A carnival of technology

I’m still coming to terms with the look of my new eyeglasses; some days I think they’re grand, others I think they look like I’m getting a head start on a midlife crisis.  They have a forced European look to them: a Scandanavian minimalism of structure combined with an Italian approach of catching angles and lines.  Maybe it works on my face.  I don’t know.

I bought a fancy, name-brand anti-glare coating this time around.  My eyes are no longer obscured by a curtain of flash.  And the dirt is no longer obscured by a constant, ignorable lens flare.  I have a lot of trouble keeping these lenses clean.  The cloth they came with is pretty  useless, and I spend much more time rubbing away with various careful solvents and microfiber rags than I ever used to.  I’m past the point where I’m comfortable with wiping the lenses on my shirt, but some shirts are better than others: the various soft organic cottons feel like the safest choice, but the roughly textured silks and rayons of my faux-Alohas are the most effective.  Everything else is somewhere in between.  On the most positive side, the lenses have survived my daily carelessness and abuses with nary a scratch, so maybe that expensive coating was worth the trouble.

Did I really buy a pair of Oakleys?  I honesty don’t know what to make of that.  Oakley was the Ray-Ban of the 90’s, but the 90’s are the past, and maybe that’s time enough that Oakley can go back to being just another purveyor of eyewear fashion, something separated by time from surfboards or black trenchcoats or sloppy mod revivals or any of the unfortunate choices and thoughts and decisions and connotations that plague any and every time.  I like the color of my new specs.  I hope that no one notices the logo.

Domain names used to be expensive.  Network Solutions had a monopoly on .com, .org and .net, and they charged $100 for two years and wouldn’t let you use any dirty words.  But all of that ended in 2000.  Network Solutions kept the database, but they had to open it up to resellers for $6/year, several of which appeared offering domains at a fraction of Network Solution’s long-suffered prices.  I didn’t buy a name until these new companies had just started to form, and I went with one that some web site recommended as having a fair price, fair terms and good support.  It was the terms of service that set them apart: they emphasized that the buyer owned the name and that the registrar was acting only as a broker, a concern that born from the appearance of all of these companies with vague definitions of who owns what.  Also, they’re French.

It came to time to renew some names, so I headed over Gandi and hit some buttons, and that sent me to a Crédit Mutuel page to pay up.  Punched in the Wachovia card number, and declined.  Huh.  The CVV is pretty well worn off, so I figured I just typed it in wrong.  I tried another Visa card that worked just fine, but about a minute after the phone rings.  The bank wanted to go over the last few transactions on my account to make sure that there’s nothing fishy.  While I’m assuring them that I really did spend that much at the grocery store the other day and yeah I guess it is about time for the DSL payment to go through, Wachovia called and left a message for me to do the same thing with them.  I’m glad that they’re watching for that kind of thing, but it seems weird for it to happen now.  My spending habits are kind of erratic to begin with, and no one seemed to mind when I was withdrawing from Icelandic ATMs like I’d stolen something (or like it took me three or four days to figure out how much the money is worth).  Maybe it’s because this was over the Internet?  Maybe it’s because those ATMs are on the American side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge?  I don’t know what in particular triggered the alert, but it’s good to know that they care.

Dear Fedora,

I think that the Fedora project has some pretty good ideas for how a Linux distribution should work.  Releases are frequent enough to keep everything shiny and new but, guided by Redhat’s commercial interests, are made with goals of pragmatism and stability.  There’s enough of a community to keep a wide range of software available and well-tested.  The focus on problems faced by desktop and laptop users ensures an intuitive, easy-to-use environment that avoids the pitfalls and annoyances that have plagued Linux in the past.  Or at least it would nice if any of that were true.

I have been using Linux since 1998 around the release of Redhat Linux 5.0.  Linux has changed a lot since then, and so have I.  At first I used it as a kind of toy, a new electronic place where the various switches and cogs of the system were thrown into stark relief for the curious.  When I started studying computers and computation at Georgia Tech, Linux, along with the other UNIX-based and UNIX-inspired operating systems available there, went from toy to a tool where the languages of computers were not tied up in projects and expensive programs but were a basic part of the system, available in every corner to transmute ideas into decisions.  And at some point in there this programmer’s playground and user’s nightmare began to transform into something more accessible.  Subsystems and tools appeared at every layer, from the kernel to the desktop environment, to make configuration easier—and automatic at best—and Linux finally started to do things in a way that people expect.  Manipulating files on a USB drive went from a four-step process to something that poppped up in front of you as soon you plugged it in.  Wireless networking hid its arcane files and drivers behind a simple window asking for a password.  Things started to just work.  All of that brings me to today, when I have less of a reason to use Linux at home, but I keep using it because I have little reason not to.  That, and because the first thing Vista did on my laptop was reletter the drives and crash.  So throw what you know.

I’ve been through a handful of different distributions over this decade, one of which I was partly responsible for making myself, and I last settled on Fedora because I had hoped it would be the most feature-rich and well-supported option.  It hasn’t worked very well.  Part of Fedora’s semiannual release schedule is an expectation for at-least annual upgrades, but lately every upgrade has, in some way, made things worse.  Pulseaudio and NetworkManager are two changes that, at least at first, were desultory in their integration, seemingly appearing as change for the sake of change, but it’s not only an eagerness to adopt all of the upstream developer’s new problems that repels Fedora from its potential.  There are some serious issues in the underlying management of the Fedora Project.

Fedora Release Engineering does not understand the word “release”

I upgraded to Fedora 11 on June 9th, not forty-eight hours after the release hit the mirrors.  The first thing it did after booting was install 178 new updates.  Every release is a new moving target.  There usually aren’t any major upgrades within a release, but packagers get around this by pushing in pre-release versions of software slated to come out in less than six months.  Both Thunderbird and Mozilla were beta versions, not yet stable enough for the Mozilla developers to be confident but apparently good enough for Fedora.

Whether anything works or not from day to day is reduced to a game of chance.  With Fedora 11 I couldn’t use an external monitor anymore.  Suspend to memory, which didn’t work right in 10, worked at first, and then after another batch of updates it didn’t.  Usability changed from day to day as new versions were marked as important security updates and as I kept installing every new package in the hopes that some of the broken features would finally start to work.  It feels like the only difference between Rawhide, the development branch where every half-thought software commit becomes a new set of updates, and an actual release is that the release will stop updating itself after a year or so.

The desktop team is not doing their job

The people in charge of creating Fedora’s desktop environment do a good job of building and packaging the upstream software, which I admit is no mean task, but they do a really crappy job of creating a consistent user experience.  Take burning a CD for instance.  It used to be that you popped in a blank CD, a new window would pop up that you could drag some things into, and then you hit a button and a CD happened.  That was pretty nice.  If the auto-load feature didn’t work for whatever reason—maybe you’re burning to a CD-RW that already has data on it—there was a “CD/DVD Creator” in the Applications menu that took care of things for you.  In all everything was pretty simple and straightforward.  After a while the CD/DVD Creator moved from Applications to Places.  And then something called Brasero would pop up sometimes, and sometimes it would work and sometimes not.  Whichever program popped up first stopped being able to blank a CD before writing, so you had to do that separately.  Sometimes the CD would eject when it was done, sometimes not.  It was still better than trying to remember the litany of options to pass to cdrecord on the command-line, but it was inconsistent for no reason.

There’s no attention to detail, and the details will flit from place to place depending on the release or the whims of the packager.  Sometimes programs are given an opaque name, sometimes described by what they do, sometimes both.  It’s easy to blame upstream changes on changes in the packaged result, but Fedora is supposed to be there to mediate and interpret the whims of GNOME and Freedesktop and everyone else.  Even if things stay consistent within a particular Fedora release, six months is an awfully short time to be allowed to remember where everything is.

Testing doesn’t seem to test very much

I know that it’s impossible to test everything, but the things I’ve noticed especially wrong seem really obvious.  Switching to an external monitor consistently fails.  When I return from suspend, the laptop immediately suspends itself again.  Changing the volume causes the currently playing sound to skip.  Maximizing firefox causes it to cram itself into the upper-left corner of the screen, and notifications from thunderbird or firefox, which are aiming for the bottom-right corner, appear in the middle of the screen.  I’m not using any particularly weird hardware: it’s just a Lenovo laptop with the integrated Intel chipsets for everything, the same kind of hardware that’s been on every Intel board since the early aughts.  It’s a pretty common case, and one with a reputation for having excellent Linux support, but it sucks at running Fedora.  Maybe a six-month cycle is too short?  I don’t know, but it’d be nice to have something a little more polished.

I’d really like to use Fedora.  It seems to have the most sane attitude among the various distributions around today.  But I’d like more to use something that works.  I hope that someday Fedora does.

Your friend,
David