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Dear Internet Advertisers

[music | Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - All Tomorrows Parties]

This week both Ars Technica and Fark, both of whom get decent traffic, have basically begged users not to use ad blockers. I think people would be less likely to use ad block if your ads didn't kill our browsers, below are some examples.

On Fark, the square ad at the top of the right-hand navigation bar demolishes WebKit based browsers on Linux. Doesn't matter what the ad actually is, but if I hit Fark in Arora or ReKonq without Flash turned off, they die as soon as they hit that ad, every single time, write it down. Fix that shit.

Sprint ads. Sprint ads have been consistently crippling Mozilla based browsers on Linux as well, both Firefox and Flock. "Occasionally", using autoscroll (mid click scrolling), the browser will just crawl and become unresponsive. It will continue to slowly scroll until the ad is off the page, then become responsive again. I can't tell if this happens on Mac, since I mainly use Safari.


Holy fuck, it's the Perfect Storm(or perfect Curve I guess)! Luckily this session is in Chrome on a Mac or else my machine might have just shot itself in the face

I realize these are both Flash issues, and that the state of Flash on Linux and Mac is pretty abysmal, I use both platforms. So…. you want people to stop blocking your ads? Show ads that don't break my goddamn computer, is it a deal? Maybe stop dealing Flash ads? JS only? Maybe?

Now, I honestly don't use ad blockers. In the case of Arora or ReKonq, the only way is to turn off Flash, which is annoying, and in a general sense I don't mind getting ads. I do hate ads that break my browser, or which open popups, resize my browser, redirect me, etc. Stop that shit Fark, stop trying to open pop-ups, and fix the ad in the right-hand nav on the homepage and we'll be buds.

One more time: Don't complain that no one wants to view your ads when your ads are harmful.

xrayspx's picture

Google Chrome Review @ 5 Minutes in

I've just been playing with Google Chrome from the Dev Channel site. After 5 minutes, I've got some things I hate.

  • Title Tabs Done Wrong:
    I like the idea of integrating the tabs into the title bar, however they don't go far enough. If you just reach up there and click-and-drag, chances are you'll grab a tab, and detach it or move it in the tab order.

    When Apple lifted this same trick in the Safari 4.0 betas, it was great because if you just grabbed any tab, it acted as the title bar would and moved the window, if you clicked and held, then started dragging, it would drag/detach that tab. That's how this should work.

    I like the fact that there's very little, well, chrome in Chrome. I like minimal layouts that give me maximum space for what I'm looking at and don't interfere. Chrome could probably drop 20 pixels by pushing the tabs to the top of the window and making them behave properly.


  • Tabs open behind current tab:
    This makes me nuts. When you click a link in the current tab, the new tab opens behind the current one, and not all the way to the right like I expect. Here's a use case that shows how worthless this is. If I'm on Fark, and Fark is on tab 4 of 8, and I click 3 links and 3 comment section links, they're now jumbled in as tabs 5-10, rather than 9-15. They're not where I expect them, they're where I have to hunt for them. This cannot currently be changed by the user.

  • No on-the-fly Search Selection
    I like Flock because, among other things, you can drop down the search box and choose an engine on the fly. By default Chrome will let you change your default engine between Google (go figure), Yahoo and Bing!. But there is no search box in the browser. What they mean by "default engine" is "what engine is used when you type text into an empty tab URL box, or highlight and right-click text in a page". That's pretty cool, but I'd love the ability to change that engine based on the context of the search rather than through Preferences. A good case is typing in "Big Trouble in Little China", dropping down the menu to IMDB and pulling up the IMDB page. The way to do that at present is to type "Big Trouble in Little China" into the URL box, right click the URL area, click Edit Search Engines, and tell it to make IMDB the default (after setting up the IMDB search engine yourself). Then you'll have to change your default back to Google later.

  • Mid Click Auto-Scrolling:
    There is none. One of my main gripes in Safari is the lack of auto-scroll. For anyone not paying attention, the idea is you click the middle mouse button, and then move the mouse up/down left/right to scroll around, no need to slavishly ZING a scroll-wheel/ball around to go up/down the page, or dive to the edge of the window and try to grab the scroll bar. Civilized, brainless, and easy on the tendons.

  • Chrome is low on Chrome:
    This is a "LIKE", I'm really happy with how sparse it is. The nav-bar + tab bar + window chrome is much smaller than Firefox, and even smaller than Safari. That gives more room to me and gives me a window that is small and tight, not annoying like FF. I also like the solution to the Status Bar, which is the bar at the bottom of Firefox or Safari where it shows you the destination of a link you're hovering, or how many items of a page have loaded.

    Chrome doesn't have a status bar, but instead they have a status "ribbon", let's say, that appears to cover part of the lower left of the window when you hover something or the browser has something to say, like that.

I'm sure there will be more, I'm not sure if it will be more positive or more negative. I suspect this will be another browser I use occasionally to see if it fixes the things I gripe about, and then put back in the drawer and go back to FF or Flock until it gets better, MOAR, or whatever.

xrayspx's picture

Backups

I've recently had to think about the mechanics of making idiot-proof backups on Linux and OSX. The specific machine I'm backing up is a Linux host with a 40GB drive. Historically only about 10% of the drive has been used, and the user has an IMAP mailbox, so all the mail is safe already.

The smallest USB drive I could get was an Iomega 250GB for like $60. Since the drive is 6x bigger than the drive that's being backed up, I've decided to make a multi-snapshot backup set using rsync. I have rsync propagating deletions, so this is in the event the user realizes that they've deleted something they needed, but it was like 2 weeks ago, they can go rooting for it.

The basic idea is to test that the drive is mounted correctly. Then to rotate all the snapshot directories one step, then mv the oldest snapshot into position to receive the new sync update. This way I'm never copying anything, and I'm never resync'ing the entire directory structure.

Then I pop a dialog with the results of rsync, or a dialog saying the drive isn't attached correctly.

Here's the script I'm using:

Read More

xrayspx's picture

What it might look like if I used Twitter

Almost exactly half my music collection contains "the". Of 15,137 tracks, 7578 have "the" in the Artist, album or track name. So I'm 19 off.

The reason this came to my attention is that I was searching my collection for The The. iTunes doesn't seem to like that search much and only hits on one "the". Quotes mean nothing to this application. Thanks again Apple.

xrayspx's picture

What "Apple Tax"?

Why I gladly pay the Apple "Luxury Tax"

First thing first, on their high end, Apple is very affordable, and at their low end, I consider the few $ more absolutely worth the money. I'll start with the OMG Macs are so damn expensive myth. When I bought my Mac Pro a couple years ago I wasn't out to buy a Mac. I was out to buy an HP workstation and run Linux. Then I went comparison shopping. At that time HP couldn't even approach the $2600 price point for my Dual dual-core 2.66Ghz Mac Pro. I think a lot of people compare against consumer PCs, which is the wrong thing to do. If you want to go part-for-part with Apple, you must compare against HPs workstation class machines. These machines have the added benefit of not being 1000 shades of annoying with a zillion colored LEDs and shiny plastic. When I bought my machine, the Mac came out $1300 less than the HP, let's do the same comparison today

Apple Mac Pro
Dual Quad Core Harpertown 2.8Ghz
2GB of memory (if you pay Apple for memory, you're a moron)
320GB SATA disk
NVidia GeForce 8800 (This was a $150 upgrade from the ATI) 512MB
2x 1Gb/sec NICs
$2,949

HP xw8600 Workstation
Vista Business 64 (OS makes no difference, they offer free downgrades to XP, but there is no "no OS" option, which I would want in my comparison since I want Unix)
Dual 2.66Ghz Harpertowns
1GB of memory
250GB SATA drive (HP's semi-pre-configured system didn't offer anything bigger)
NVidia Quadro FX570 256MB

$4,015

If I want to make it match by bumping up the CPUs and memory, it's $4,775 for the HP. The Mac uses 800Mhz FSB memory, the HP uses 667Mhz. HP doesn't tell you what NICs are in the system, I can only hope there are two.

So it's a very easy victory for the Mac Pro there.

Operating System
The OS Choice Issue was my second hurdle. I am a long time Linux-on-the-Desktop guy. Starting with RedHat 6, my primary desktop machine had been Linux. Windows simply isn't an option for me. I very much like the idea of Open Source, but I'm not above paying money for something that saves me time. Windows doesn't work for me, it's a workflow thing. Taking the time to describe why is outside the scope here. It's sufficient to say that "Cygwin is insufficient here".

Getting used to OSX took time, no argument there, but I don't have to ever screw with NDISWrapper WiFi driver bullshit ever again. I don't have to deal with VPN clients that require me to turn off one core before connecting so they don't hang my machine. What I do get is a stable Unix system that runs and runs fast. The Linux software I like can be used through Fink, which admittedly is less than completely ideal, but Amarok, KDE Baskets, and PAN run just fine.

The great things I love about OpenSuSE are things I don't need on the Mac. YAST for example is a fantastic package manager, but I don't need it.

Software

So that brings us to the software comparison. There's honestly not much to compare, but here we go

KDE4 - Is great, compositing shuts off if I drag highlighted text from Firefox (a GTK app) because of the highlighted-text-drag-effect. Compositing also gets shut off when the machine is locked sometimes.
--UPDATE: I fixed this and it's documented here. Basically Firefox makes a picture of the text you're dragging, you can shut that off in about:config -> nglayout.enable_drag_images = False

I think they should fix the issue, rather than just say "turn that off", but that's just me.

Leopard - Doesn't do that shit. Is accelerated. Everything is a PDF, you know the drill.

VMWare - Free on Linux, Fusion for Mac at $79. Fusion has 3D Acceleration, which is good enough for me to play GTA. Also, drag and drop between the VM and host desktop, and rootless mode, which I don't use much, but it's pretty cool some of the time. You can also have Mac document types bound to Windows apps, for instance, if I want to, I could have .doc files on the Mac open in Word on the VM.

So, show me where I'm out hundreds of dollars for buying a Mac here? I don't want to hear "The $1000 consumer HP model is good enough", I want to see "Here is a box with every identical part from the Mac, and it's $X less". I don't want to build PCs anymore, I do want a warranty.

xrayspx's picture

Converting Visio Stencils to OmniGraffle

Someday, we'll live in The Future, I swear it.

Last year I bought OmniGraffle 4 Pro, I really, really like that app, and it makes using Visio seem like self torture. Now only if the formats were open all the way around...

The thing that has held me back with OmniGraffle is the lack of stencils. Graffletopia does a great job, but I find myself using the Apple or Dell (mixed with the Sun, Netapp, etc) stencils that aren't really representative of my hardware, and I feel that it just doesn't seem that professional when I hand my boss a network or rack diagram that has all this disparate hardware that doesn't match anything we actually own. I have a lot of Visio stencils, some of which DO work in Omnigraffle using their preferred import method: Make a new drawing in Visio, drop your objects on there, save it as an xml drawing, and import that into OmniGraffle. The problem is that for a huge percentage of stencil sets, you get an error that you can't load the EMF data and get a grey rectangle or munged object.

Many people have been recommending blowing the objects way up in Visio and using a screenshot, or exporting the document from Visio as a PNG or some such. This will get you your objects, but they'll be raster images and you will lose both detail and the ability to scale them. What makes Visio and Omnigraffle (and PDFs, and Illustrator) work so well is that your objects are vector images and are scalable in all directions while maintaining quality.

To import those objects which don't convert properly, I've started using the following method, which isn't perfect, but the objects do come across, and you don't have to rasterize them.

I am using:
Visio 2002 in a Windows XP VM
Illustrator CS3
Omnigraffle 5 Pro

Go into Visio, create a document and populate it with some of the objects you want to convert. I've found that if I really load this up, it doesn't work so well. Save this document as .emf or .wmf (enhanced metafile or windows metafile). Oddly I've found that CS3 doesn't like the .ai files saved out from Visio 2002. YMMV. This would obviously be the preferred way to move files around, assuming it works.

Open the saved file in Illustrator on the Mac. You may have to ungroup/regroup your object and sub-objects. When you're ready, cut and paste your object from Illustrator into Omnigraffle using CMD-C and CMD-V. Dragging them from one app to the other didn't seem to work exactly as I would have expected.

Now, in Omnigraffle, click the gear icon in the Stencils panel and select "new stencil". This will open up a canvas that you can copy your new object into after whatever tweaking you want to do. In Omnigraffle 4, this is done with the Stencils menu instead.

There should be simpler ways to do this, but I haven't found any that produce results of the same quality with as few steps. I've found that you can use OpenOffice or NeoOffice to open the emf/wmf files, and then follow the same steps to import the objects, but it seems the NeoOffice rasterizes the files, so while it does work, you lose some detail. I'm also looking for other methods. Inkscape does a great job of opening and editing PDF documents, but doesn't seem to save in any vector format that can be loaded by Omnigraffle (mainly saves in SVG variants). Omnigraffle claims to be able to open PDFs, but I haven't had good luck with that in the Real World.

If I find an easier way to get quality stencils from Visio into Omni, I will update the page. In either case, I'll add screenshots soon enough.

I also wouldn't blindly upload any stencils you create to Graffletopia without running by them or the original stencil distributor, as that would almost certainly put you and Graffletopia both in hot legal water.

Mail.app and IMAP Folders

For some time, I've been annoyed by Mail.app not checking all folders every time it checks mail. My situation is that I have an IMAP server at a colo, a Mac Pro at home usually with Mail.app running and more importantly, running its filters, and a MacBook running Mail.app that I take with me to work or wherever.

The problem is that as mail comes in and gets filtered by the Pro, the laptop continues to check mail every minute. However it does not "see" messages that get filtered off. So if Dave sends me mail and it goes to the Dave folder, the only way I notice it is if I manually click that folder, which isn't happening.

So how do you fix it? I know there is probably a way, but I've not found an official answer to this in the months I've been looking, so here's what I've got that actually works.

Hit the Mailbox menu and select New Smart Folder. Use "Message is not in mailbox" rules if you don't want to check things like your spam folder (I have my spam stored on the server so if something gets filtered, I see it. Also make a rule to specify "Message Type" as "Mail" so it excludes any RSS feeds you have.

This should hit every folder you have, and when it does, it will actually "touch" that folder, and make the unread message count for that folder update. So what I've done was just collapse the "Smart Mailboxes" in Mail, and I'll probably forget that thing exists, since the unread message counts are now correct.

Woo, yay Apple. My life clearly isn't complicated enough. I'll update this with screenshots later, this is kind of a draft so I remember what I did.

UPDATE 11-10-2009:
I had some luck using FAM (File Alteration Monitor) on the server side (Courier). Since every mail in a Maildir directory is a separate file, FAM is able to check that filesystem for changes, report that to Courier, which makes the mail clients pick up the changes. Mostly.

However, famd kept running my server out of memory, so I had to turn it off. Back to the drawing board.

xrayspx's picture

OSX vs OpenSuSE

[music | Leaether Strip - What If (Beats on classic mix)]

The Amarok discussion usually comes as a result of a wider discussion/flamewar about the "little things" that bug the shit out of me a year after dropping SuSE for OSX as my home desktop. I used Linux as my desktop for about 8 years, and before that for more "traditional" server type applications. I've had a Linux desktop since Redhat 4.1, but it didn't replace Windows completely until about 1999. That gives me a different perspective on how a computer Should Just Work. My definition of that is skewed by things like uptime and standards compliance. I have no idea what the Standard Uptime is for a Windows desktop machine. My Windows desktops have always stayed up for months and months, because they do nothing except run Outlook and specialty business software that I couldn't get to work under Wine.

So from that perspective, OSX is not particularly stable. The only time I ever rebooted my linux machines was when either the power went out or I was upgrading SuSE. Aside from that, they Just Worked. I don't count things like upgrading KDE as a reboot, because it was just an X11 restart, ctrl-alt-backspace, new DE starts, no reboot. Leopard is more stable for me than Tiger was, especially in terms of returning from standby on the laptop. However in terms of applications "beachballing" and having to force-quit things, well that kind of thing rarely happened to me in SuSE. I'd probably kill Firefox every couple of weeks because something screws up or its footprint was too huge. I have to force-quit Safari every day or two (no SIMBL or other wackiness anymore until I figure out why this is).

Here's a quick list with some detail about what really bugs me, and what I really like in OSX:

xrayspx's picture

Amarok vs iTunes

I get asked a lot why I hate iTunes and what's so much better about Amarok. This is about Amarok 1.4.7, since there is no good way to run Amarok 2 yet. When I can get any copy of Amarok 2 to load a track and play it, either via the KDE4 Live CDs or from RangerRick's KDE on OSX native project, I'll give it a spin.

Here's a quick list of beefs with iTunes:

  • Collection list on one side (full height), playlist on the other.
    --Currently I have a Party Shuffle running in iTunes in one window, and then a collection window next to it, that's not really ideal
  • Lyrics search
  • Built-in Wikipedia search
  • I like the iPod management a lot better, and the ability to copy to AND from my iPod
    -- Like many things, there are tools for this (Floola I guess)
  • Last.fm integration - Amarok has similar artists and other info in the context menu from last.fm, this extends beyond "Submits my tracks".
  • Auto updates your collection, quickly
    -- iTunes doesn't really like it when you just take a bunch of folders with MP3s in them and drop it in the folder your collection's in. Well, it doesn't "not like it", it just doesn't notice them. There are tools you can run, which take ages to rescan your entire collection, but the situation is lame. Amarok does that better.
  • Amazon has a lot more album covers than iTunes Music Store, and Amarok has a way better cover-art management tool. I hate Coverflow. As a mechanism to search for a CD, it is pretty bad, and with so many albums not being in iTMS, it means I have to use Amarok, get the covers from Amazon, then go tell iTunes where they are for each CD. Nah.
  • Amarok uses open DB formats, which enables you to write your own tools a lot easier than you can with iTunes DBs.

    I would put up a similar list of things I think iTunes does better, but I'm not sure what those things are. I don't use ratings, the checkbox thing never seems to work, at least against my iPod, and I don't like the layout of the collection list (finder-like or a huge list of tracks), I prefer a nested list of Artist -> Album -> Track. That makes it way easy to browse, and doesn't make my targets move like the finder interface does.

    So you'll notice, there /are/ solutions for many of the features I like in Amarok, but most of them involve "find another app to run to let you do this", whether that's a browser so I can hunt for lyrics or Wikis, or Floola or iScrobbler to deal with other features that iTunes should have by default. I have huge doubts about the Amarok UI redesign in Amarok 2.0 until I actually see it in action, but being native should help its stability on OSX. For now I either just use iTunes, or run Amarok in a VM.

  • xrayspx's picture

    Tools and Hacky Stuff

    Here are some tools I've written which could be of use to other folks. It's going to be mostly Cisco related, some of which is still being formatted before I upload it, more to come.

    CSSManager is a tool to simplify suspending and activating services in a Cisco CSS load balancer. It adds a couple of features like the ability to "lock out" a server and to add comments to a suspended machine to give context for its suspension. More features to come.

    CSSPump A tool to display at a click the state of all services on a Cisco CSS 11000 series load balancer. It reads the comments set by the CSSManager above and adds them to the display of active/down/suspended servers.

    OpenSWAN to PIX VPN. How to configure FreeS/WAN (Now Openswan) on Linux and a Cisco PIX as endpoints for a 3DES IPSEC VPN.

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