User Interfaces

Why is there such a strong focus on making user interfaces simple and easy?Let me give you 4 examples of software that is not simple and easy, and yet have the best user interfaces of all.

1. The in-house terminal based applications we use at Mathematical Reviews. Replacing these applications with a point-and-click interface reduces productivity (unless you add other features to offset that). A completely keyboard driven application has a steeper learning curve but increases productivity in the long run.
2. Vim. I have been using Vim for around 8 years, and before that its predecessor Vi. Vim is by far the best programmer's editor I have ever used and I won't even consider using an IDE if it doesn't integrate Vim. Therefore I don't use and IDE.
3. Blender. Some people have described Blender's user interface as bizarre. Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but once you learn it you love it. It is very efficient and natural.
4. GUI System Administration tools. What's wrong with editing config files? Even when I have a GUI available, I go to the command line to do all my system administration. It's just quicker and easier once you get past the curve. I was past the curve 13 years ago.

So what's my point? Don't judge software by its ease of use. Sometimes the best software takes an investment of time.

What has driven developers to make things easier and easier? It's not productivity or efficiency. It's not technical sophistication. It's not because it's better.

It's Marketing, plain and simple. If you want people to adopt your software you make it really really easy. You aim at the least common denominator. The lower you aim, the more you sell.

Xgl and Compiz

I was bored last night so having recently upgraded to Ubuntu Dapper Drake, I thought I would attempt to install Xgl.

It is remarkably easy. It was in the Ubuntu repositories already so all I had to do was click a few times and it was installed. A simple edit in the GDM config file causes Xgl to start when X starts.

This thing is really cool. I didn't take any screenshots, but Phil did and there are numerous demo videos on the web.

Xgl with Compiz out-blings the Mac. Yes, there are drop shadows, transparency, and fade-in/out, but there are also wobbly windows (your windows kinda feel like jello when you move them) and a really cool cube for all your virtual desktops (I can't live without virtual desktops). I dragged a video player window half off the screen while it was playing and then rotated the cube and you could still watch the video playing on the edge of the cube! This is really cool!

I'm actually amazed at how stable it is too considering it is beta software.

Groupware

Regular readers know that I've been playing with different document management systems lately. I've narrowed the choices to Alfresco or Plone. I've also started looking at groupware servers.

A year or so ago I spent some time looking at hosted providers and never found anything I was really happy with. This year we're planning to setup a server in our office. 

Currently I have the choices narrowed down to 3. Zimbra, Scalix, and Lotus/Domino. Zimbra and Scalix are both basic groupware servers. I like Zimbra and Scalix because of their full-fledged Ajax clients – which means no client-side software to install. I like Zimbra because it is at least partially open-source. However, Lotus/Domino seems to be a darn good solution that even includes document management and work-flow. It would kill two birds with one stone at about $100/seat for the first year and about $30/seat for following years.

On the other hand, a combination of Alfresco and Zimbra could be free. But both have commercial versions that have added "enterprise-level" features, which combined would total more than Lotus.

Does anyone have any experience with any of these solutions and if so I'd love to hear your comments. 

Fellowship One Mapping for Windows

I am releasing the Windows version of my Fellowship One mapping program. It's very basic for now, but it'll get the job done (hopefully). You can get it in the Data Exchange section of the Fellowship One forum.

Rootkits

Routed by Rootkits is an interesting article from Computerworld on solutions to the rootkit problem.

Ubuntu Dapper Drake

I like playing with new technology. So yesterday and last night I upgraded my work and home machines to Ubuntu Dapper Drake which is still in beta. I wouldn't recommend this unless you really know what you're doing. There were several points at which I thought I was going to have to whip out my Breezy Badger CD and start over. It kept getting hung up when it thought it was a laptop and tried to install pcmcia drivers and such.

Once up and running it seems to be very snappy and stable. This release seems to be focused on polish. There are no really big improvements, but the level of polish has been bumped a notch. There are more tool-tips, nicer dialogs, some spiffy new toolbar applets, better support for wifi, speed improvements, etc.

One thing I did notice is that Dansguardian is now configured to use Clam anti-virus to scan while you browse. That is really cool. Also, my previous complaints about Alfresco may have been due to the SMBFS that came packaged with Breezy Badger. Accessing my Alfresco drive is now much snappier.

Diagramming Web Server Complexity

I am simply amazed at how complex serving a single web page is. Check out the diagrams in this article. It is a comparison of the system calls made on Apache running on Linux vs. IIS running on Windows Server.

Illegal Immigration

Why are politicians in favor of illegal immigration?

Two Words. Social Security.

According to Newsmax, in order to get a job, most illegals have to have a social security number and pay social security taxes. The only way for them to do this is to use a fake number. Since the number is a fake, they can never collect social security benefits. The taxes they pay are a huge windfall for Social Security.

So am I in favor of illegal immigration? Probably not. But I can certainly see that allowing it may be a very pragmatic solution to the social security problem.

Xara LX

I've been closely watching Xara LX. I've been a happy Gimp user for about 5 years now, but Xara may convert me. Near the end of last year, Xara announced that they were making Xara open-source and porting it to Linux and Mac (no Mac download yet).

Xara is technically a vector drawing program, but in reality it is a hybrid vector/raster tool. In fact, it seems to do nearly everything I need in regard to raster images. It's not a paint program, so you may have to whip out Gimp or Photoshop to do touch-ups, but it does great at compositing images – which is what I mostly do. OTOH, since you can draw vectors and there are brushes, you may be able to do everything you need.

A couple things I haven't found a replacement for yet (and I'm using a very alpha version) are the clone tool, select by color, and intelligent scissors. And unfortunately there is still no ability to save.

I'm looking forward to version 1.0.

Sci-Fi Shows

I recently joined Netflix (which is awesome BTW). I have been enamored with the Sci-Fi Channel's new rendition of Battlestar Galactica. It is very well done. If you like sci-fi, you'll love this. Even if you don't like sci-fi it's good. I liked the original Battlestar Galactica and so was a bit disturbed to see some of the changes that were made, but I have to say that this beats the original hands down.

Most people don't remember Space: Above and Beyond. I believe it aired in 1996. I was really bummed when Fox canceled it. For many years you could not get this show on DVD (or VHS). A couple weeks ago I thought I'd check and see if I could find it on the torrent scene. Sure enough, there it was. In a last ditch effort to be legal, I checked once again and voila, it's now available on Amazon! Yippee! This has to be one of my all time favorite sci-fi shows. At first I didn't think it was quite as good as I remembered it. However, as I watch it I'm finding that the later shows were much better than the pilot and early shows. It really is a top-notch sci-fi show.

One thing I did notice in comparing the two is how far special effects has come since 1996.

Anti-Virus Ratings

I don't know what the standard comparisons are for A-V effectiveness, but this comparison has some interesting information.

Kaspersky ranks #1. McAffee #5, Norton #10, F-Prot #11, AVG #15, PC-Cillin #16, and Avast #17. Clamwin scored a sad #25.

This of course doesn't measure the software's usability, just its ability to find viruses. So far both AVG and Avast seem quite a bit nicer than Norton and AntiVir. I think I'll swap out one of those for F-Prot in the next round. It doesn't have a free home version, but you can't beat its corporate pricing.

Anti-Virus

Thanks to all those who posted about their favorite anti-virus (in Norton Anti-Virus). By the numbers, the winners were AVG and Trend-Micro. I had a look at both of those and decided that a key feature for me is a free home version. Crossroads has a lot of volunteers and it would be nice to be able to recommend a particular package for them to use that I am familiar with. AVG wins in that regard.

At this time, I have both of my kids computers running a different anti-virus. My son's is running Avast, and my daughter's AVG. At this point I am leaning toward AVG. They also have a Linux version. While I have never needed anti-virus for Linux, anti-virus is useful for running on servers to filter incoming email and such.

Someday I hope Clam anti-virus has an on-access scanner. That is the only reason it has stayed out of the running at this time.

UPDATE: Has anyone checked out F-Prot? It's $50 for a 10-user license. $4/seat after that. $3/seat after 50, and so on.

VNC, Perl, and Mapping

I finally decided I need to keep my promise of getting the Fellowship One mapping software working for the Windows people. I'm used to working on a Gnome Linux desktop and have all my files and such there. My kids each have their own computers (running WinXP) given to them by Grampy (who works at IBM). I decided to use my daughter's computer since she uses it less than my son uses his. So I installed VNC and connected from my desktop so I wouldn't have to keep wheeling back and forth across the room. VNC rocks.

I installed ActiveState Perl and of course could not live without Vim. I've not used ActiveState perl much and so this was a bit of a learning experience. It is actually quite a nice Perl distro. Using the PPM package manager I was able to get all the packages I needed installed and I actually got the mapping software to run.

I used PAR to package the whole thing up into a .exe file. The PAR that came from ActiveState's package repository did not work. I uninstalled it and used one from the university of Winnipeg in Canada. That works great.

It's still a little rough around the edges, but good enough to generate a simple map. I'll be making it available in a bit.

Crossroads Property

On Sunday Crossroads' senior pastor, Scott Winstead, announced that Crossroads has land! I don't remember the exact number, but it's about 80 acres! I'm sure it will be a few years before we're in our own building, but this is very exciting news!

Open Document Formats

Massachusetts has started a trend.

There is currently a bill introduced in Minnesota to require the use of open data formats in any executive branch agency. It seems that either Microsoft is going to have to shape up or ship out.

Read more…

Silly Things Programmers Do

My kids are always asking me which kid gets to decide the movie we're going to watch. Micah wants to watch Pokemon and Hannah wants to watch Hello Kitty. So I finally devised this handy dandy and very fair solution for keeping track of this. I added a little icon to my toolbar and now all I have to do is click to get the answer.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use IO::Handle;

@kids = qw/Micah Hannah/;
$filename = "$ENV{HOME}/.randomKid";

if( -s $filename ){
    open my $f, $filename;
    $kid = <$f>;
}else{
    $kid = int(rand(@kids));
}

system "zenity --info --text $kids[$kid]";

$kid = ($kid+1) % @kids;

open my $f, "> $filename";

$f->print( $kid );

Fellowship One Data Exchange

I have posted version 0.2 of my Perl package for accessing Fellowship One Data Exchange on the Fellowship One forum.

Breakfast

Every once in a while I take it upon myself to go on a diet. I've done all manner of diets, from Atkins to low-fat to Neanderthin. This time I'm doing the Weight Watcher's Core diet. It actually seems to be one of the most well balanced and effective diets I've tried. Here's what I had for breakfast this morning! Mmmm, Salmon patties! My own recipe too.

Of course my wife doesn't appreciate smelling fish when she wakes up…

More on Alfresco

After playing around with Alfresco some more, I concluded that my previous thoughts on its CIFS (i.e. SMB) feature were not entirely fair.

Yes, while browsing through the filesystem I've mounted from Alfresco, the CPU get's pegged. I really don't like that. There were some comments on the forum that this is a known issue and will be worked on for a future release. That's good.

Some of the slowness was due to the fact that Nautilus creates thumbnails for all of the images. When you browse a directory for the first time, thumbnails take a while to create. After Nautilus caches the thumbnails browsing is fast – even in Alfresco. On a native filesystem Nautilus displays the directory even without the thumbnails and adds them as it creates them. With the Alfresco filesystem it seems to want to wait a bit longer.

I'm still not sure I'd put an entire off on this. 

Thought is Metaphor Pt. 2

See Thought is Metaphor.

In my previous post I talked about how both science and art are metaphor. Why did I pick these two areas?

There are two types of mental interaction with the outside world.

1. an attempt to create a mental representation (i.e. metaphor) of something external. (science).
2. an attempt to create an external representation (i.e. metaphor) of something mental. (art).

Previously, I asked the question, "when does metaphor thought and reality become one?" Let's ask a slightly simpler question. "How can you know if thought and reality are similar?"

Science attempts to get closer and closer to reality, but there exists no way to know for sure if reality and any arbitrary scientific theory are mathematically equivalent. It simply can't be done. If you've ever worked in software development or engineering, then you'll understand me when I say that science is essentially an attempt at reverse-engineering reality. Science will always remain metaphor.

With art, on the other hand, we know what the reality is since it originates in our thought. We can know how close a physical representation of our thought comes to the actual thought.

The simple fact is that it is nearly impossible to create an exact representation of our thought in physical form. Thought and reality become one only for a being who is able to make an exact physical representation of his thought. Last I checked, the only person who can do that is God.

Welcome to the mind of God.

Yet Another Ajax Office Suite

Zoho looks very cool.

Mono

It appears that Mono 1.2 will include a complete implementation of Windows Forms (not yet version 2.0) (see Q&A with Miguel "Mono Man" De Icaza). A beta of Mono 1.2 will be released sometime in April.

What I'm hoping this means is that Fellowship One Check-in will run in Mono. This would be very very cool since then F1 Check-in could run on any platform for which there is a Mono run-time. This includes Linux, Mac, and even a Nokia 770 Internet tablet (which I've been eyeing for quite some time).

Presumably with very little work, Fellowship Technologies could have this application up and running on any number of platforms.

Hint, hint.