Gaming, Programming and Random Rants

It seems every week there are people claiming that yet another area of computing is dead. IE6, Windows, netbooks, desktop apps, the list goes on. Yet 9 times out of 10 these proclamations are very premature. Because while power users normally use the latest and greatest of everything, ordinary users don’t. Ordinary users don’t use n-1 either. Ordinary users use whatever was on their computer when they got it. Fine. Most people know that.

But then the problems start. How old is an old computer? One that came with Windows XP? (and these are non-technical users -they are using Windows) I’m sure most reading this would agree that that is an old computer. No one would use anything older than that, surely?

People actually still use this.

Think again. As someone who regularly fixes the computers of “non-computer people”, I frequently encounter PCs running Windows XP SP1, Windows ME, and even Windows 98. These are users who can’t run the newest versions of apps. Or the versions before them. Or often even the versions before them. Surely they’d buy a new computer then? Nope, they’re still happily using that copy of Office 2000 they were given with the PC. Now, I will admit that “computers needing to be fixed” is obviously going to highlight the older ones still hanging around more than just picking some at random, but it can’t invent old computers out of thin air, either.

So what happens when their computer goes up in smoke? Well, first they send it to their computer nerd friends, or a PC repair store. If it’s still irreparable without extra money, they will buy a new one, and that’s one less old computer for us to deal with.

So, a new computer nowadays will come with Windows 7 preloaded. And despite all the new features, the basics of Windows usage haven’t changed much since Windows 95. The start menu button might be circular, but it’s still in the bottom left. The text names off the programs in the taskbar have been replaced by pictures. The windows are a bit rounder and more colourful. Nothing that would trip any of us up.

But then… We have those like my dad. He “can’t understand this Vista stuff”, coming from XP. He still uses an old, slow Windows XP laptop over the new Windows 7 desktop. I managed to finally move him away from IE6 to IE8. He still misses IE6′s “easiness”. His average use pattern consists of MS Word, Facebook and Outlook Express. He did an ECDL course as part of his job. ECDL for those who haven’t done it, is a computer course that teaches MS Office, Windows and IE.

It's not all that different, is it?

Attempts at moving these people from their preferred apps is futile. They learned how to use one program, and they’re going to continue using that one. You won’t get them using OpenOffice, which is as close to MS Office as you’ll get without being it, so trying to get them to use iWork, for example, is futile.

Now, moving aside from my dad, and keeping with the Apple theme,  let’s look at a device that has spawned a lot of “is dead” articles: the iPad. Depending on who you ask, the iPad will be responsible for the demise of everything from the netbook all the way up to the entire personal computer industry. But on it’s release, the device was woefully underpowered for any heavy usage. But then a theory came about: The iPad wasn’t for us, the heavy computer user, it is for the average Joe. After all, it is far simpler, so should be easy for people who aren’t good with computers to use, right? Wrong. As I’ve already mentioned, the difference between XP and Vista are enough to confuse some people.

It's certainly less different than this, but apparently, everybody is going to use these.

Even apart from that, do you really think those people looked at the iPad and thought anything more than: “Oh, another gadget”? A significant amount of people I know won’t use anything other than the “dumb” Nokias. Why? Because that’s what they’ve always used, and that’s what they are used to. Because of this, if you try and sell the iPad to them as like a computer, they won’t want it, because it’s not Windows. If you try and sell it to them as like a phone, they won’t want it, because it’s not Nokia. If you try and sell it to them as an middle device, they won’t want it, because they’ll see it as an expensive unneeded gadget. The fact that Apple had to impose a two iPad per customer limit during pre-orders shows exactly who is buying them, and the amount of Apple fanboys and gadget nerds, even when combined, is still finite.

Oh, and you can play WoW and The Sims on netbooks. You can’t do that on an iPad. Those two games have a very large number of players, many of which use their computer for little other than those games and Facebook.

Yet people still use these, and even older models.

Let’s look at another “is dead” example, that of desktop apps. The apparent killers here are web apps. After all, if you look at my typical day’s computer usage, it includes Google Reader, Gmail, Brizzly, Google Calendar, Pidgin, Vim,  Eclipse, Rhythmbox – Oh, look, the last 4 are desktop apps. Desktop apps with no web app of equal quality to match them. And, they’re not likely to reach it for some time. Even Joe Hewitt, who quit iPhone development, believes it to be better than web development. I wonder how much time and effort it would take to recreate programs like Photoshop, or Visual Studio in the browser. The best online image editor I could find, still doesn’t achieve feature parity with Paint.NET, which it is obviously inspired by. Google Docs and what I’ve seen of Office Web Apps don’t reach the features of OpenOffice, never mind MS Office on the desktop.

Huge Progress? Undeniably. Equivalent to a desktop app? Not at all.

Another problem with web apps is the web designers’ old enemy, IE6, which is also allegedly dead, yet still has 20% of the market share. Where is it coming from? Those users with Windows 98, ME and 2000, who actually can’t upgrade (even to Firefox, or Chrome). And of course, corporations who won’t upgrade anything without everything being tested and examined three times over.

Some of these users have even been reached by the messages many web designers are putting on pages telling IE6 users to upgrade. I got asked by one teacher who has been seeing these more and more, how he would go about upgrading his browser. The computer ran Windows ME. I had to give the advice that he would need to buy a new computer. I hate telling people that, because most of them don’t want to spend €400 on a new computer, unsurprisingly.

I could just search the web for tech “is dead” posts, and go on through this for every widely used technology that’s been said to be dead, but people reading this would get bored around 2000 words in, with only one fifth of things that have been said to be dead covered. But these few examples should hopefully remind people that tech doesn’t just die and go away that easily.

So, I’ve been using Arch Linux the past few days, after reading Sirupsen’s post on it. He was quite positive of it, and he’d pointed out Vim to me, so I was prepared to take his advice again. Besides, what with the upgrades, downgrades, beta versions, etc, my Ubuntu installation was pretty much a wreck at this stage, and needed to be reinstalled anyway. And the last x64 disc I had was for 8.10. Which would mean upgrading three times in the space of a week, which I wasn’t very inclined to do.

And that brings me on the the first issue with Ubuntu – the whole updates system. The fact that you have to reinstall your system every few months, or get stuck with old versions of software like Firefox and Wine, is a major nuisance, especially on a 1 meg connection, where a system update is 5 hours just for the download. (On that subject, I’m finally getting a 3 meg connection sometime in the next 2 weeks. Yay!).  This unsurprisingly defeats the point of a package manager, and has led to me to forgo it altogether for certain software like Firefox, and Eclipse, with their own updating systems, outside it’s control. So, hearing one of Arch’s main goals of having a rolling release with the latest programs constantly, sounded like a pleasant escape.

Another point that Ubuntu has always given me a problem with, is that of bloat. A default install of Ubuntu contains GIMP, OO.o, Firefox, Evolution, Empathy, Ubuntu One, Orca, etc., etc. Evolution, Firefox and Empathy all get instantly uninstalled in favour of other programs, GIMP is a good example of horrendous UI, and OO.o, while not bad, certainly could be improved.  But Arch and I have very different ideas of bloat. I consider those bloat. Arch considers things like automated wifi config bloat. So while I’d like a minimalistic Linux, Arch goes too far and is completely spartan. To put it another way, Ubuntu is like a rented house full of furniture, some of it rather dated, my ideal would be an empty house, and Arch is a pile of bricks.

But then there is installation. A fresh install of Ubuntu, provided you have the latest ISO, is a 20 minute process. Most of it is relatively automatic, and it _usually_ just works. Unless you do something stupid like sudo apt-get remove evolution-*, which somehow removes GNOME, but hey, you can remove the wrong package on any distro. Arch on the other hand, is a much more involved process, requiring manual editing of at least 10 config files, requiring you to seemingly psychically know details about modules, and which kernel version has what for which device. The one in the downloads page would not work for me, because I need to install over wifi. Turns out, I need drivers which aren’t there. They are there in kernel 2.6.32, which is in the version of arch with the download link on the forums, not the download page. Oh, and on top of that, I need firmware, which is not on the disk, instead I have to stick it on a USB stick and copy it over before installation.

Part of this is the reality of what Arch is. It’s a geeks for geeks distro, much like Linux as a whole used to be. Nothing wrong with that, except it’s at a level beyond what I’m able to deal with. For example, I was trying to set my resolution the other day. The advice I got was “Read man xorg.conf”. As I remarked on Twitter the other day:

man xorg.conf makes the rather amusing assumption that you already know loads about both X.org and the internal workings of your monitor…

Or, at least it’s amusing until it means you are stuck looking at a display that looks like crap because it’s stuck at 1152 x 864, when it’s native resolution is 1440×900. Further asking only get the advice “Look under Modes”. Well, here is the an excerpt section of Modes in man xorg.conf:

Mode  ”name”

This is an optional multi-line entry that can be used to provide

definitions for video modes for the monitor.  In most cases this

isn’t necessary because the built-in set of VESA standard  modes

will  be  sufficient.  The Mode keyword indicates the start of a

multi-line video mode description.  The mode description is ter-

minated with the EndMode keyword.  The mode description consists

of the following entries:

DotClock  clock

is the dot (pixel) clock rate to be used for the mode.

HTimings  hdisp hsyncstart hsyncend htotal

specifies the horizontal timings for the mode.

VTimings  vdisp vsyncstart vsyncend vtotal

specifies the vertical timings for the mode.

Flags  ”flag” …

specifies an optional set of mode flags, each of which is  a

separate  string  in  double  quotes.  ”Interlace” indicates

that the mode is interlaced.  ”DoubleScan” indicates a  mode

Mode  ”name”              This is an optional multi-line entry that can be used to provide              definitions for video modes for the monitor.  In most cases this              isn’t necessary because the built-in set of VESA standard  modes              will  be  sufficient.  The Mode keyword indicates the start of a              multi-line video mode description.  The mode description is ter-              minated with the EndMode keyword.  The mode description consists              of the following entries:
DotClock  clock                  is the dot (pixel) clock rate to be used for the mode.
HTimings  hdisp hsyncstart hsyncend htotal                  specifies the horizontal timings for the mode.
VTimings  vdisp vsyncstart vsyncend vtotal                  specifies the vertical timings for the mode.
Flags  ”flag” …                  specifies an optional set of mode flags, each of which is  a                  separate  string  in  double  quotes.  ”Interlace” indicates                  that the mode is interlaced.  ”DoubleScan” indicates a  mode

This is not helpful! horizontal timings? dot clocks? All I want to do is change the resolution. man pages are for advanced technical details, not basic user information. And the wiki, their other reference, is in varying parts as unashamedly complex as these man pages, or only covers the optimal scenario, lacking any middle ground. On the other hand, Ubuntu provides this page, which explained far, far more. Also, while doing this process, I was informed I shouldn’t use GNOME because it’s a bloated, buggy, desktop environment, in the opinion of several members of #archlinux . Despite working fine for me for the last while. I’m looking for help, not conversion! I wonder what they think of KDE or Windows then…

On the subject of not helpful, here is the recommended way to install a package not in the default repos for pacman in Arch, and believe me, that is a lot of packages.

1. Go to aur.archlinux.org
2. Download the PKGBUILD
3. Possibly make changes to the PKGBUILD
4. Open a terminal to the folder containing the PKGBUILD
5. Run makepkg -i

Does this sound tedious and repetitive to you? Certainly does to me, so many members of the Arch community have built helpers to automate this, such as Clyde, as mentioned by Sirupsen the other day. But apparently this isn’t the Arch way. So to install wine, I use sudo clyde -S bin32-wine. But, the AUR has the wrong version of one it’s dependencies. Here’s what #archlinux thinks of those.

Macha, you should really read about abs and aur and stop using any aur helper

Another area where I want a simple solution, and they go for the most spartan one possible. Ok, not the most spartan, I could compile it and place it in the directories myself, but really, a 5 step process for EVERY package, and each of it’s dependencies? As opposed to sudo apt-get install foo, or sudo clyde -S foo. Why is this better?

I want to like Arch. I admire it’s aims of being up to date, and simple. But I just can’t. It’s not for me, and on the final release of Ubuntu 10.04, I will be going back to Ubuntu on this laptop. I hear they’ve dropped GIMP now, and worked on getting it to boot up faster, too…

Linux and wi-fi. They normally go together like a square peg and a round hole. Every wireless adapter I’ve had the past few years has had at least some problems running under Linux. Ranging from my USB WPN111 putting an end to my first foray into Linux (“screw this – no internet, it’s too much effort, I’m going back to Windows”), about 2 years ago, to my current laptop’s random DNS failures when I used WPA2.

So, I was pleasantly surprised when my new TP-Link WN821N worked straight away on Linux on my desktop PC. Given that is was a €20 Wireless N adapter, I didn’t expect it to. All well and good. Then it came to Windows. Expecting it to be simple as usual, I installed the driver. The wi-fi thing showed up, I used Connect to a Network, and… No network.

Several minutes of googling later reveals there is no Windows 7 driver (which is what Server 2008 R2 normally uses). Instead there is a Vista driver, which is no good in this case. So I’ve either:

• Ran into one of those edge cases where the difference between Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 actually does matter.
• Ran into one of those edge cases where the difference between Vista and 7 does matter

or

• Both

Which really sucks. Especially when the majority of what I do on that desktop using Windows is gaming. (Yeah, yeah, gaming over Wi-Fi, tut tut…). Gaming sans multiplayer is kind of limited. I mean, sure I can play Fallout 3, and Oblivion fine, but what about Team Fortress 2? Oh, hold on, that works on Wine. Actually, so does Fallout 3. And openTTD. And that’s basically all I play in PC games lately.

Right, so why am I running Windows on this machine? My copy of Visual Studio is from DreamSpark (as is my copy of Windows, which is why I’m using Server 2008 R2 in the first place – it was that or XP, I’ve no Windows 7 yet, and my Vista disc is a Dell OEM disc), which I’m fairly certain can only be installed once, and it’s already on my laptop. uTorrent and Paint.NET both blow away their nearest competitors on Linux, but uTorrent is useless without an internet connection, and Paint.NET is only one program at the end of the day.

So, screw this – no internet, it’s too much effort, I’m going back to Linux*. And that is something I never thought I’d say when I first started experimenting with Linux. Of course, most of this is TP-Link’s fault. If some random outsider can write a working driver for Linux, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be able to write a driver for Windows 7. I won’t be buying from them again.

* On this desktop at least, on my laptop I still dual-boot to have VS for programming Windows languages, and iTunes for syncing my iPod Touch.

Auto updaters are great. They keep Windows secure, they save me having to manually install each time with Firefox, they’re completely transparent with Chrome and on Linux, the whole system’s updates are controlled through the one interface. Some are less ideal. Paint.NET prompts you to update on startup, usually when you’ve just turned it on for a quick edit (and you can’t use it while it downloads the updates – apparently this is fixed in the newest version). It’s still better than nothing however.

There are one class of updates that aren’t quite so great however. These are the ones that decide they need to sit in your system, all running simultaneously. And when there is an update? It’s so important that they need to pop up a window to alert you of this, even if you have no intention of going near said application for a week. Or maybe they are like Apple’s. An update to iTunes includes Safari by default. Why?

The other day, I was two hours into a Supreme Commander LAN party. While I was about to start the final attack, what happens? The game minimizes, and a message pops up. New update for Adobe Reader. Last time I opened a PDF was a week ago (against my will). On my system, once you minimize any of these games:

• Oblivion
• Supreme Commander
• Call of Duty 5
• Team Fortress 2
• Unreal Tournament III
• etc.

They aren’t coming back up again. Say goodbye to your progress if there isn’t a recent save. I tried in vain to start the game again. Click the taskbar entry. Up pops another Window:

“Supreme Commander Application has stopped responding”

It closes. I end up disconnected from the LAN game. Up pops to the nearly defeated player “Macha has been defeated”. All because some stupid cruddy app to open files created by those too lazy to make an actual web page decided it needed to update itself right now. (Yes, I am aware Adobe Reader and PDFs are useful to some people in some situations. I am not one of them).

While the Java updater was not the guilty culprit this time, it has been at other times, with behavior similar to that of Adobe’s updater.

That is one clear advantage to console gaming. The nearest equivalent is the 360′s forced update or be signed out of xbox live being applied to single player games as well, and that’s not nearly as bad.

I can remove these applications from startup of course, but somehow they seem to always make their way back there.

One thing that alwasy gets on my nerves is when I go to a website to read an article and the web page turns out to just be a summary of the article with the full article in a PDF. 99/100 times, this results in me leaving the page and finding the information elsewhere. There are other variations of this: “See our website for information”, and the information is a PDF file is another common one.

If I did click on the PDF, what would happen? On Windows, Adobe Reader would open up (slowly, sometimes taking as long as 5 minutes), then the PDF file would start loading. If I was lucky, it’d be in a browser tab. If I was unlucky, it’d be in a whole new window. On Linux, it’d open in Document Viewer, which is faster. However, I would then be unable to click any links in the document.

Why would anyone supply on the web, a page that needs an external application to run outside the web browser and call it putting information online? Especially when said application has had security problems in the past. It just strikes me as being very lazy.