Halffull.org

I recently convinced myself to purchase a laptop. As blue midget will attest to, this took considerable mental effort on my part. (don’t call me cheap!) I knew it’d be nice to have for attending techie user groups, for travel, and for just-plain-being-better-than-my-old-computer, but the kicker was the possibility of having to travel for work.

The Dell Inspiron 6000 intrigued me – it’s fast, attractive, has mostly good reviews, and is as cheap as day-old doughnuts for what you get, but it’s Dell. Their support is difficult, to put it nicely. I’ve personally seen them ship computers with no expansion ports and the CD-ROM drive not screwed in. It’s truly a sad state what they’ve slipped to from their original high. (Unless you’re willing to shell out several thousand for an XPS model, of course.

However, I’m impressed with my Inspiron 6000 so far. It seems sturdy, powerful, compatible, and value-concious.

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All I want is a simple database management program.

All I need is to create tables, rows, and fields, insert or edit data, things that aren’t always convenient on the mysql command line. (editing of data in particular.) The only decent program I’ve found is phpMyAdmin, which of course requires a web server and php. I’ve tried every native DB management tool in portage, and several not in portage, to avoid these requirements. They all bite ass. Even MySQL‘s own management tool is buggy and missing features. Is this really so difficult a request?!

Anyway – phpmyadmin decided to die yesterday, after I hadn’t used it for a month or so. The strange voodoo that commenced haunts me to this day.

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http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27426

That deserved a line of its own. Go read about how Sony hates you. Admittedly the story is a bit biased, but it has a right to be. Shame on you, Sony.

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I purchased a Palm Zire 31 last week, so of course this week Palm released the upgrade, the Z22. I’m not bitter about the timing at all, in case you couldn’t tell. In any case, they’re both great products, and I feel it is my duty to let you, the Halffull public, know what I think of them.

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I caught this one before it was even released! Tomorrow (supposedly) Google is releasing a new service, Google Talk, which is basically a public Jabber server for anyone with a Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, you have no excuse, as I was offering them to anyone a few months back.

I’m excited about this for several reasons. First, the Jabber protocol is much better than AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. AIM is by far the most popular in my circle, which is understandable but unfortunate. All three of these legacy protocols come from terrible roots, whereas Jabber was designed to be a light, interoperable, secure protocol. It hasn’t become popular yet because there hasn’t been a good, popular server with which everyone could easily get access.

Second, Google can do no wrong. I know, I know, with the rate they’re growing today they’ll be a behemoth down the line, but I’ve never seen them have a really bad idea. It’s like Bell Labs in the golden days. They managed to keep this one secret, too, which is surprising. I’m hoping it’ll become as popular as Gmail. Also, I must note, Gmail was incredibly good in its own right for UI quality. No webmail service (or truthfully, any web service at all) had come close to its polished UI. While talk.google is just a server, I believe, I think the same forethought will show through.

Third, if it becomes a standard chat server, there’s a chance that we can eliminate the huge mess of protocols we’re forced to live with today. It’s a pain having to use 5-7 accounts in your instant messaging program. One good account would be wonderful.

Did I neglect to mention that the server is already running? So, here’s how to set it up:

• screen name: your Google/Gmail account name (skip the @gmail.com)
• password: obvious
• server: gmail.com
• tls: of course
• port: 5222
• connect server: talk.google.com

Comment here if you set it up. I’m currently having trouble seeing buddies online, but I’m not expecting everything to be perfect until they officially release the service.

[update] Google Talk was indeed released this morning, and with a surprise. It’ s not just an IM service, it’s a VoIP client too (for Windows users). This only works with their official client. Another nice surprise was that they have a chart of alternative clients you can use to connect to their network. How very nice of them! Others should start taking notes, methinks.

[update] Thanks to Manast for this update. You should now use the following settings in Pidgin, and possibly other clients:

• screen name: your Google/Gmail account name (skip the @gmail.com)
• server: gmail.com
• Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams: unchecked
• connect port: 443
• connect server: talk.google.com
• Force old (port 5223) SSL: checked

I’m normally not one for wikis. Point me at a MediaWiki that’s not Wikipedia and I’ll barf.

Initially I hated them because the concept of letting anyone edit your web page is repugnant, to say the least. I came to accept that, in certain cases, they could be useful as knowledge centers. If you don’t like writing documentation, or if you don’t know every intricacy of the subject matter, wikis can be great for letting the community help to spell out a set of articles.

Now I hate them because most wiki systems are awful. MediaWiki, the most popular, has feature-itis to the extreme. “Someone has a fetish for an aberrant magic word that only one site on the entire intarweb will use? Sure, we can add that!” The interface becomes cluttered with strange options that 99% of sites will never use. And God help you if you try to learn all the magic words, templates, variables, and other things so complicated I couldn’t even find a help page for them. Which says a lot in itself. If you need everything and the kitchen sink, it’s your choice. (Wikipedia is only acceptable because it has huge wealths of information, and because MediaWiki was built for it.)

Most other wikis are either fugly, undocumented, unmaintained, or lacking crucial features. However, in my travels, I have found a few very nice and innovative wikis. Here they are, in all their glory:

1. TiddlyWiki: a wiki entirely contained in a single HTML file, using only HTML, CSS, and javascript. It’s quite amazing. You know how to install it? Go to the site, make whatever changes you want, and save the page to your hard drive. It’s your own site. You can email the wiki around, or host if you want – it’s entirely self-contained. Beyond that neatness, it’s also very functional in its own right. It uses just the right amount of javascript to get a seamless, interactive feel. Clicking links doesn’t open a new page, it might just fade in a new block of text over an old one. It’s an effect you really have to see – check out their site. It’s not AJAX (it can’t be, it’s entirely in one local file) but it feels even better.

2. Instiki: the original Ruby wiki, so easy to install and use you’ll wonder if it’s really a wiki. Two steps to install, easy formatting, and it still has all the important stuff for a basic wiki. Plus, it was the inspiration for Rails.

3. Trac: fantastic not for its wiki abilities, but for tying the wiki into the software development process. It has a subversion code browser, wiki, milestones, etc. Take a good look at it if you want your project to have a home.

4. Tomboy: I almost used Gnome for this program alone. It’s an awesome little system tray utility that gives you a personal wiki for notes, to-dos, etc. The quality is in the simplicity. It’s always available.

5. Wikalong: an extension for Firefox that adds a wiki in your sidebar, linked to the current URL. Handy way to keep notes on certain pages, share information, etc. You could also post your Adblock filters.

6. There was a wiki I found at one point that was good for software documentation. I can no longer find it, but it might have been DokuWiki.

I have a suspicion that many people use (other) wikis when they don’t feel like doing design. That is to say, most wikis are butt ugly by default.

Two important points today.

1. I got a new web hosting provider, asmallorange, this weekend. I’ve tested everything I can think of on the site, and the only issue so far is that the database transfer wasn’t perfect – in some posts with double-quote marks, the right quote is replaced by a weird black symbol and a question mark. If anyone notices any other problems, or knows how to easily fix the black mark problem, let me know.

2. asmallorange is incredible so far, and by the reports of their other customers, their servers are reliable and fast. They offer pretty much any feature you’d want, including Ruby on Rails and SSH access. The most impressive thing to me, however, is the support. They have a very easy-to-use support system where you can choose a web interface or email to view/submit support tickets. Every time I’ve submitted a ticket, they’ve responded in 5 minutes or less. And you never get a canned answer; all of the support team knows what they’re talking about, knows the servers, and can help with pretty much anything. If it’s complicated, it gets elevated to the owner, Tim, who is an unsleeping robot support machine. And you can start on the basic plan for $2.50/month. Hard to beat, and I highly recommend it.

Ok, so I was about a week late announcing the goodness that is Backpack. But this is just so cool I couldn’t wait.

Google introduced a new homepage, something like My Yahoo, except that it doesn’t suck. I know that’s a subtle distinction for the Yahoo engineers sometimes – particularly the ones working on the homepage.

Take your normal Google homepage. Add custom content to the bottom that you choose. Make it fully drag-and-droppable via AJAX, which is incredible to see done well. Make sure the content is actually useful, that there are no ads, and that it integrates nicely with good sites, rather than the crap that Yahoo floods you with. Google gives you the power to flood yourself, if you like, but you can strip it down to nothing but a search box if you like. Another neat feature to note is that, at least for me, the site loads the search bar first, and the extra content in one block last. I’m not sure if this is a function of the browser, the site, or chaos theory, but it keeps it nice and speedy for a homepage.

It’s funny, because my project for the past few days has been trying to screen-scrape together a nice integrated homepage, and they went and did all the work for me…

[edit] One remaining minor annoyance was the hugeness of the Google logo on the personalized homepage. Greasemonkey has fixed that.

I feel it is my duty to inform the readers of Halffull of good things. (I was going to say “all our readers who are virtuous and pure of heart”, but I want someone to actually read this)

37signals has come up with another gem, released this month, called Backpack. When they released Ta-Da lists, I was an avid user for quite a while. It only had a few minor issues like the reordering of elements not being quick enough – it could desperately use a drag’n'drop system. Other than that, it was marvelous – quite simple and intuitive, and with just enough use of AJAX to be useful.

Backpack has obsoleted it in one fell swoop. In essence, it’s a personal information manager, or PIM, on steroids. This is not to say that it has every feature under the sun, or even that it’s terribly innovative in its type of features. The genius was in getting it just right. It’s not a wiki, but it has some wiki-like syntax thanks to Redcloth and some wiki-style interconnectedness thanks to its page-based design and easy linking. You can have any number of notes, files, images, list items, and body text on every page. The free version offers 5 pages (more than enough for many people) and 10 reminders, with no images or files; the pay versions start at $5/month.

The reminder system is great – not only is its interface intuitive (“+15″ to be reminded in 15 minutes, or just “7:30pm” for a specific time) but you can be reminded via email or even to your cell phone. [Note: Currently you can choose one (or both) of these options, but they're global, not per-message. Hopefully that will change soon.]

If you’re not a fan of web forms, you can even email content to your pages. Each page has a unique email address – you can send notes, files/images, and even make todo lists via email through an easy syntax.

Complaints?

1. Backpack inherited its list system from Ta-Da Lists, which means it has the same awkward reordering.
2. While Backpack makes sharing your pages publically, or collaborating on pages with friends, quite easy, they only offer full public read-only and private read/write options. It could really use private read-only and public read/write (wiki-style) options as well.
3. There are a couple features that might come in handy – a calendar element, for example. Currently calendars have to be made with HTML tables done through textile, which, while easy enough, have to be edited manually every update.

These are really minor complaints though, and 37signals listens (and often implements) suggestions from their forum. If there’s something you miss, they’re probably already thinking about it.

Things I’ve used Backpack for so far:

1. Storing a Quick Reference of my various ID numbers, IP addresses, contacts, etc.
2. Listing books/websites I want to read, and in what time frame.
3. Keeping track of WoW information, like talent builds, quest to-dos, etc.
4. Email reminders of important tasks, like picking up hulk at the airport.
5. And of course, general notes, todos, songs I want to download, etc. Pretty much anything fits.

[edit] They added drag-and-drop reordering, so my biggest complaint is gone. It works really well, too, and for both to-dos and notes. Check it out! [edit] After more than two years, they’ve finally added a calendar element. However, it’s extremely basic at the moment, and couldn’t be used as a full calendar system unless you have the most boring life ever. In addition, Backpack has been nearly obsoleted by newer, more interactive web applications. I personally haven’t used it in well over a year. However, 37signals is working on a Backpack rewrite which could be quite interesting.

This image says a lot about Windows. I got it while trying to accomplish something at work today, due to no prompting of my own.

1. Notice that the “no” option is grayed out. What the hell am I supposed to do here? I wound up hiding the thing as low as I could on the screen, because you also can’t minimize it.
2. I have no clue what this update was. It installed some new code, presumably from Microsoft, that I know nothing about. Hell, it could have been a worm, you really have no way to tell. Probably an update to their automatic updates backend.
3. This update, no matter how minor, requires a full reboot. Why haven’t they learned over the past… oh, 20 years… that reboots are not only painful but completely unnecessary for 99% of updates? It’s not like they’re updating the Windows kernel; that only happens once every… oh, 20 years.

I’m not a complete Microsoft hater, not in any way – it just seems to me that they learn lessons slowly. They don’t need to learn any faster because they provide the unique solution that most home users need. They could be even better off (and I mean this constructively) if they’d just learn a few simple lessons from Unix-land (and I don’t mean stealing another TCP stack.)