Monthly Archives: September 2007

Apple: the good, the bad and the ugly.

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My son has an 5th generation iPod. The other day he came in a little annoyed as the headphone socket had broken. When he checked the receipt, it was about five days past the twelve month warranty period. I suggested that he should go to the Apple store and see what they could do for him.

I went along for support, and to have a play with the latest toys. The good thing is that I do like the apply gear from an aesthetic point of view. They give a good impression of being well engineered products. The new metal cases are really cool. A quick play with the new iPod touch was fun. The interface worked well, and as a portable web browser, it was quite neat. That was all good.

For those who have not entered into an Apple store, and this was only my second time, it is not arranged like a conventional shop. The majority of the space is for product display, with lots of units setup and working to play with. At the back of the store is the rather cheesy named ‘Genius Bar’, where tech support can be had. To make a purchase, it would seem that you can talk to one of the assistants wearing a portable till in a holster. All very ‘Open Plan’.

When we got there, it was a bit busy. We spoke to one of the assistants, who then logged onto one of the demo computers, and made an appointment at the Genius Bar. Twenty minutes later, we were talking to one of the in store Genius’. He scanned the bar code from the original box and confirmed that it was now ten days since the warranty had run out. I was just about to get ready to start having a moan, when he added that as a general rule, if it is within fourteen days of the warranty running out, they will honor it. Result. That was good!

So far, from this experience, I should want to get some apple gear. But I can’t, for a number of reasons. I have often thought that I would like an iPod, but as I use Linux, there is no official support from Apple for this operating system. Until recently, it may have not been such a problem, as third party developers have provided a solution. Now with the latest range of products, it appears that Apple made a deliberate effort to raise the bar for these third part tools.

I know that one of the great features with Apple gear that it all just works together. For those that want the full Apple experience, this is great. Plug your iPod, iPhone or whatever into your Mac, and off you go. But for me, I don’t want Mac, nor do I want to run Windows. Therefore, I will only ever have a second rate experience with any Apple music player or other device. Having to rely on third part support is not good, it is bad, maybe even ugly.

WordPress upgrade

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I have just upgraded this blog to use the new WordPress 2.3 release. It was so easy, I thought that it had not worked! It is not exactly clear what has changed, but I do now have Tags and a funky tag cloud. Having only one plug-in installed, and a theme that is only a small modification of a standard theme probably helped.

Compiz in Ubuntu 7.10

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One of the reasons that I wanted to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 before it was released was so that I could have a play with the new developments in compiz. It was therefore more than a little disappointing to discover that it did not work. When I tried to enable desktop effects, it would simply state that it could not, and would revert back to metacity.

At first, I was a little annoyed as I could not even see any error message as to why this had failed. Finally, for another reason, I started gnome-settings from the command line. When I then selected the appearance tool, and tried to turn on desktop effects, some useful information scrolled up the screen.

It would appear that by default, compiz checks that the graphics card has at least 64 MB or RAM before it will allow compiz to start. No doubt this is done for a good reason, but this does not help me with my 32 MB graphics card in my laptop.

A little bit of googling and I discover that compiz in Ubuntu has a wrapper script called /usr/bin/compiz A quick look in here and it is easy to see where the check for the RAM is done. I dropped the limit to 32 MB and tried again. Yay! Wobbly windows 🙂

Now all I need to do is find out how to configure compiz ….

Resist the urge to upgrade

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I am currently running Ubuntu 7.04 on two computers at home. In the past, I have always found it hard to resist the urge to install the development version of the next release of the distribution I am running. This started when I was using Debian. With its slow release cycle, Debian stable did start to feel a bit tired as a desktop system.

I would find that the latest version of some software with the features that I was interested in was not available. Rather than muck about with back-ports etc., I just went and installed testing, and then unstable. These are only my own machines, and the need for stability was not critical. The only time this did bother me was when I wanted to print. I found that my printer needed to be re-configured at regular intervals. A couple of times this did bite me as I wanted to print something quick, and due to changes in CUPS or whatever, my printer was off-line.

I then moved to Ubuntu. With its shorter release cycle, I decided that I would have the best of both worlds. I could have the more recent versions of software, and not have unpredictable breakage. Two upgrades a year should be ample. Well I could not wait for the final release of version 7.04 so I installed that a few months early, to try out compiz IIRC.

Now I am trying hard to resist the urge to upgrade to 7.10 before it is released. I fully expect that it is already stable enough for my use, but it would be good to wait until it has been released to try it. Not long to go now!