Bring It On

I found myself increasingly using XBox for gaming almost exclusively. Being a hardcore PC gamer for years, this surprised me - isn't XBox technically inferior to the PC? Then I stated rationalizing it and noted the things I like:

• it's extremely easy to start and also to let go (one button to turn it on and the same to turn it off)
• the controller is clumsier than keyboard/mouse combo, but most games have consistently similar setups, thus it's very easy to learn "new" control scheme; there's nothing to customize
• graphics are of lower quality than on the PC, but are consistently good and frame rates are mostly constant; again, nothing to customize
• online experience is flawless - once set up, It Just Works^TM

All of this sounded strangely familiar... Of course - Joel wrote about this phenomena in one of his classic posts:

The secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way. If you're willing to live with not-very-goodness, you can have a Big Mac with absolutely no chance of being surprised in the slightest.

Replace Big Mac with XBox and the statement remains valid.

I was trying to download Fedora Core (ISO image) the other day when I noticed an interesting phenomena - most of the mirror sites were offering 3 or 4 CD version, and very few of them DVD version. I don't see how installing from several CDs can be easier, but I digress. This made finding the DVD ISO image a bit harder, but not impossible - few of the mirror sites had it.

When I started downloading, I noticed something really strange - first, I accidentally started downloading from IE directly (which I normally don't do because IE does not support resumed downloads and always uses one connection only, unlike specialized apps that open up to 10 thread simultaneously speeding up download tremendously). IE reported that file size I am downloading is -1 (!?!) and filled the progress bar completely. Ahem.

Then I switched to FlashGet, which would always report some crazy error or give up.

Then I tried using Windows Commander. Then FileZilla and some other randomly picked freeware FTP.

Finally, I noticed something strange - when the apps would not complain, the size of the image would appear to be somewhat smaller than it should be. Few seconds later armed with a calculator I found that the size reported was exactly 2GB. Coincidentally, that is exactly the maximum you can store in the signed integer (sigh).

Who is to blame? Well, not my apps if that's what you're thinking :). The place I was trying to download from mandates a proxy which is almost three years old (Squid 2.4STABLE6). When I tried downloading without the proxy, everything was fine.

Funny how we are still occasionally plagued by overflow problems...

There is a bit of controversy about usefulness of Edit and Continue (E&C from now on). Apparently, some think that it is a poor substitute for proper planning and yet another debugging crutch.

Well, I thought I will never use it but changed my mind recently. I was trying to format a date in a very specific format. I never seem to be able to remember the format specifiers sometimes just minutes or seconds after reading about them in MSDN.

Being able to play with format specifiers on the fly saved me several minutes and multiple trips to the documentation browser, yet has not jeoperdized my coding approach in any way.

So I guess the conclusion would be to “use it wisely” and that E&C can be useful.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Gnome dictates different order of OK and Cancel buttons than Windows (you can also clearly see it on the screenshot). As a long time Windows user, this irritated me so I decided to find out a bit about the reasoning behind, hoping to find more than just "we wanted to be different".

One of the opinions I read was that this follows the Back/Forward browser buttons logic - right button for confirmatory action and left one for dismissive. Apparently, Mac uses the same button positioning as well (not sure if the reasons are the same).

So I got used to it, and I am not going to argue that this positioning is wrong. But then I would expect all applications running consistently on each and every OS standard.

It turns out that one app does not follow this rule - BitTorrent 4.0 on Windows has (from Windows point of view) reversed positioning of buttons... On the other hand, Firefox works correctly everywhere.

I guess it's one more thing we must think about when porting apps...

I wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole goes... In other words, I was trying to implement portable GUI that would run on Windows and Linux.

In order to do that, I needed to install Linux. No problem - I know Mandrake is generally quite user friendly and my VMWare Workstation is dying for some attention (I'm lying of course - all those CTP versions are keeping my VMWare quite busy but it sounded better this way). Installation went without a hitch, I installed both Gnome and KDE, spent a bit of time wondering how to configure various things but all in all it was quite smooth experience.

In order to use Glade (hopefully solution to my portable GUI problem) I had to build it from sources. I couldn't find it, but if you know where to get RPMs for Glade please let me know. Naturally, build failed due to a few missing developer components and this is where I found Mandrake Control Center and Media Manager.

Being Windows user, this looked very close to Windows Update so I took it for granted that it should work in a similar way. Well, it does, but you have to configure sources of updated packages yourself. This is probably a good time to present exhibit A, dialog you get when you want to add a new update source:

Looks straightforward, but it ain't. Ignore for now the fact that OK and Cancel button are in the “wrong” place (what is it with Gnome anyway, this seems to be a standard convention?). Even if you somehow find out where to get the addresses for update sources (more on that in a moment) the dialog insists that you choose protocol (is is HTTP/FTP etc) and that you split URL into fixed and relative path, even though the UI with the not selected check box implies that you don't have to do this. I tried entering only full URL and it did not work. Heck, entering manually split URL did not work either. Needless to say, software could do all this for you (split URL, detect protocol) thus this is a standard case of useless UI - it's there, but it is no more easier to use than a command line.

Which bring us to the point of finding update links. With a bit of struggle I managed to find this site: Easy URPMI. Make a few simple choices (which Linux distribution, which version etc) and you're done - it spits out commands that, when entered in a console, do essentially the same thing as the above UI, except that these work. Of course, there was no “give me protocol, give me absolute and relative URL” nonsense whatsoever (try it). At least when I got back to the UI I could see that newly added site showed up there. Sigh.

Some developers just don't get it. GUIs are easier than command line interfaces (for average user) but that does not mean that you should just slap together few controls and put them on a dialog. You have to offer a choice that is tangibly better than command line interface. You have to work more so that user has to work less.