KDE 4.2 is much more like it

A while back I outlined why I wasn't able to use KDE yet, which at the time was at version 4.1. Since then, KDE 4.2 has been released and is being much touted as the first version in the 4.x series that is truly suitable for end users.

Well, the short story is that I'm extremely pleasantly surprised!

Here's the long story. Having just upgraded to 6GB of ram, I needed to upgrade to 64-bit in order to take advantage. With jaunty in alpha 3 and offering KDE 4.2, I decided to go ahead and install that, using ext4 too. This other stuff is for another post though: now I'll go through my previous complaints and see where we're at now...

1. Taskbar entries are now movable: this is configurable in the widget's properties, which allows position to be set to 'manual'. Grouping is also in place and can also be set to manual.
2. The taskbar height is now fully resizable, and works very well.
3. There is still no applet for tomboy notes: I don't expect this to change any time soon, if ever.
4. It looks like KDE's choice of desktop search service is one called strigi, which is itself a part of the larger nepomuk semantic desktop system. This all looks very interesting, but there appears to be some problems with strigi performance.
   
5. I have no problems with picking up and dragging around windows now. In fact, this seems to be extremely smooth, and it is very noticeable that there is no tearing as things are being moved around.
6. As with Tomboy, I don't see this happening any time soon, if ever.
7. This has been fixed: the system tray now displays very nicely.
8. I now have no problems assigning keys to switch desktops and move windows from one desktop to the other. In fact, this seems to have come on in leaps and bounds. I wanted to assign something the other day and there it was, exactly where I expected it.
   
9. This one still persists, and is probably what bugs me the most. The problem affects the system tray and digital clock widgets, and is documented in this bug.
10. I still get this, particularly in Thunderbird and Prism. I did find a nice theme for firefox which makes it fit right in with the default KDE theme, and that helped a great deal. Does need more work.
    
11. This seems to have disappeared completely, which is obviously very welcome indeed. :)
    
12. kopete still doesn't do IRC. However, I really do need to have a look at quassell, which has a very interesting client/server architecture which I think I will find extremely useful.

So from that list we see a considerable improvement over KDE 4.1, enough that I'm going to be sticking with it for the time being.

The main problem for me is the way in which the clock and system tray widgets want to soak up all usable space on the panel, which is horribly messy.

Still, heck of a job. I'm going to be very interested when 4.3 comes along to see what else they've done...

New Rule for registration processes

I just signed up for a site that asked for a password. Like most people, I don't create a different password for every site I visit I'd never be able to remember them.

Instead, I have a set of them, for differing levels of importance or required security. It works well, and so far I don't think I've ever had any security breaches.

The problem though is knowing which password you should use beforehand. This is a problem because some sites will email include your password in plain text in the welcome email after registration.

We all know that as soon as a password is emailed in plain text is can no longer be considered secure. These sites will no doubt also email it in plain text if you use the "Forgot Password" link too, which of course makes it worse.

I'm actually ok with this: some sites simply aren't that important and if you account gets hacked then meh. But I would like to know beforehand that they are going to be treating my password in this way before I decide which password I'm going to use.

So, New Rule: registrations should disclose if they are going to be sending the password via email in plain text prominently on the registration form itself.

Why I can't use KDE 4 (yet)

I've always been a flip-flopper when it comes to desktop environments. When I first started with Linux I think I was using KDE. Spent a bit of time playing with things like Enlightenment and black blox before settling for quite a while on XFCE4.

After a while I got itchy feet and tried gnome again, and I've been a gnome user ever since.

KDE3 just didn't do it for me, for many reasons that I mostly can't remember now. I do remember that its default themes were as ugly as hell, and I could never for the life of me get other themes to work well at all. They required weird contortions like compiling (for a theme?!?!), and never looked as good as the screenshots would have you believe.

So I stuck with gnome. Simple, clear and crisp. Compiz has given it a really nice boost, and I think the combination works really well.

But, I'm still a flip flopper, so I'm always on the lookout for something new. Unfortunately, E17 appears to have become to Duke Nukem Forever of desktop environments, so it was in the end KDE4 that got my interest.

I tried KDE 4.0 shortly after it first came out, and quickly switched back. It was unstable, and didn't have everything in place. I figured I'd try again with 4.1.

That I did, and this time it fared better. I decided to give it a week and make notes on what bugged me about it so I wouldn't forget. This way, when 4.2 comes out I'll be able to see if they've sorted any of the issues that bug me...

My work environment involves a desktop machine and a laptop, both of which are running (k)ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. I use the keyboard and mouse of the desktop machine and control the laptop via synergy. My KDE4 experiment has been run on the desktop machine (with the laptop continuing to run gnome).

So, without further ado, here is my list:

1. Taskbar entries don't appear to be movable. That is, I can't change their order. This bugs the hell out of me: I like to have specific things on the far left, and if they aren't there I get lost.
   
2. The taskbar is too chunky. Having just one at the bottom is nothing like enough space, so I opt to have one above and below in the gnome style, but the size of the taskbar means that quite a significant amount of vertical screen space disappears.
3. No applet for Tomboy Notes. Yes, I know that KDE has its own note-taking application, but it's not as good, and I'd rather be able to use the same notes whichever desktop environment I'm using. It doesn't even have to use the same backend: just standardise on the file formats and that should do the trick.
   
4. Is there any decent integration with MetaTracker? If there is I can't find it mentioned anywhere...
5. Grabbing windows seems to be a bit sluggish. I'll point click and drag, and find that the window was never grabbed. So I'll have to go back and do it more slowly.
   
6. There is no applet for the Revelation password manager
7. Many applications appearing the notification area have a horrible white box around them. Something nasty going on with transparency I'd imagine. It only seems to affect non-KDE native icons too...
   
8. Trying to assign CTRL+ALT+Left/Right to allow me to cycle through desktops doesn't work. They keys assign, but they don't actually do anything when pressed.
9. Created a new panel, added a clock and System Tray to it. I can't get them to align to the right. The clock insists on taking up about a quarter of the panel's horizontal space, while the System Tray does even worse. Can't see any way to force them to behave.
10. It is worth pointing out that gnome hosts KDE apps far better than KDE hosts Gnome apps. Not in terms of look and feel integration, but in terms of things actually working properly. Gnome apps in KDE seem to have weird quirks such as scroll bars disappearing.
    
11. It makes really horrible things happen with the clipboard on the Gnome machine that this KDE machine is controlling (via synergy). I simply cannot paste sometimes: it just keeps pasting things I copied previously (and yes, I am trying both methods of pasting). Clearing Klipper seems to work around the problem, and it seems that this happens when Klipper's list gets full, which is rather annoying...
12. Kopete doesn't do IRC.
    

There were other minor things too that I just forgot to write down.

And it is interesting to find that a number of the complaints above (such as the window grabbing issue) transferred to the laptop machine too. I wonder if this is indicative of it being a simple configuration issue?

Anyway, KDE 4.2 is now in beta, so it won't be much longer before I'll be able to give it another go...

Thoughts about Ubuntu 8.10 - Intrepid Ibex

I've not posted about a Linux distro before, but I figured I would this time... just because!

Last week my Gentoo-based work laptop (IBM Thinkpad T43p) encountered a package blockage when updating. As usual, I tried to fix it myself, failed, and then discovered via the forums that this was a particularly tricky one to navigate that was probably going to require things like booting into recovery mode and doing manual surgery.

I decided that enough was enough, and that it was time to move on. It was a day before Intrepid's release, so I just went with the release candidate: I had done the same thing with the previous Ubuntu release on my desktop machine so I knew it would be ok.

And it was. Installation was as easy as it usually is, and the grub installation correctly picked up on the Windows XP dual boot partition which came with the laptop.

The first thing that has really impressed me is the networking and wireless support. This worked flawlessly straight away. Connecting to and disconnecting from the wireless network is handled properly authatically. Very impressed with this.

I was also impressed that hibernation support appears to works too. This is something that I had got working in the past but only by using the TuxOnIce kernel. This again appears to work out of the box, which is fantastic.

It's a shame that OpenOffice 3 didn't make it, but it can be installed pretty easily using a PPA.

I'm also a fan of the new "FUSA applet" which sits in the top right corner on the panel and provides one place from which to switch users, shutdown/restart/hibernate/suspend and also affect IM online presence. I'm not really one to manually mess with my online presence, but I do much prefer this to the previous shotdown window popup: it just seems cleaner and faster.

The only problem I have had is a keyboard repeat problem which I think is represented in Launchpad in the form of bug #278078. This only happens when I am controlling the intrepid system over synergy, not when using the machine's keyboard directly. Hopefully it will be fixed soon, becasue it is really quite annoying!

So all in all, I'm impressed. The next thing for me to look at is KDE 4: but that's another post. :)

Its name is...

Planet Ubuntu just ran a meme on the subject of computer naming: i.e. how you choose names for your computers.

Mine are named after musical modes, so currently I have:

• aeolian
• dorian
• mixolydian
  

I used to have locrian too, but that machine died and I decided to not reuse the name until I ran out of other modes. I seriously doubt that I'll ever have as many machines as there are modes anyway! There are (basically) seven of them, so I should be fine. :)

My next guitar

I've recently found myself wondering what guitar I'd like to get next. This is a little weird, because I really don't play the guitars I already have anywhere near enough, but lately I've found myself thinking about it more and more, so it might be time to get started again.

My current guitars are:

• A blue Les Paul Studio Lite M-III, which is lovely and has an extremely flexible pickup arrangement that allows it to be played as a strat-style 5-combination single coil guitar, as well as a standard double-humbucker Les Paul.
  
• A Charvel Model 3 (I think. It looks like this in red, but I see so many pictures of Charvels with the same name that look completely different, it's hard to know) , which is unfortunately in need of a bit of love. The bridge's fine-tuners aren't well at all, the locking nut doesn't lock any more and the pickups sound very lifeless (especially the bridge). On the other hand, it has a lovely neck, and also features a self-performed customisation in the form of an additional switch which reverses the connections to the middle pickup, adding an extra two pickup combinations.
• A Washburn D10S12 12-string acoustic, which I actually bought brand new last year.

Now I'm not a guitar collector: I have little interest in spending money on and storing lots of instruments that are minor variations on the same model. So I won't be buying another Les Paul any time soon. When I look for a new guitar I want it to give me something new that the ones I already have doesn't.

Looking at that list, some sort of Fender immediately jumps out as a possibility, but the Les Paul does the three single coil job already, and while it won't really sound like a proper Strat, it's close enough for the time being.

As I was reading Paul Draper's emails about the recording of Six, I was reminded of the Gibson ES335 (as played by Mansun's Dominic Chad), which is a double-humbucker instrument like the Les Paul, but with the distinction of being semi-hollow. This gives it a quite different sound to other solid-body electrics, and so nicely fits the bill of adding something new to what I already have.

Unfortunately, the ES335 is very expensive. Yes, that's $1,999, and that is the cheapest model I could find on that site (the most expensive was $3,849). This is far more than I am willing to pay.

Fortunately, there is an alternative in the form of the Epiphone Dot, which is significantly cheaper at $459 including case ($399 without a case, but I see the case as being essential, and $60 isn't bad anyway).

I have read very positive reviews of this model, and looking around youtube there are a number of videos of people reviewing it and even comparing it to the more expensive Gibson model, with positive results. It's definitely on my list now.

Celebrating the 10th anniversary of Mansun's "Six"

Today I had the very pleasant surprise of two rather long emails in my inbox, from Paul Draper (formerly of Mansun) regarding the recording of the album "Six" (two because there were supposed to have been two "sides" to be album).

I have many memories of this album from the time I first bought it, going to see one of the gigs on the Six tour (at the Leeds Town and Country Club), and enjoying it with friends.

One of the things I always appreciated it was the way in which it pushed boundaries and broke from convention in so many ways, and yet remained a really enjoyable collection of musical moments. The emails Paul wrote about its recording reveals a lot about how all of this came about, the reasons why things were done a certain way and what some things mean. It also shows a number of details that you might not notice: for example, "Special/Blown It" was written as an attempt to create a song based on one giant chord sequence: it in fact ends up being based on a 32-bar sequence repeated five times. This is similar to what Radiohead did with their song "Just", which came about following a competition between Tom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood to get as many chords into a song as possible. Little musical jokes like this that most people simply won't notice are one of the things I love about great music.

Some of Paul's commentary is simply hilarious. Take for example his story on how "Witness to a Murder (Part 2)" was devised with the goal of creating :

...something so off the wall, so fucking wacky that when people listened to it they think: "FOR FUCKS SAKE, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?"

Following a brainstorming session they came up with this plan:

An 18th century baroque harpsichord movement featuring one male and one female opera singer singing how miserable they were in Italian with Dr Who playing a dead Brian Jones in a swimming pool in East Sussex.

And that is exactly what they recorded. Brilliant.

Then there's an extremely long section about how the "Muttley" laugh in Shotgun was recorded that is, shall we say, perhaps exaggerating a touch? Wacky.

I was really sad when Mansun broke up. This was a band that was creating genuinely good music that was clever, had depth and rewarded repeated listens. They weren't just about creating hit after hit, and there aren't many bands like them.

The whole thing reminded me of how much I enjoyed making music years ago, with my friend Mark and friends from university, and how I would like to get back into doing it again. it's just a question of time and equipment really.

Maybe someday...

(I've held this post back for a few days in the hope that I could link to Paul's writings about Six, but it appears that it is currently for mailing list subscribers only. I'll add a link once it is published somewhere public.)