Brian Jamison

If you live in Oregon and are unfortunate enough to have Qwest as a “service provider” for your landline, there is a very special game you get to play when you make a call to the 503 area code. Sort of a landline landmine.

Some numbers in the 503 area code require that you dial a 1 first. Most do not. You’re supposed to know that a given number lies outside of some imaginary geographic boundary around Portland. Apparently Qwest thinks we have telephonic geolocating chips embedded in our heads.

This shameful tactic was attempted years ago in Los Angeles where the population quickly rioted and a technical fix was just as quickly produced. My mobile phone dials all 503 area codes (in fact all area codes) without a 1 first and so should my landline. And I don’t want to hear about the difficulty of programming physical switches or the upgrade costs. This just shows a complete and utter disregard for the value of their customer’s time. VoIP here I come.

The Qwest managers responsible should have their phone service “enhanced” so that every time they dial someone a randomly generated number is required to make it go through. For the rest of their lives. If the managers guess wrong they will be informed of the correct number by a piercing three-tone bell and a garbled voice remarkably similar to the cassette tape-based system Qwest uses today to inform their customers when they blunder into the 1+503 landline landmine.

Woot!

I’ve been using KDE on the desktop since 2001. As any of my colleagues can attest, I’m pretty vocal about how much better I think KDE is than Gnome.

But maybe I’ve been wrong all those years. So about a week after Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) was released I decided to install the default Ubuntu - with Gnome as my window manager and see if I should be using Gnome instead of KDE.

I got a new laptop at the same time, one of those AMD Turion X2’s, so I also decided to install the 64bit version, knowing I was bound to hit some rocks. (I resolved not to blame Gnome for any 64bit rocks I might collide with, although the experience has been pretty good). As a side note, I also took Vista for a short spin since it came preinstalled on my laptop. The experience was truly awful. I’ve never used an operating system that got more in the way of me trying to get work done. No wonder people consider Windows XP an upgrade from Vista!

As expected with Ubuntu, the installer worked flawlessly and was finished in just a few minutes. I wish the installer would allow me to easily set up disk encryption but I had to do that manually later. My machine booted to its native 1440×900 resolution and I was able to check a box and download the Nvidia driver for my machine automatically. The eye candy is quite impressive in Gnome, but it’s not without issues. The 3d enhanced effects did slow my experience down and I’m quite sure there are some memory leaks as after a while the desktop just stopped working. I’m sure that the issues I experienced will be ironed out by the next LTS release. Pushing out a major graphics upgrade in a non-LTS release is exactly why I love Ubuntu. It’s a brilliant strategy that lets people like me who are willing to draw some blood hang out near the bleeding edge while letting folks like my dad and wife stick with a stable LTS release like Dapper.

I made the decision to turn off all the eye candy, which was extremely easy to do, and the OS became quite stable. The same can’t be said for my wireless, which requires multiple reboots to get working properly. I’ve heard through the grapevine that the problem lies with Intel, and again I’m confident that the community will work the issues out.

What I’ve discovered is that simplicity is Gnome’s strength. Gnome presents users an extremely limited number of options, and I think this approach has merit. It sometimes feels like the Gnome developers sometimes conflate simplicity with ease of use, two very different things. Take burning a CD, for example. After trying for about 20 minutes to burn a CD using Nautilus, the file browser/CD burning tool in Gnome, I gave up and installed K3B. The Nautilus interface was so simple I couldn’t find any options! I’ve got a few more gripes with Nautilus. It doesn’t appear possible to click and drag a box around files I want to select in list view, something I do quite frequently. Nautilus displays thumbnails for images and even the first few words of text files which is a really cool feature, only the thumbnail sizes are huge in comparison to folders and other icons. I don’t like the look - I find it ugly. Nautilus tells you how much space is free, but not how much space is used in the current directory unless you select files. And it displays far less information in a given amount of space than KDE’s file manager.

Evince is Ubuntu’s choice for a PDF viewer. Unfortunately, it fails to properly print PDFs that print beautifully using KPDF - in my case it added random garbage characters that were subtle enough that I may have missed them and gone off to an important meeting only to find my printout was gibberish. It seems quite slow to render compared to KPDF as well.

There are a number of missing features - printer selection for example lacks KDE’s ability to scan the local network for a printer, which I find a real time saver. Shift-Arrow changing windows and themes in Konsole make a big difference to my productivity. I don’t understand why it takes up to a half minute to pop up the calendar from the taskbar in Gnome when the calendar in KDE is instantaneous.

As far as 64bit goes, it’s been almost completely smooth sailing. The one problem is with our new Canon Pixma iP1800 printer, which I made sure had Linux drivers before I bought it. But it turns out that the people at Canon compiled only a 32bit version of the driver, and in this case, the 32bit driver will not work in a 64bit OS. So I get to wait until Canon decides to compile the driver in 64bit or release the source code. I’m mystified why a printer manufacturer wouldn’t simply release the source code to their printer drivers — they’d certainly sell more printers. Yet another reason why having the source code is crucial.

At the end of the day, most of my problems with Gnome come down to:
1) Not being able to do things the way I’m used to doing them
2) Lacking some key KDE features that I’ve grown to love and rely on
3) Not exposing enough choices

While I could manage with #1, the other two are deal-breakers. So I bid Gnome a pleasant “see you later” and return to KDE. After I’ve used the new KDE for a bit I may write a similar post as I’m sure there is as much or more for KDE to learn from Gnome.

Seems like every year or two I have to go through making this work again.

Step 1: Load the visor module with the correct vendor and product ID:
root@foo:/# modprobe visor product=0×060 vendor=0×0830

Step 2: Test that the pilot syncs from the command line using pilot-xfer:
root@foo:/# pilot-xfer -p /dev/ttyUSB1 -l

Step 3: Manually configure Kpilot with the username and port /dev/ttyUSB1 (the wizard is broken).

I like carrots. Carrot juice. Fresh carrot with or without sour cream. Shredded carrot on salad. Carrot soup. And my favorite, carrot cake. Bring on the carrots I say.

But why oh why does the carrot end up in nearly every vegetarian meal, even when it makes no sense? From veggie burritos to Thai coconut soup it seems that the chef’s instinct upon hearing the word vegetarian is to reach for the carrot. Put it down I say!

Perhaps carrots are included in ethnic fare because they are considered inexpensive filler. It certainly isn’t because they’re native - carrots originated in Afghanistan but came into their own in the Netherlands (things Orange being significant there). What can be done to educate chefs about proper vegetarian fare? If there was a “keep the carrot out of ethnic food” movement to educate chefs I would surely donate.

Which brings me to a related case - I attended a fund raiser where omnivorous guests were treated to steak and a variety of interesting side dishes. As I watched my fellow gift-givers heartily dig in to their meal, I was served grilled zucchini with rock-hard broccoli next to boiled carrots. Yes, that was it. No sauce, no spice, nada. Lest you think this is anomaly this has happened to me more than once. The next time I’m served “rabbit food on a dish” the chef and I are going to have a little chat.

I just heard that Underlight was shut down on the new year, nearly 10 years after our first pre-alpha. Something in me died when I heard the news.

My involvement with the game ended long ago, but from time to time I would surf over to the site and think positive thoughts, amazed that many years later, people still found the time to dream in the City of Dreams. The game lived a far longer and richer life than I ever imagined, though it never became the success that we all believed it should. We weren’t the first out of the gate, but we were close. Meridian 59 beat us to market, and Ultima Online came out ahead of us, but release we did.

I have so many good memories of the project, and I learned so much from the experience.

When we started working on the game in September of 1995, the execs at the large game publishers we visited actually ridiculed our idea that a large-scale graphical RPG was possible. This mindset cripples the industry, which is why there is such stagnation in commercial game development.

There are so many memories. I fondly remember sketching out the high level architecture for the “party mode” protocol we used in the game with Brent Phillips, long walks with Josh Partlow working on the setting and theme of the game, sitting down with an 80 year old thesaurus and creating the names for the Houses and locations. I remember our “asteroids” networking proof of concept, and the early builds where all we could do was run and jump in a large room. I remember the elation of closing our first round of financing… and the crushing blow of learning that due to a corporate restructure our financing simply vanished. I remember the night when Josh Partlow and I stepped out into the live alpha and roleplayed our hearts out wondering, “will they roleplay back?” And roleplay they did.

Most of all I remember the people that gave so much to make Underlight real. People whom I respect put a lot on the line and made great sacrifices because they believed in the game. Many people I don’t even know came in and kept the game going, and made it better after I left. Underlight is a story about people who believed in something. It grew beyond all of us.

Farewell Underlight. The City of Dreams fades, but my memories will not.

Brian
aka
Kelrith, Founding Ruler of House Calenture, and
Caladar, Founding Ruler of the Order of the Sable Moon, and
Tehthu, First Dark Mare
…. among others