that there is any benefit to desktop users in keeping the default value). A swappiness value of 60 means that the system always tries to keep 60% of physical memory free by swapping pages of (currently) unused (but occupied) physical memory free. Why on earth would an average desktop user want to avoid using 60% of their physical memory out to disk? Storing memory pages in physical memory allows them to be accessed literally hundreds of times faster than storing them on disk. This is not only a really stupid idea, but it would be easy to fix: All that would have to happen would be for one character in /etc/sysctl.conf to be changed. And yet, in the five years I’ve been using Ubuntu, this has not happened, despite more than one suggestion made to Canonical that it should be. Not only that, but upgrading from Natty to Oneiric overrode my customization (I’d already set swappiness to 10) and restored it to the default value of 60. Again, this happened silently.
• The Samba package didn’t upgrade properly (documented in bug #877852). This resulted in a confusing series of generically threatening messages implying that my system might be unusable on rebooting. To figure out what was going on, I needed to use Google. I tried to download a disc image for the operating system that I needed to install and burn it to a DVD just to be sure I could at least boot from a DVD, but … the system crashed and shut itself down while I was doing so. (Thankfully, I was able to boot again.)
  
• The OS update application assumes that it has the user’s constant attention. I clicked “go ahead and upgrade,” and a few minutes later it popped up a dialog box asking me if I wanted to keep a configuration file that I’d changed from the default, or whether I wanted to install the new default version. Since I’d already gone to bed, the upgrade process ground to a halt, and took two more hours to complete after I’d clicked the “install new default version” button when I woke up. Yes, I realize that some packages have to be upgraded and configured before others can be, but come fucking on. Surely there is some background processing that can happen in the interim.
  
• For some reason, the installer decided that on rebooting, I should be using XFCE as a desktop environment instead of GNOME, even though I haven’t used XFCE for months. This required logging out, discovering (due to the issue described in the next bullet point) that I didn’t know how to log into GNOME, logging back into XFCE, doing a Google search, logging out again, changing the setting, and logging back in again.
• The login screen has been more or less entirely redesigned. User names now appear along the left side, and the icon that exposes the option to choose which desktop environment will be launched on startup has moved from the bottom-right corner of the screen to being (as a much smaller version) right next to the user name. (That was a Google search right there.) Surely this is an aesthetically driven change, but it’s confusing and not immediately obvious.
• No screen saver enabled by default. Nope, none. There are instructions available (on external blogs, requiring another Google search) on how to get a screensaver running, but the procedure is janky and requires opening the “Startup Applications” applet to manually add the screensaver daemon to the list of programs that launch on startup. (Really? Really?) Apparently, the GNOME screensaver, which I’ve been using since time out of mind, doesn’t work at all in 11.10. As nearly as I can figure out. This ties in to my next point …
• Canonical has gotten really pushy about wanting people to use their Unity desktop environment, which I fucking hate. It’s a bad Apple UI rip-off if I’ve ever seen one. It’s “simple” and “beautiful,” or something, but functionality that used to be easy to find now difficult to find or no longer exposed at all. I wanted to continue using GNOME 2, but it (apparently) won’t work at all in 11.10, since the GNOME developers have stopped developing it and upgrading to GNOME 3 means … you guessed it … another hit against system resources. Because, yanno, everyone is buying a new computer every year or so, so we should offset any gains in faster processing with an operating system that sucks up more resources, so people are treading water, buying new hardware just to keep the same phenomenological experience of how fast their computer is. And people who can’t afford to buy a new computer every twelve to eighteen months? Grad students, for instance? Well, fuck ‘em. That’s what they get for being poor.
• On a related note, how about making MATE, the still-developed fork of GNOME 2, available in the standard repos? Especially given the number of people who hate the living fuck out of GNOME 3 and Unity? (Linux Mint is not above giving their users this option, Canonical.) MATE has asked to be included in the Ubuntu repos, but this request has been assigned “wishlist” (i.e., very low) priority by the Ubuntu maintainers.
• The upgrade process seems to have entirely removed or disabled most of my GNOME themes, presumably because Canonical wants me to use Unity instead of GNOME. GNOME 3 is in general much less polished and usable than GNOME 2 — another brilliant idea (“let’s replace a polished set of software that works great with a half-assed, still-under-development version!”). Apparently, this problem can be partially obviated by adding yet another repository that offers software tweaks and extensions that aren’t meant for complete morons, but I, for one, don’t know how well supported this repo is, if it’s supported at all.
• Packages that I’d previously pinned to a specific version to prevent upgrades got (silently) upgraded anyway. Most annoying change: I’ve been using an old version of GQView, because newer versions dropped some features I really like when it became Geeqie. Well, the upgrade process went ahead and replaced GQView with Geeqie. When I uninstalled Geequie and reinstalled an old version of GQView that I’d downloaded before, it still still showed up as pinned in Synaptic, so it’s clearly not that the upgrade process accidentally unlocked it. It just didn’t care.
• Packages that got removed and replaced with “default clients” for various services:
  • Pidgin (apparently, I should be using Empathy. Fuck you for trying to strong-arm me into your default application, Canonical. I like Pidgin).
• It used to be possible to edit aspects of the GNOME theme, like the text highlight color, easily. Now it isn’t. In combination with the fact that the default highlight color is an ugly muddy orange, and that upgrading restored a bunch of customizations (including this one) to their default settings, this was really annoying.
• Upgrading restored the “character palette” panel applet — a convenient way to enter characters not on my keyboard — to its default settings. I’d spent a fair amount of time adding to it, and particularly in gathering into the same palette characters that are frequently used together (e.g., the 9 characters not on my keyboard that I need to type in German; fraction symbols; typographical symbols). Now all of those are gone, and I get to create those panels again.
• The dictionary panel applet has apparently disappeared completely and seems not to be available at all. A dictionary on your menu bar that you can type into directly and look up words from the Internet? Who would want that, when you could launch a web browser, wait for it to open, type in the URL for an online dictionary, wait for it to load, then type in the word you’re looking for, and wait for a web page to load that’s much larger than the definition for which you’re looking because it contains a bunch of ads and pleas to play online games developed by the dictionary website? Clearly, that’s much more convenient, and we should remove the dictionary applet entirely. ‘Coz everyone who uses Ubuntu, apparently, is an idiot, and therefore rarely reading anything that uses words they don’t already know.Dictionaries built into the operating system. Pshaw.
• Remember when you could type a command or program name in the “Open with…” dialog box in Nautilus? Yeah, that’s not an option any more. It’s been redesigned, apparently to be more “user-friendly.” You have to pick from a list that, apparently, can’t be edited directly. (I wish to fucking Christ the Ubuntu — and GNOME — devs would read Dominic Humphries on “the myth of ‘user-friendly,’” in this article. Apparently, “user-friendly” means that it’s designed so morons who have never before used it can figure it out immediately, with no help — even if this means crippling what experienced users can do with it, or how long it takes them to do so.)
• The operating system upgrade decided that, when using GNOME, my default file manager should be PCManFM, not Nautilus. I don’t know why it made this decision for me, since I only use PCManFM when I’m trying very, very hard to conserve resources (i.e., booting into XFCE to get the absolute fastest performance), but this is what the upgrade process decided for me. Yeah, you can apparently change your default file manager by opening Nautilus, right clicking a folder, and choosing “Open with …,” then picking your new default file manager, but this (a) is non-intuitive for most non-developer humans, and (b) a pain in the ass if you’ve got multiple desktop environments installed, because they all seem to describe their file managers as “file manager,” “files,” “file browser,” or something very similar in the “pick an application” list, rather than simply listing the application name (“Nautilus,” “Dolphin,” “PCManFM,” etc.). This makes for a trial-and-error process instead of just picking one from a list. (This is apparently another “let’s make things easier for idiots, we don’t want them to have to figure out the names of the programs they’re using or, indeed, to ever become aware that programs have filenames” idea. Problem is, it has a negative impact on non-idiots who have more than one desktop environment installed.) Oh, this brings me to my next point.
• Speaking of Nautilus: a bunch of features have disappeared, as far as I can tell. Remember that button that had an upward-pointing arrow on it? The one that, when you pushed it, would move up one level in the directory hierarchy? Yeah, that’s gone; I’m guessing that’s in favor of reclaiming window space or some other bullshit. (This post on Ask Ubuntu says that the GNOME developers are trying to “simplify” the interface.) Yeah, there’s a backward-pointing arrow that lets you move back one location in your history, which is equivalent if and only if you started viewing the current folder by double-clicking it from its parent. And yeah, it’s possible to hit Alt+Up Arrow to do the same thing, which is convenient if you happen not to be using the mouse at the moment.
• File Save/Open dialogs have stopped remembering how you’re sorting. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I like to keep my file dialogs sorting by, say, date modified when I’m performing certain tasks. Now, all my file save/open dialogs always sort ascending by file name every single fucking time I open them. Really. Fucking. Annoying.
• File Save/Open dialogs have stopped remembering what your last used folder was (although a Save As … will, in fact, put you into the folder in which the current version of the document is saved). Instead, the default view is a “recently used folders” pseudo-folder. Which is, again, fantastic if you’re an idiot, but if you’re trying to save multiple documents into the same folder, for instance, then it’s another double-click every time. Once again: good for idiots, bad for power users.
• The Adobe Flash plugin was silently replaced with the open-source alternative, Gnash. Which, yeah, way to go on open-source advocacy, Canonical, but Gnash doesn’t work nearly as well, and you didn’t tell me in advance you were going to install it while removing Adobe’s version, nor announce the change afterwards. I had to figure it out by discovering that most Flash sites weren’t working, then trace the problem. Because, yanno, Canonical, I have nothing better to do then to deal with bullshit Microsoft-like strong-arming.
• Alt+F2 to launch an application sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. Once I’d been using Oneiric for a day or so, it stopped working completely. An initial workaround was put the application launcher applet in the upper panel. Of course, moving my hand off the keyboard to the mouse, then moving the mouse pointer to the upper right corner of the screen, then clicking the little icon, takes about four times as long as holding down the Alt key with one thumb and reaching for F2 with my left ring finger, and if I have to reach for the keystroke, wait to discover it’s not going to work, and then take my hands off of the keyboard and use the mouse, well, that takes about ten times as long. But hey, operating system, just respond when you feel like it. No biggie. I realize you have needs too. Apparently, this can be completely fixed using a technique documented here (there are a lot of other “work around the stupid decisions the Ubuntu people have made” tweaks listed in that article).
• Newly opened windows, by default, don’t move to the top of the window stack — they appear one level behind the topmost window. Which means that, if you’re working in a maximized window, you probably get zero visual clues that the system has in any way responded to your request to open another window, program, or whatever. This is really fucking stupid. It can be fixed by using one of the techniques documented here — provided that you’re willing to work around the incredibly poor descriptions that some members of the community are giving for how various things can be accomplished.
• The “System” menu has apparently disappeared entirely from the GNOME menu bar. This is really fucking annoying. Much of it has migrated into the “Me” menu’s system settings applet (another bad choice, both in terms of the “Me” menu’s name — let’s name things like Microsoft does! Brilliant! — and in terms of where the functionality has gone) or into one of the submenus of the Applications menu. Which means I get to re-learn how my operating system divies up its graphical exposure of the programs installed on my hard drive. Things I’ve not yet been able to find that used to be in the System menu:
  • The CompizConfig settings manager (launch with Alt+F2 — when that works — then type “ccsm” — duh.)
  • Synaptic (Alt+F2, hopefully, then “gksudo synaptic”). Apparently, Synaptic is not installed by default on fresh installs of Oneiric Ocelot, presumably because it’s “confusing” and “complicated” for idiots. (Why include a power tool when there’s a simple version that can do half as much?)
• Lots of small, non-obvious changes, requiring a lot of time spent trying to figure them out. For instance:
  • Changing the properties for the GNOME panel now requires not right-clicking the panel, but holding down Alt while right-clicking it. Yes, this is actually an improvement, since it lets me more easily adjust properties for the panel itself even when the panel is full, but it is one of about nine trillion changes not documented in the release notes nor, for all I can find, anywhere else.

I’m grateful to Canonical for distributing a free OS, and for driving development in the Linux community. But I’m starting to have the sneaking suspicion that getting most of their revenue from selling technical support incentivizes making confusing changes between versions in the hope that some people will pony up money rather than doing several dozen Google searches or endlessly moving through menu items, trying to figure out where the program that they used to be able to find has moved.

It’s disappointing that, after being a Linux user for under five years, I can already pine for the old days — the days when Linux was about choice and configurability, and not about some corporate jerks making top-down decisions about “good design ideas” and “usability” and “user friendliness” that assume that everyone’s usage patterns is the same, that people don’t want options, and that it’s a good idea to change basic aspects of functionality and user interface design with every single release. Canonical’s claim that “each new edition of Ubuntu is better than the last, harnessing new technologies to make it quicker, easier and more intuitive than ever” seems to be designed to appeal to new users — trendy eye-candy as part of the user interface, constant changes to the exposure of underlying functionality — rather than to keep existing users happy. Sure, many the Linux world’s equivalents of rabid Apple cultists will always sing the praises of the company that’s doing the most to bring Linux to the “masses.” But those of us who don’t use computers like the “masses” do might legitimately wonder about why Ubuntu is eliminating easy access to options in favor of nudging people toward all behaving in the same way. (Might I suggest that the name for the Unity desktop and the way that Canonical is drumming for it seems, in this context, a bit sinister?)