Iberia on-line check-in doesn’t work with free software
Apparently, there are still some 1990s-era websites which haven’t noticed that the web is not Windows. I realized this today when attempting to check in for an Iberia flight using my Ubuntu system and Firefox.
Someone thought it would be a good idea to use JavaScript and ActiveX to check whether the user has installed Adobe Acrobat Reader. If they don’t, it displays a helpful message:
Error message from Iberia on-line check-in
…and refuses to continue. After all, if you might not have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed, why bother trying to check in? I’m glad you asked. Because it’s not the only program capable of reading and printing PDF files!
You may have noticed that the message offers us some information, just in case the script got it wrong. Perhaps it tells us how to continue checking in despite having different application preferences than their developers? Unfortunately, no. Instead, it explains how to configure Windows to use Adobe Acrobat Reader as the default PDF viewer:
Helpful guidance for configuring your Windows system
I’m not the first one to discover this problem, as a quick search turned up instructions for working around the problem (Spanish, English translation) from September 2008.
Working from home: inbox focus
Like many people who work from home, I use the same computer for both “work” and “personal” activity. This has many benefits, including lower cost, more efficient use of space, and reduced configuration maintenance.
The main drawback of this arrangement is that it’s easy to get drawn into the wrong context. This is especially true in a company like Canonical, where there are people working at all hours around the world, communicating with each other on common IRC channels. If I see work-related conversations on IRC after hours, it’s easy to slip into “work mode” and start thinking about what’s being discussed, or even responding.
Similarly, if I look at my work inbox, my brain goes on autopilot and I start processing email even if I was doing something else before. This habit serves me well during the work day, when I can process a lot of email in the time between appointments, but in the evenings and at weekends, it’s a distraction.
Recently, I made a small change to my mail reader configuration to try to address this problem. If I launch mutt “off hours”, it uses a different default inbox than during “working hours”. These are of course approximate, but since both my personal and work inboxes are in the search path, it’s not a big deal if it guesses wrong. It generally only needs to be correct at the start of a session. Sometimes, it’s just the nudge I need to remind me to switch contexts.
set spoolfile = `case $(date +%u-%H) in \
[1-5]-0?|[1-5]-1[0-7]) echo +incoming.canonical.INBOX ;; \
*) echo +incoming.INBOX ;; \
esac`
apturl: Quick links for Ubuntu applications
I’d like to bring your attention to a little-used feature of Ubuntu which helps connect the web to the vast repository of software which is packaged for Ubuntu: apturl. It has been included in Ubuntu installations since 7.10 (Gutsy), but isn’t yet widely used on the web. Have a look at it and see if it might be useful to you.
Here are some examples of how you can use it:
- If you’re the maintainer of an application which is packaged in Ubuntu, add an apturl link to your site so that Ubuntu users can simply click to install it: If you’re running Ubuntu, check out Banshee
- If you’re the author of a how-to document, replace apt-get commands or Add/Remove instructions with a simple hyperlink: Step 1: To get started making screencasts, install gtk-recordmydesktop
- If you’re writing a blog post or other content where you make reference to an application, include an apturl link so that readers can follow along by installing it: I’m eagerly following the development of Gwibber in Karmic
It would be fantastic if someone came up with a “Get it for Ubuntu” image and a small, embeddable HTML fragment which could be used for these sorts of links. Meanwhile, please try it out and let us know what you think of it.
Update: WordPress completely destroys the apt: links in this post. Boo! Refer to the wiki pages for syntax examples.
Stop deleting your email
When talking about email, I hear anecdotes from people using the “delete” key to progress through reading their inbox. Presumably, this instructs their mail reader to delete the messages. Permanently. It makes me shiver each time I hear it.
Why on earth would someone do this?
An email that you have processed (read or replied to) isn’t trash. It is reference material. It is history. It is information which has been (in part) absorbed by your brain, and at least seemed important enough that you looked at it in the first place. Unlike many other forms of person-to-person communication we receive and process on a daily basis, it is digital. This means that it can be copied and stored forever without losing any information.
I’ve been saving virtually every (legitimate) email that I receive for some years now. When I’ve finished with a message, mutt automatically saves it to an archival folder without me having to do anything. It’s actually less work than deleting it (which requires a keypress). I only delete spam and other content which is truly useless to me. This adds up to under a gigabyte of storage per year. A few dollars worth of hard drive space is sufficient to hold all of it.
Every day, I refer back to messages I’ve read. I refer to more recent messages more frequently, but go back three months or more on a regular basis, to refresh my memory, to pick up on an old topic, or to provide context to someone who is joining a discussion. It is bewildering to me that this information is thrown away by so many people.
I also don’t ever have to decide whether something is worth saving or not, and this helps me process email faster. I can relax, knowing that I can always find it again if I need it.
So, why do you delete your email? Is this a by-product of using your inbox for archival, where anything which might be useful stays there forever? Is it just the simplest way to put the information aside when it no longer seems important at the moment? Do any modern mail readers lack the capability to archive messages for you? Do they not make it easy enough? Is it a habit which transferred from paper mail, where storing it is impractical for most people?
Micro-blogging maze
I’ve only been micro-blogging for about a month now, and already, it’s gotten complicated.
Diagram of my micro-blogging world
- I have five views of the micro-blogging world: identi.ca (web), Twitter (web), Gwibber (client), Twidroid (client), Facebook (web)
- I use two different micro-blogging services, identi.ca (which the free software community seems to prefer) and Twitter (which everyone else seems to prefer). Many people seem to be on both. Some of them relay their updates from one or the other to Facebook, some don’t.
- Most of the time, I watch identi.ca, but I occasionally need to check the other places or I miss something.
- identi.ca can relay my updates to Twitter and Facebook, but @replies don’t come back. People on Twitter can hear me, but I don’t often hear them until much later (when I check Twitter)
- Twidroid can send and receive both identi.ca and Twitter messages, but can only connect to one of them at a time (dashed lines).
- Gwibber talks to everything every way, but crashes a lot
- identi.ca uses #hashtags and !groups, and I never know which is right. Twitter uses #hashtags. In both cases, there’s no feedback about whether you’ve correctly guessed a hashtag which other people are using
I’m sure some of you, dear readers, have managed to bring this mess under control. How?
P.S. The diagram was originally an SVG, but WordPress doesn’t seem to support them. Shame…
Adventures in rebooting
Rebooting can be an exciting experience when tracking the bleeding edge of Ubuntu development. Today, after installing the latest round of updates (including a new kernel, the latest grub 2, and all sorts of other important things, I rebooted. A few things happened:
- My system failed to boot at first, because grub.cfg had been updated to use search --no-floppy, which wasn’t supported by the version of GRUB actually living in my MBR. I think it might be nicer if something as critical as a boot loader were more forgiving about this sort of thing, but at least GRUB’s interactive editor makes this easy to work around at boot time. A grub-install /dev/sda from single-user mode should fix it permanently.
- I noticed the console being set to graphics mode very early, signaling the arrival of kernel mode setting. When the X server started up, it did so without any flickering, creating a smooth transition from startup into the login screen.
- Presumably due to the above, my displays started to behave differently, with the external LCD set to its native mode (1920×1200) and the internal one set to its native mode (1680×1050), with the latter displaying an offset picture (much of the login screen was “off the edge” of the display)
I was hoping to see the lightning-fast resume times I’d observed in some KMS demos, but it still takes a few seconds on my system. At least it still works, with all this change. Onward and upward!
Smooth sailing to GRUB 2
GRUB 2 is now the default for new installations of Ubuntu, but as explained in the announcement, existing GRUB 0.x systems won’t be automatically converted to GRUB 2. This is because switching to a new PC boot loader is tricky business, and it’s generally best to leave it alone if it’s working.
Generally.
The main exception to this rule is, of course, the community of people who test the bleeding edge of Ubuntu development. Yes, perhaps even you! If you’re adventurous enough to be running Karmic in this early stage of its development, a little boot loader trouble wouldn’t kill you, would it? What’s the worst that could happen? You would have to boot from your handy Ubuntu USB drive, mount your root filesystem, and clean up the mess by hand. Maybe it’s been a while since you had to recover your system in this way, and it would be good practice!
Thus, I convinced myself to make the switch to GRUB 2. I wanted to be confident that Ubuntu 9.04 would continue to provide a great experience on my laptop for anyone installing it afresh.
It turns out, this is really easy to do, and not as risky as I thought: sudo apt-get install grub-pc
This will remove the grub 0.x package from your system, but don’t worry. It stays installed in /boot/grub even though the package is removed. While it’s installing, the grub-pc package explains exactly what to expect, and gives you a choice of whether to preserve your existing setup by chain-loading GRUB 2 from the GRUB 0.x menu. This is the default, and is a good way to confirm that GRUB 2 works properly on your system before making the final leap.
It builds a new configuration for you in /boot/grub/grub.cfg, preserving a few key bits from the old /boot/grub/menu.lst. This takes a surprisingly long time (I suspect os-prober, which has always seemed curiously slow).
When it finished, I rebooted, let it start up with the defaults (not touching any keys), and everything came up fine. To seal the deal, I followed the instructions given earlier and ran: sudo upgrade-from-grub-legacy to install GRUB 2 in the MBR, replacing GRUB 0.x and rebooted again to test that.
Everything just worked.
Refer to the testing instructions for more details, and add your system to the list if you test it.
Have you tried the “white boy” test?
From time to time, someone in the Ubuntu community writes about the experience of introducing a “normal person” (someone who has no specific expertise with computers) to Ubuntu. These accounts provide useful feedback to Ubuntu designers and developers working to make Ubuntu easier to understand and use. They are no substitute for rigorous usability studies, but are nonetheless worthwhile. By explaining where the subject got stuck, they help to identify the most obvious usability problems. By celebrating the user’s successes, they help to build a sense of accomplishment and momentum around usability. They usually go something like this:
My grandmother is 104 years old and has never used a mobile phone before, much less a computer. One lazy Sunday afternoon, I introduced her to Ubuntu. I helped her into the den, showed her the mouse and keyboard, inserted the installation CD…
They go on to describe the subject’s attempts to use Ubuntu for common tasks, without any prior experience of the system. I will boldly hypothesize, based on my own reading and without gathering any data, that the subjects are predominantly female. Perhaps the earliest examples of this were our references to Jeff Waugh’s mother, in early Ubuntu thought experiments, as an example of an uninitiated Ubuntu user.
Thus, we generalize: Ubuntu is so easy, even your grandmother can use it, or it passes the Mother test, or the girlfriend experiment shows just how far we have to go.
These generalizations idealize women as uninformed, technological novices or intellectual inferiors, which is particularly striking to some of us who learned computing from our mothers. This is not to say that statements like these are the origin of gender stereotypes, but they do display and reinforce these (often unconscious) beliefs.
In analyzing statements about gender roles, it is sometimes helpful to substitute for gender some other trait, such as skin color or race. This helps to illustrate bias, because many of us are more sensitized to racial stereotypes: is Ubuntu so easy that a white boy could use it? Does it pass the white boy test? If my white boyfriend can figure it out, you can too! This can be a useful way to “test” language and reveal implications.
We should think twice when we read, and make the effort to investigate our own speech as well. Unfortunately, our first impulse is often to deny the possibility of bias, and treat the situation like an argument we want to win. Instead, we should try to recognize these moments as opportunities to improve our awareness, and listen for new information in the reactions of others.
It would be a huge step forward for us as a community to do better at this. We will know that Ubuntu has truly arrived, though, when becomes more popular among white people than Apple.
Collecting debug information when your GPU hangs
After having my i965 hang) twice this morning, I decided to create a small script to make it easier to capture the relevant information when this sort of bug happens. Because the X server stops running, the display is useless, and it’s convenient to be able to get the relevant information by running a single command (I do this using ConnectBot on my phone).
It’s designed to be invoked manually by the user while the system is hung, but if we can somehow detect that it’s locked up, then we could run it automatically.
It collects dmesg, /proc/interrupts, /proc/dri and (for Intel cards) intel_gpu_dump output at the time of the hang. It then leaves behind a crash report in /var/crash, so that after the user recovers their system, apport will collect the usual information and submit a bug on the appropriate package.
If this seems useful, it could be added to x11-common or to apport.
Overflow error: need for better organization and management
I know that I have too much on my mind when:
- I have a brilliant idea
- I realize that I can’t do anything with it right now
- I realize that if I don’t record it, I will lose it, because I have a lot to think about
- I consider creating a list of ideas to come back to later
- I notice that I have already done this (and forgotten about it)
- I open the list, and notice that the idea I just had is already on it
- It has been there for a year
- This is not the first time this has happened
I’ve been thinking lately that I need to put some energy into organizing my life better, and this is a good example of why. I am flooded with information, creative ideas, desires, and responsibilities through my work, study, home life and reflection. I have no illusions about being able to fully honor all of these: that is clearly impossible. However, I instinctively feel that I could do a much better job of sorting and prioritizing them to maximize my personal effectiveness and satisfaction.
I am a great fan of keeping lists: to-do lists, agendas, my inbox, journals, and other tools all serve to help me capture my thoughts and consider them in a larger context. Rather than reacting to them one by one, I can look at all of them together and make a conscious choice about what to do right now. List-keeping is one of the most basic strategies of personal organization, and practicing it has made a dramatic difference in my life.
However, I can see that it is no longer sufficient, and that in order to continue to improve, I will need something more powerful. I’m not looking for a new list management tool: Remember the Milk, Futz, Tomboy, Jott, and many others provide highly optimized list-keeping facilities. I don’t use any of them myself (being a text file junkie), but they look great, and offer the right tradeoffs for different people. My method list-keeping is good enough for me, for now. Rather, list-keeping is not enough.
Similarly, scheduling has been a successful strategy for me, helping me to decide how I spend my time. I am not as proficient in scheduling as I am in list-keeping, but I understand the basics and apply them.
What I need is a new paradigm, a new way of thinking about this problem which incorporates and transcends list-keeping and scheduling, and addresses their shortcomings. I’ve only just begun to research this area, and so far, the most relevant material I’ve found has come from Stephen Covey’s classic text The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. “Habit 3″ describes a historical progression of time management tools and approaches which resonates with my personal experience, and prescribes next steps to improve upon it. I’m not sure yet whether it’s the right direction for me, but here is what I think so far.
Things I like about it:
- Explicit recognition of the various roles I occupy in my life
- Helping to balance priorities across different roles
- Promoting preventative and growth activities, in balance with day-to-day progress
Things which I feel are missing:
- Simplicity: It seems like a lot of bookkeeping, compared to how I’m used to doing things. I want a system which is as lightweight as possible, because organizational tools which create friction are self-defeating.
- Feedback: I want a mechanism which helps me to regularly evaluate what I’ve done and improve upon it. This should be as easy and automatic as possible, without requiring too much time tracking and data entry
- Technology: As a technologist, I’m always looking for ways to bring the latest technology to bear on my problems, to make me more efficient. Covey’s approach was designed without the benefit of the past 20 years of Internet revolution, and the software which is based on it seems a bit dry and monolithic.
Dear readers, do you find yourselves in a similar position? What are you using to manage your life? What else did you try? What was good or bad about it?
