Ups and Downs and Everything In Between

Lately, I have been reading Jakob Nielsen’s excellent book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. As I was reading it on the subway yesterday, I got to page 308 only to find that the facing page was page number 325. Naturally, I was somewhat frustrated that the copy I got was defective.

The first thing I did when I got home was to go online and search through the online errata to see if I could locate the missing pages. Unfortunately, as far as I could tell, it’s not in there at all. The error isn’t even mentioned anywhere on the publisher’s web site.

I resolved to emailing New Riders publisher’s customer service staff and asking whether they could point me to a copy of the text. When I checked my email today, there was an apology from the New Riders Customer Service department asking for my address so that they could ship me a new copy. That is awesome.

The prompt reply, and the no-nonsense manner in which they offered to resolve my problem has left me with an incredibly positive association with New Riders (assuming, of course, that my new copy arrives without any glaring errors). There is only one other company that I have heard of which resolves customer support complaints so elegantly, and that is Apple Computers.

Having good customer service is far more important than selling a good product. Why? Because it only takes one negative experience to turn customers away from you, no matter how good your product is or how deeply loyal the customer may have previously been to your brand.

Update: About 10 minutes ago today (February 8^th) there was a knock on my front door by the postman. Surprised, I signed for the package and took it inside to open it. Low and behold, a shiny new copy of Designing Web Usability was now resting in my palms! And, yes, I checked the pages and this copy has no errors that I can see whatsoever. I’m definitely a satisfied customer.

Fedora Core is a bipolar Linux distribution. There, I’ve said it. I know there are legions of Fedora devotees out there, but they have probably had no such headaches installing the damn distro as I have had in the past week or so.

For all my troubles, it was easier to get FreeBSD up and running (a mere two attempts instead of the several dozen with Fedora) and get a full graphical desktop running. To their credit, the Fedora Project is trying to create a “fully functional” graphical desktop environment right out of the box, which is a bit more of a challenge than FreeBSD’s standard install which drops the user straight into a command-line shell. Thankfully, I am not that much of a computer cripple, and so I was able to find my way into the full GNOME desktop environment in a matter of minutes.

Even so, there are many things left undone in FreeBSD’s standard installation (which are supposed to work almost immediately with a Fedora Linux installation), and which I will end up having to go back and configure myself later. For what its worth, I am at least getting a far more hands-on introduction to a real UNIX than what I would have gotten if Fedora Core worked as advertised. Whether or not that is a good thing only time will tell. In the mean time, I am merely happy to be experiencing a new OS.

Further Fedora Failures

I had tried to install Fedora Core 3 on several PCs of very different hardware makes last week. In each case I was unable to complete the Fedora Core 3 installer and get a working version of Fedora Linux onto the computers. Despite spending the better part of this week researching the topic and attempting to find solutions to the problems, I simply could not get it to work.

Fedora Core 3 Installation Problems

I was constantly confronted, in some point during either the graphical or text-based installation of Fedora with the console message Install exited abnormally followed by lines that read Sending termination signals…done., unmounting filesystems, and finally stating that You may safely reboot your system.

Whether or not it was, indeed, safe to reboot the system is up for debate. In some cases my previous OS had already been rendered unbootable by the installer having written a new partition table to the hard drive before “exitting abnormally.” This is why I had rescue CDs before attempting a Linux migration (and is why you need to have them, too)!

In all the mailing list archives and installation guides I could find, several common motifs echoed in the various “Help me” posts I perused:

1. Using certain kinds of mice, most notably any form of LogiTech® or serial mice can cause crashes of the graphical installer and should not be probed for automatically, or—in the worst cases—should not be used during installation, period. This is not really a problem because the installer provides ample keyboard navigation support, but is a rather annoying bug anyway.

   Workarounds that I have tried included:

   • Using a generic mouse instead of any major brand mouse. Specifically, I used an InterAct PS/2 (6-pin mini-DIN) mouse instead of a LogiTech, IntelliMouse, or serial mouse.
   • Unplugging the mouse for the duration of the automatic hardware probing and then manually configuring the installer to use a generic 3-button mouse.
   • Unplugging the mouse for the duration of the installer. Or for the durations that worked, anyway.
   • Using the text-based installer (which does not use a mouse at all) instead of the graphical one.

   Unfortunately, none of this had any effect other than to drive me crazy when trying to combine these various workarounds with the following workarounds.

2. Hardware probing itself is sometimes, allegedely, to blame for the failed installs. Disabling the hardware probe, or certain parts of it, by passing special options to the Linux kernel at boot time sometimes fixes the problem. Additionally, sometimes certain options regarding the power management features of the hardware and the kernel cause problems, and they should also be disabled during the installation boot-up process via special kernel arguments. The list of special boot options I tried were:

   • linux noprobe
   • linux noacpi
   • linux nofb
   • linux mem=mem_amount (with the appropriate amount of memory available on whatever system I was trying to install onto in place of mem_amount)
   • Various others I can’t remember right now.
   • Various combinations of the above options in conjunction with other attempts.

   In my case, the automatic hardware probe always managed to correctly guess my video card and monitor type (Intel 810 and ViewSonic EF70, respectively), so I was left to believe that the mouse was the only likely hardware issue. Nevertheless, I did notice that when the X server was starting up, parts of the usually gray screen were corrupted (think horizontal or vertical “snow” on an old TV set) and later, scrolling text and pop-up windows would not display correctly.

Sooner or later, usually sooner and almost always during the Searching for Fedora Core installations… progress dialogue, the X server would exit abnormally (or crash) and I would be told that it was safe to reboot my system. To which I scoffed and went to eat more cake.

I suspect that I may be lacking some kind of knowledge about either

• how the Linux kernel works or how OS kernels in general work, or
• how physical media such as hard disk drives interact with their software counterparts and how they store information (partitions, blocks, clusters, sectors, heads, cylinders, etcetera…)

that I need to understand in order to solve this problem. Unfortunately, despite all that I am reading on that topic these days I just could not get Fedora Core 3 to install successfully.

The really frustrating part in all of this is that there are no explicit error messages that come up to help me diagnose the issue. Even with the most braindead implementation issues on Windows, an error message, cryptic as it usually is, never fails to pop up and let the user know something is wrong. (Of course, the sheer frequency with which that happens is actually a prime motivator to my fondness for Unix-like systems.)

In this case, Fedora Core’s installer never warns me of a problem until its too late. In two cases, during a graphical installation on a machine that had already logged a failed installation attempt an error window did show itself and read something like BUG! Assertion (heads > 0) failed! which I understood to mean that something was either royally screwed with my partition table, BIOS drive geometry, or physical hard disk drive, and thus induced my search for the bugfix at LWN.net. Some common sense tells me it is more likely to be a problem with the partition table than anything else because both Windows and Knoppix work without any problems at all.

Fedora Core 2 Installation Succeses and Woes

It was suggested to me, when I finally gave up and sent a rare and detailed “help me” request to a very nice (and far more skilled) acquaintence of mine, that I should try to install Fedora Core 2 instead of Fedora Core 3 because it was likely to be far more stable.

The good news is that I have actually managed to get FC2 working on one (1!) machine of mine. Surprisingly, the docile computer is the extremely old PeoplePC-branded box with extremely low resources. (PeoplePC was a prevalent ISP in the mid-1990’s who were, I believe, the first to offer cheap computers as a bonus to new subscribers.)

Unfortunately, this machine runs painfully slowly (especially with a huge application like GNOME) and so even opening windows is an exercise in patience. Doing anything actually productive is simply unrealistic, as it took nearly 2 hours to get the latest updates in up2date from the Red Hat Network, and I actually cancelled the update in the middle of that process. So I had been hoping that Fedora Core 2 would install nicely on the other machines I have.

Of course, that’s when the bad news hit. The bad news is that bugs are in FC2 as well and the same thing happened with it as what happened with FC3 on one of the machines I tried to install it on. I was greeted with that very familiar Install exited abnormally message and was told to reboot my system. I spent a few minutes trying a few of the workarounds I talked about above on this version of Fedora on this machine, but gave up after about half an hour.

Interestingly, on the other machine which didn’t take the install the problem was entirely different. Rather than even getting to the graphical installer, when I pressed Enter at the boot:-prompt I was inexplicably dropped into the text-based installer instead. There was not the slightest indication that the computer was even trying to load the graphical installer. Wierd! This didn’t happen with Fedora Core 3 at all.

Optimistic as I was, I thought it still might work; perhaps it was just the graphical installer that wouldn’t function. But alas, this was not to be. When I was asked where the installation media is to be found and responded with “Local CD-ROM,” the text-based installer reported being unable to locate Fedora Core on the CD-ROM, even though the install disk was right there in the CD drive and I had used that very disc to get FC2 working on the first, oldest machine I tried!

Thus, I have decided that Fedora is a bipolar Linux distribution which needs heavy doses of appropriate patience and medications. I am at a total loss to explain this except to say that I am not left with a great taste for Fedora or Red Hat in my mouth. Ew.

FreeBSD is Less Moody, but also Potentially Confusing

To make matters even more confusing, I had tried to install FreeBSD some days ago on the old machine which now holds the only working Fedora Core installation I have. When I tried to install FreeBSD on it the other day I was unable to proceed due to an error that read something like Unable to locate Hard Disk Drive or similar. I can’t remember the exact wording.

After giving up with Fedora tonight, I tried to install FreeBSD on the machine which forced me into the text-based installer for FC2. It has completed without a hitch, and it only took me a few moments to orient myself within the system (man hier was incredibly helpful) in order to find out how to start a GNOME session and get back to the still-comforting GUI desktop.

Final Fumbling Thoughts

It might be of interest that both machines on which Fedora Core 2 failed to install for one reason or the other are HP Pavillion machines of somewhat different makes. One has a Pentium III processor and the other a Celeron, for instance.

Since FreeBSD has worked on one of these Pavillion towers but not on the old PeoplePC-branded tower (where Fedora 2 did work) I am hoping that at the very least some other BSD will take to the other Pavillion. That way, I can get different operating systems on my various computers and finally get to start playing with the many options out there, like I have been wanting to do for months now.

While I hope this is certainly not the end, I am not at all opposed to the idea of giving up on Linux (or at least Red Hat) for the time being. Perhaps all I really need is to go build myself a new system with new and (hopefully) supported hardware. That really shouldn’t be such a big deal, and I need to upgrade that old PeoplePC box anyway. 200-something mhz is just not acceptable these days. (It wasn’t even in the mid 1990’s, but PeoplePC was cheap and we are not rich.)

I am already far more comfortable with FreeBSD than I was even in the graphical environment of Fedora Core 2’s default GNOME themes. Perhaps it is the shell. I spend a lot of time on Mac OS X within Terminal at a tcsh prompt (though I have playing with bash lately) and, after all, FreeBSD is one of Mac OS X’s parents.

Seems only fitting that I should feel more comfortable with the BSD’s than with a Linux. In the end, Linux Is Not UniX. ;)

Danica’s iPod was the one Christmas gift she bought herself this year. She really deserves more, but times are tight right now. Anyway, after a week of getting her music library slowly transffered onto the thing, it quit mounting properly on her Sony Vaio laptop. (If it matters, it stopped working right after she ran Windows Update. She is now officially scared stiff of ever running Windows Update again. Ever. Things just keep breaking when she does it.)

Some digging resulted in the discovery of the advice to go out and get a FireWire PCMCIA card (aka, a CardBus card) for the laptop. Plugging the iPod into a USB controller is apparently finicky at best, impossible at worst.

So I went out and bought her an Adaptec DuoConnect card, which has two USB 2.0 ports, one traditional FireWire (aka, IEEE 1394) port and another “mini” FireWire port. At first I thought it wouldn’t work because I hadn’t noticed the part about not buying a combo-device.

Fortunately, it worked without a hitch and Danica has her iPod back. Which is great for me because I get to listen to more of her great music selections. So rule of thumb for iPods: they love FireWire, they hate USB.

Funny. It seems that TV is struggling to find new ways to counter the onslaught of DVR and Tivo devices which let viewers skip over the commercials in television broadcasts.

This is of absolutely no concern for me whatsoever; I have canceled all my TV service since moving into my new apartment. It has been an enlightening and rewarding experience, and I strongly encourage anyone who is wondering why they are paying dozens of dollars every month to their cable or satellite provider to do the same.

Yesterday, Danica and I played Go for several hours before bed. Both of us have been spending more time online lately. She has been getting her news from the Web for years, whereas I rather miss watching The Daily Show for my daily dose of Bush-bashing.

There are some shows I do miss. Family Guy, for instance, and (most) the rest of the lineup on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. But “going without” for the past few weeks has meant I’ve been getting more of that precious “quality time” with Danica. And no TV service doesn’t mean no TV!

The other day, I spent a good two hours playing the original Sim City on the Super Nintendo. Yesterday, Danica and I watched Pi. In general, she has been getting more out of her NetFlix subscriptions, too.

So in short, any attempt at forcing people to watch stuff they don’t want to see, like commercials, is going to backfire ridiculously harshly. I’m extremely happy without the distraction that television was, even if it does mean I have to spend more time with myself. And that’s not always easy.

It is a shame that there is only 24 hours in the day. I figure I need at least 8 hours of sleep per night (on average, anyway) and that leaves only 16 left for web-surfing if I did nothing else at all. Of course, that’s unrealistic, so the real estimate I give it is more like 6 hours a day—and I’m a web-aholic!

Most of the time I spend surfing the web is actually done within my newsreader. My subscription list contains several hundred news sources of interest from around the web, and so it’s no wonder that I’ve been having trouble keeping it up with it all. The other day I finally got around to reclassifying that gargantuan list into a more palpatable format, very reminiscent of Jeffrey Veen’s “happy little folders” with categories ranging from “Must Read” to “Missable.” Now I don’t feel so bad if I can’t get to 90% of the items on my reading list this century.

Today, as I was reading Joe Clark’s Zoom-Layout article on A List Apart, a notification of new posted items in some of my feeds took my attention away from Joe’s article and momentarily had me contemplating whether or not I should abandon it in favor of the new item.

Now, Joe, you’ll be glad to know that I resisted the temptation and finished reading your article (as well as some of the discussion), but that moment of hesitation has really got me thinking. There are all sorts of various notifications popping up on screen at any given time, and there are simply so many bits of information that one can be alerted to. It’s no wonder the webbed world has gotten as impatient as it has.

If the content of Joe’s article had not been as engaging and interesting as it was, I may have clicked on the notification and never returned to finish it. The implications of this attention-starvation economy for a business site is quite frightening. Moreover, business folk are doubtlessly unfamiliar with this form of competition.

If A List Apart had been a printed magazine, I would have been flipping through pages as I read Joe’s article on my sofa, instead of at my computer desk on my laptop’s screen. The motivation for getting up—whether for another magazine or a cup of coffee—is relatively small, at least until I had finished the article. But on the web, competing content is so utterly easy to access that the motivation for going to it increases exponentially as the quality of the current content the user is exposed to decreases.

Or in other words, this is why usability is getting to be big business, or at least should if e-commerce companies know what’s good for them. Not that this is any form of groundbreaking discovery, but it has never hit me so plainly as it has today. And I’m a big advocate of experiencial learning.

It has been happening all day; an unshakable feeling of fogginess, lack of conecntration, the inability to to clear my head or focus my eyesight. Everything seems unsteady, shaky, vulnerable to some form of toxic gas or radioactivity that would permeate everything. Dread, heavyness, and confusion have been the only certain things today.

And I don’t know why. I feel like crying as I write this.

Moments ago, my iTunes library started playing Legacy of the Wizard music clippings. That makes me miss old times. (For those interested, I found this archive of Legacy of the Wizard MIDI music files.)

I have been fighting the battle of finding sources of motivation my whole life. The reason I quit school was because it was not motivating.

I have huge problems doing anything I don’t want to be doing, and this went well beyond the standard “rebellious teen” stereotype I was frequently pinned with.

My moods and my general state of mind play the most crucial role in whether or not I can actually do something. Going to the store for a simple carton of milk seems like an insurmountable hurdle to breakfast when I’m not feeling okay. And that doesn’t mean I’m feeling depressed, or manic, it just means I can’t motivate myself to actually go do it; as far as I can tell, there was never a correlation to depression or mania in that regard.

I have gotten better and better the more I work at it, but it is a slow process that has taken a huge toll on my energy reserves every day. I find that learning new things and engaging in the activities that I find interesting keep me emotionally stable and prevent me from getting too harsh with myself when I think about what I’ve done (or not done) during my days.

The number one thing I keep telling myself, over and over and over again, is to “just do shit.” Going out of the house is very hard at first, but then once I do I feel much better. I am more apt to write, to code, to experiment with computers, to do my work, and just to do stuff once I have gotten over the initial hurdle of starting to do something.

But the reverse is true as well. If I start my day by being lazy, by not getting that carton of milk and instead settling for whatever’s in the fridge, then it would be a miracle if I could get myself out of the habit that day.

Also, I find that having a good, long stretch of time in which to do things is important. Typically, one must work, eat, and deal with billions of other distractions throughout the day like phone calls. If I am to do anything solid throughout my days, I must be given ample time to do it. Otherwise, I feel rushed and unmotivated.

Danica and I only managed to go to sleep nearing 5 AM yesterday. Which is really, really bad. We have so much to do that we just don’t have time to lazy about the house for hours on the few days we have off togethr. I was pissed at myself for not going to bed earlier last night.

I spent about 4 hours last night playing with Knoppix 3.6, since Fedora Core 3 is apparently bipolar too. Who knew? It wouldn’t install on my older PC, but after reading more carefully through the release notes I’m no longer convinced it had anything to do with the bug I encountered on the first pass. Instead, I think I might just need to upgrade the hardware on that box because, unfortuantely, it’s just too old. (Old 350 mhz Celeron, for instance. Blah!)

So I’ll see if I can install Fedora Core 3 on the other machine and hope it’ll take. While I do that, I need to go get a brand new motherboard and other internal components. I’ve never built my own system before, but this is as good a time as any to try it. Nothing fancy, just a good solid fileserver maybe.

This morning, however, I was pleasantly awoken by Danica’s gentle hugs at around half past noon. Late, of course, since I had hoped to be out of here by noon instead. I knew I’d have trouble waking up by going to sleep that late. Danica had prepared coffee and a slice of loaf cake for breakfast and we enjoyed each other’s company in sitting at the makeshift kitchen table.

And for something completely different, as I was blowing air through a small electrical cap for our new Gevalia coffee maker (I got it so we would be spending less money on Starbuck’s, and because it’s surprisingly good), I managed to whistle for the first time ever! I can’t seem to reproduce the effect, but it had me unproportionately excited for a few moments there.

Now it’s off to actually do what we have to do today: shop for cabinets and counter space for the kitchen, pick up random objects from our old apartment, and get curtains, drill bits, and other various items from around the city. Wish me luck and low prices.

Yesterday was much better than the past couple of days, and today is turning out to be truly awesome.

• I was still angry with Danica when she came home, so few words were exchanged at first. Some time later, she went to the kitchen (omg, we have a kitchen) and ate some leftover Thai for food for dinner. That’s when I stopped fiddling with my computers and came to join her.

  We spoke a little, hugged, played Race (an Israeli card game), and generally felt better. I’m not really sure if we’ve resolved to “not fight” anymore, but there is certainly less emotional pollution in the air right now. That, if nothing else, makes my day.

• I didn’t go to sleep last night. Instead, I finished inspecting the other PC I have. This is the lower-end machine, so instead of merely look at the data, I actually took the whole thing apart and took out the CD-ROM drive, the floppy disk drive, some PCI cards, and disconnected the power supply. Yes, I was like a kid in a candy store.

  This may sound odd to some of you (it sure does to me), but I’ve rarely ever seen the inside of a computer before. So this was really a lot of fun to do. I had my trusty power tool so screwing and unscrewing various parts was a snap. If I could, I would have literally opened up the CD-ROM drive to see what it looks like in there, but I didn’t have the right tools.

  I went out to Radio Shack, the hardware store, and various other locales around my neighborhood when it turned to morning and after I had fetched Danica her morning pastries and latè, but no store had the right sort of screwdrivers. I tried my best to open the small CD-ROM screws with one of those eyeglass repair kits with the little screwdriver but I only succeeded in hurting my hands.

  I did, however, buy myself a Linksys Fast Ethernet NIC for the PC which didn’t have an RJ-45 port. I installed it on the PCI slot in the motherboard myself, screwed it in place and am currently sitting next to the open computer. I spent a good deal of time cleaning the innards with a can of compressed air and rubbing the casing down with paper towels. Hopefully that’ll do some good.

• I’m finally installing Fedora Core 3, the Linux distro that was most often suggested to me to try first. I’m actually paging through the installer as I write this, which is incredibly exciting. I didn’t even finish setting up my workspace, but it’s really just about damn time I had a Linux box. I plan on installing one other Linux distro one of my two remaining PCs, and probably FreeBSD on the other because it’s what Mac OS X was “based on,” or so they say.

  Oh yeah. And Danica’s excellent music collection is playing off of her computer on my speakers. It’s awesome stuff. Really it is.

Dave Hyatt, a developer of Apple’s Safari web browser offered some amazingly enlightening insight into the nightmares of browser developers the other day. The only thing I can think to say is: Dave, thanks for trying.

This is a great example of how IE’s inconsistent rendering behavior has long-lasting negative effects on the adoption of CSS not only by web page authors, but web browser authors. As Dave himself says,

So now I really have no choice. This is an example of where the CSS2 standard simply can’t be followed because buggy layout engines have set a bad precedent that the rest of us have no choice but to follow.

It’s a shame that Gecko does not do the right thing in strict mode at least, but I suppose they had no choice in the matter either.

This is reminiscent of back when Opera was beginning to look more and more like Internet Explorer, but at least it’s not a bug this time.