Brian Jamison

This is a hungarian streetcar!

Judging solely from the airport Hungary has not come nearly as far as the Czech Republic post-EU integration. But there is a good energy here and a positive spirit unlike my last visit to East Europe.

Budapest’s airport reminds me of the last time I was in Prague (which was before the wall came down). Okay, BUD is way more modern and plastered with ads from Ford and Tmobile. But it has a quaint, small city kind of feeling to it. I was hoping Hungary would be cheaper than the rest of the EU but a half liter bottle of water just cost me $2.50. Maybe absurdly high prices for water in airports are simply a planet-wide phenomenon.

I was psyched to find a free wifi hotspot on the lower level in terminal 2a but it stopped working for me after 5 minutes; just enough time to dash off a quick VoIP call home with my Iphone using Truphone, which works great. Oh well.

Taking off from Prague we had a groovy full power run up with the brakes on and flaps at 100%. Not surprising given the plane was packed and it was summertime.

I snapped this picture for Alexander of a neat shuttle bus at Budapest airport.

My theme, indexnet 1.0, was displaying non-UTF8 characters in the index.php file, specifically the offending characters are next to the next page and previous page. Posted from the iPhone wordpress app!

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.

I just had to scan 19 pages of a paper application. Problem was, I saved each file as a JPG, leaving me 19 different files. Not nice to email that. So I just stitched them all together into a single PDF called “app.pdf” using this command:

I call that power and simplicity.

“Accidental Configuration Syndrome” (ACS) is what I’m calling the act of repeatedly and accidentally altering the configuration of an application and/or operating system. ACS leads to unnecessary confusion, frustration, and technical support calls. ACS primarily afflicts older people or those with average or less than average mouse and keyboard manipulation skills.

I’ve been providing technical support for my Dad and in-laws’ desktop Linux machines for years now. Linux on the desktop is an excellent fit for them, but they all suffer from ACS.

Just yesterday I restored OpenOffice’s primary toolbars on my father’s machine. These toolbars are his primary interface to OpenOffice – they’re critical tools, and to him they just went missing one day. Of course he had accidentally dragged them off of the primary interface, but I found that this is surprisingly easy to do. Try it; start OpenOffice and aim just two pixels below File on the primary File – Edit – View interface. Hold down the left mouse button and drag down as you might expect to do if the File menu were to appear. Did you just pull the main toolbar off of the interface? I did. Now try and put the toolbar back without screwing things up. I wasn’t able to, and it took me a few minutes to get it back to “normal.” Should the default action of a click and drag be to remove the toolbar? No. Should a mistake in a common usage action (pulling down the FIle menu) cause a major configuration action? Of course not.

Another example — at my in-laws, the main application bar in Gnome seems (to them) to change in mysterious ways. Application launch icons move around, appear and disappear without any apparent reason. What’s happening is that instead of left clicking to start an application, they accidentally right-click and select move, or accidentally click and drag. Once the damage is done, there is no easy way for them to set it right, because they weren’t intentionally making the change – they literally don’t know what they’ve done. Similarly, their desktop is periodically littered with multiple launch icons for solitaire in a failed attempt to simply start the program, again, a right-click presented a configuration option and literally in the blink of an eye they accidentally make a configuration change. To them it appears as if the program simply didn’t start – they don’t notice the new icon on the desktop.

Configuration states should also not be activated by keystrokes – the chance for ACS here is just as great.

The fix for all of this is simple, and it has nothing to do with educating people using computers. This is a user interface problem. We need to build applications and operating systems that assume people will primarily be using them instead of configuring them, and require explicit, deliberate action from a person to enable any configuration changes. Use, not configuration, must be the default state.

From Wattzon, an even more improved product label along the lines of the nutrition facts labels found on food products. The entire slideset is worth the time and puts a solution to our global energy dilemma in a practical, attainable (albeit challenging) light.

On the left, today’s required nutrition label. On the right, a proposed label containing the energy used to create the product and how much it would add to your energy consumption footprint. Click the image for the full-size version on the Wattzon site. Someday this sort of labeling will be required on all products sold.

(updated and somewhat simplified 6/8/2008)
I have finally managed to synchronize my palm Tungsten T3 to Google Calendar and Swiftdove (Thunderbird optimized for 64 bit + the Lightning calendar) as well as Kontact (aka KDE PIM or KOrganizer). I now have full read/write sync with all apps (with a few small quirks). This method should also work with Thunderbird/Lightning and presumably Sunbird but I haven’t tested that.

Quirks
There are three quirks that I’m aware of.

Things I tried that didn’t work
I’ve been trying on and off to synchronize my palm with various PIMs under Linux since 2001 with little success. Backing up through Kpilot or pilot-xfer has always worked fine, but getting real sync has been pretty much impossible until now. It may not be the holy grail, it is one of the last pieces to the perfect desktop puzzle.

Initially I tried to get OpenSync to work. I failed with the command line tool, with Kitchensync (best name for sync software evar) and with Multisync090. The KDE PIM/Google Calendar sync failed every time, and I never could get my palm to sync. While that project looks quite promising for now isn’t ready for prime time, as they fully acknowledge on their site.

With a bit of effort, GCALDaemon allowed me to sync between Kontact and Google Calendar, as well as Swiftdove and Google Calendar. And since I was able to sync my Palm with Kpilot (and therefore Kontact) I figured everything would be fine. Alas, that didn’t work – Kontact would display both calendars but would not pass the palm calendar to Google, and vice-versa. I was about to give up when I tried one last trick – I noticed that Kpilot allowed me to specify the ical file to link to, and that GCALDaemon uses a google.ics to sync up with Google Calendar.

So I told Kpilot to synchronize with the GCALDaemon ics file instead of the Kontact ics and played some tricks. And it worked – with a little coaxing!

Howto
Here’s a guide for getting the tricky parts working under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) 64 bit. I followed this page of the GCALDaemon guide, then this page through step 5 of the same guide to set up file sync. Now on this page of the Terminally Incoherent guide for Kontact, continue from where it says “Now open Kontact” and once you get to where you specify the filename, use /usr/local/sbin/GCALDaemon/google.ics instead of the location Terminally Incoherent specifies. And since all configuration files should be stored in /etc, I moved /usr/local/sbin/GCALDaemon/conf/gcal-daemon.cfg to /etc and made a symbolic link to the original location. I also set file.polling.google to 5 minutes in the cfg file.

By the way to get this all working you’ll need Kpilot, pilot-link and Sun’s Java. The default Java that ships with Ubuntu 7.10 will not work with GCALDaemon. You’ll also need GCALDaemon and configure Kontact to sync with GCALDaemon – install this software and then use the tutorials I liked to above.

sudo apt-get install kpilot pilot-link sun-java6-jre

Once you have GCALDaemon working with Kontact and Google Calendar, you can begin the next steps. Once you’ve done the following steps ones all you need to do is sync your palm normally.

1) Make a backup of your entire palm (you may need to replace that /dev/ttyUSB1 with something else):

pilot-xfer -p /dev/ttyUSB1 -b /home/yourname/somedirectory

Having a backup is crucial, so don’t skip this. You were warned.

2) Open Kpilot, go to Settings -> Configure Kpilot and tell it to sync to the same google.ics that GCALDaemon is using. Again, mine is at /usr/local/sbin/GCALDaemon/google.ics. Under the Conflicts tab choose Handheld overrides.

3) Synchronize your palm and wait until GCALDaemon transfers all of your appointments to Google Calendar. I had thousands of appointments so I gave it an hour.

4) All of the calendar entries in your palm may have vanished. Don’t panic. Sync again – all of the entries should be there. If not, restore the calendar to the palm using pilot-xfer. You don’t have to start over, just restore the calendar. Two way sync should still work with no duplicates.

That’s it.

To install Swiftdove, the 64 bit optimized version of Thunderbird that includes Lightning, into Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy), you need to follow these two steps:

A) Add the swiftweasel repository to apt by adding this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/swiftweasel gutsy multiverse

B) Update the cache and install Swiftdove:

apt-get update | apt-get install swiftdove-athlon64

Swiftdove is noticably faster, and the inclusion of Lightning is a nice bonus.

Woot!