The Zero Room

Someone's done a really nice home usability test on Ubuntu 8.04, using his girlfriend as the experiment. Apart from the good old-fashioned flame-bait value of this, I'm finding usability studies increasingly fascinating. From my own experience, it's remarkably common to find features that seem an obvious good idea from one point of view can be intimidatingly bewildering from another (and often I'm the bewildered one).

For example, I have one website that allows anonymous users to post content, although for obvious reasons each post has to be approved by an administrator. When content is submitted, the user is redirected to the site's front page, and gets a message in a little box with a different background colour to the rest of the page, telling them that their post is awaiting approval. Clear enough, you may think. However I got some feedback today from a user saying that the site is broken, because every time they try to post anything, all they get is an error message. You might say that the user should at least stop to read the message, but on the other hand something is wrong from a usability point of view if a message telling the user that everything is working perfectly fine looks at first glance like an error message. Usability is hard.

Robin 'Roblimo" Miller has an interesting bit of flamebait over at Linux.com, talking about why it's so hard to switch operating systems or desktop environments withing the one operating system. His point seems to be that our deeply-held preferences are established by first impressions (or even chance), then entrenched by habit, no matter how vigorously we might argue that we have a rational basis for them.

I'm not sure I agree with him; GNOME is a better desktop environment than KDE; both are easier to use than the WIndows or Mac user interface; nano is a sensible choice for a programmer's text editor, because... ah... okay, maybe he's got me there. ^O ^X

Lugradio's Stuart Langridge (who must I'm afraid get used to the idea that he will probably never receive as much noteriety for anything else he does as long as he lives), after a laptop purchase which can fairly be described as a fiasco, asks the question "Which video card should I buy?" for his desktop PC.

Among the answers is a link to an awesomely useful page: http://free3d.org

The page uses the fairly rough and ready benchmark of the glxgears screensaver frame rate to rank different combinations of hardware and free software. I'm quite pleased with my 930 frames-per-second result (Intel Corporation 82G965 Integrated Graphics Controller, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4300 @ 1.80GHz), and my masculinity is not at all threatened by the >6000fps results at the top of the table. With figures like this, and two out of the three major 3D hardware manufacturers (AMD/ATI and Intel) actively providing free driver software (not to mention in one case complete hardware specsifications!), it's time to bury the myth that free software operating systems don't do good 3D.

Bruce Byfield at Linux.com has done the world a favour by collating the many and varied hardware compatibility lists into one, highly bookmarkable article.

Richard Stallman "recently" (don't you hate it when people don't attach a date to material posted on the Web?) delivered one of his regular talks,"Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks", to the University of Waterloo in Canada, who have put the video of the event online. Richard is an inspiring individual; one of only two people on Earth I'd count as a hero. Despite having heard recordings of earlier renditions of this talk, I would still have dashed out of the house to change the world immediately after watching this, were it not for the fact it was around 1am and I was not dressed for world-changing.

Also highly recommended is the video of Eben Moglen, of the Software Freedom Law Centre, talking about "The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3" in June this year. Anybody who's bandwidth-impaired can get copies of these (they are appropriately licenced for free redistribution, of course) from me at the next Club Linux meeting.

I love the occasional Top 25 Linux Commands articles that come along. For one thing, it gives me another opportunity to be tiresomely pedantic and say they are not "Linux commands", but bash "builtin" commands, or standalone programs. I also invariably find one thing I never knew about, or had forgotten. In this case it was "history", a bash builtin that is faster to type than "cat ~/.bash_history".

It's a rainy day, and for those of us who missed it, I've just noticed that video and audio from most of the presentations at linux.conf.au 2007 are available via the conference's programme page on the web site. I'm cracking open some microwave popcorn with extra butter-flavoured dairy-based solids and a jeroboam of sparkling Coca-Cola, and havin' me a nerd party.

Maybe it's just a sign of the increasing maturity of the free desktop. More likely I think it's evidence supporting the contention that GNOME's six-month release cycle has institutionalised a culture of conservatism. Either way, the release notes for GNOME 2.18 are distinctly underwhelming.

Long ago, I used to read a magazine (no longer in print; a victory of the Web over dead tree publication) which carried Matt Groening's "Life in Hell" comic strip. At the end of each year, it was customary (I don't know if it still is) for Matt to list the "Forbidden Words" for the following year; terms relating to the fads, scandals, cause celebres, and all the cringe-inducing cliches of the previous twelve months.

Carrying on this tradition (good artists copy, great artists steal, bloggers carry on traditions), here's my provocatively heretical list for 2007, with accompanying ranting. Add your own in the comments.

• "Commercial" Software
• "Ready for the Desktop"
• Eric Raymond
• Open Source
• Linux
  

Linux.com has reviewed the new releases from Mandriva and Ubuntu, both generally favourably. Mandriva's package management system(s) still appear to be letting it down, and Ubuntu "Edgy" disappoints for it's lack of "edginess". If you've used either, leave your impressions in the comments below.