A quick search through Google and I find more articles talking about how slick the new release is or how fast it starts up and shuts down. If these articles are anything to go by, then the developers have clearly met one of the goals set by their BDFL, Mark Shuttleworth: Shorter boot speeds, some as short as 25 seconds, ensure faster access to a full computing environment on most desktop, laptop and netbook models. But I fear that the developers have focused on these goals too much that they lost focus on two of the most important things for (most) end users: system stability and seamless upgrades.

I have been using Ubuntu since the very first release (Ubuntu 4.10) and I have used every single release since then. I use my computer for 8 hours a day at the very least. I have several projects that I maintain and file system integrity is very, very important for me. System stability is something that I expect from a “stable” release. Almost all of the Ubuntu releases so far have been very stable. The 8.04LTS release had a few issues with Flash crashing under 64-bit Firefox and Wi-Fi would die abruptly and get back up again but that’s about it. The 8.10 release had a very annoying kernel bug that took 5 months for a fix to be released.

Upgrades between releases have always been pretty painless for me. I don’t do a lot of funky stuff like installing packages directly from sources and certainly none of that “automatix” crap. Upgrades via “Update Manager” have always worked for me, with very few problems. I have come to depend on the fact that I can simply fire issue an update-manager -d and everything falls into place more or less correctly. At the end of an upgrade the most that I needed to do was to tweak a few config files, re-enable some repositories that were disabled during the upgrade and I’m done.

The upgrade process from 8.10 to 9.04 went without a hitch. I would even be inclined to say that it was flawless. What disappoints me so much to the point of frustration was that the apparently flawless upgrade had a couple of very nasty gremlins under the hood. When I rebooted my laptop after the upgrade, the Bluetooth light. It did this every single time I booted up. It is not supposed light up if I had it off when I shut down. The much touted 25-second boot up time was a no show. Boot up speed was more or less the same for me.

On my first boot up after upgrading, I was about to update my Medibuntu packages. After hitting “Reload” on Synaptic, it complained about not being able to write to the file system because it was mounted as “read-only”. Uh-oh! This could only mean one of two things: full disk or file system corruption. I thought that this was only a post-upgrade hiccup and it should go away on the next reboot. I rebooted, cleaned up my APT package cache to make sure that I had enough disk space on my root file system and I was able to update the Medibuntu packages.

The next day, I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to turn off the damned Bluetooth light which seems to come on every time the ACPI subsystem was initialized on boot. The config files I tweaked required me to reboot in order to see if they worked in keeping the Bluetooth light off. At one point, rebooting caused fsck to run and it reported that my root file system had errors that needed a manual fsck. I ran fsck manually and there were quite a lot of errors that needed fixing, mostly having to do with unused inodes. During the repair stage, one of the libsvg library files were hosed, causing startup of some of my GNOME panel applets to fail. I reinstalled the library and that fixed it. A couple more reboots and I then fsck was forced to check my home partition because apparently, it was not unmounted cleanly. Boot-time fsck failed with errors and required me to run it manually. In the manual run, it reported a whole lot of unused inode errors, several superblock errors, and directory errors. I lost one photo file in my F-Spot Photos folder. I was starting to get really nervous now. All my project repositories are in my home partition. I can’t afford to lose any of those files so I decided to take a snapshot and dump it on an external hard disk.

I spent all day long rebooting and running fsck. This was because something would crash at some point because of some library not loading. At one point I even ran memcheck to see if it wasn’t my memory. This laptop is only about 7 months old and I would be really disappointed if this was caused by hardware failure. In my previous experience, file system corruption was usually caused by a bad memory stick. Fortunately there were no problems reported by memcheck. fsck with bad blocks checking reports no bad blocks on my hard drive. I can only come to the conclusion that this is a software problem caused by the upgrade. After several more crashes and fsck runs reporting more of the same thing, I was frustrated and I finally gave up. I downloaded the ISO image for Ubuntu 8.10, hoping that it would not crash during download and completely hose my home file system. I had no choice at this point and I wiped my root file system and installed Ubuntu 8.10, which surprisingly caused the Hibernate function to work.

It was a really disappointing and frustrating experience. I think the Ubuntu team has succeeded in their goal of trying to out-Windows Windows. This latest release was so unstable that it made me long for the good old days of Windows ME. This unhealthy obsession with faster boot and shutdown times is causing them to lose focus on system stability and seamless upgrading. I can’t see how having the fastest boot and shutdown time will help make Ubuntu any more useful than it is right now. I don’t really give a flying fart if the OS boots in 25 seconds or 25 minutes. I don’t really care about how slick the on-screen system notifications are. All I really care about is a clean, stable, easily maintained and easily upgraded operating system that does not play Russian Roulette with my files. Hopefully the Ubuntu team gets through this “my OS can boot faster than yours” phase and start working on the more important things. Otherwise, we will all be stuck with an OS that can do nothing more than boot and shutdown: Really fast.

Side note: A “Jackalope” is a mythical creature and sightings of this creature have been attributed to rabbits infected with the Shope Papilloma virus. I think the codename really suites the 9.04 release. It’s a beast that has sprouted some rather curious but completely useless appendages at the expense of being healthy.

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Immediately two things jump out in his case: 1.) he went to what he thought was the “right” doctor, but because of his history, it was the wrong doctor; 2.) he decided he could cure himself by taking “herbal medicines” that made dubious claims about their effectiveness.

He should have gone to see a physician first, given that he was already under treatment for diabetes and hepatitis. The rash was probably because of his hepatitis medication. Had he gone to his doctor instead of going directly to a dermatologist, his doctor would have given him different medication or modified his prescription.

Regardless of whether or not he went to see the right doctor, it would have all been pointless anyway. He decided to self-medicate and he chose to take some of these “herbal medicines”. I can’t say I blame him. Real medicines are expensive and they can have nasty side-effects (like unbearably itchy skin rash). If you tune in to your favorite local TV station, you will be bombarded with ads for “herbal” concoctions that claim to be effective against a wide range of illness. You will also see local showbiz personalities peddling all this crap as well. There is even one noon-time show that has a couple of these “herbal medicine” companies as one of their primary sponsors. After all, you can never go wrong with scantily clad women who basically tell you to take some pills that will cure you of all your afflictions.

I know that we have ancient herbalists to thank for much of what we call “real” medicines these days. But right now, there is simply too much of this “herbal medicine” gunk is in our airwaves. It must be a pretty lucrative business since the companies that make these things seem to have more than enough money to pay local celebrities to endorse their products. The ads and packaging for most of these high-profile “herbal medicines” are pretty slick as well, meaning they have a good (read: expensive) marketing agency behind them. Despite all the glossy claims made by the ads or the celebrities that endorse these “herbal medicines”, there is something that these companies just barely tell you: NO APPROVED THERAPEUTIC CLAIMS.

What the hell does that even mean?!? You bombard me with ads that tell me that your 7-herbs-in-one capsules effective against arthritis, high-blood pressure, kidney problems, chronic fatigue and it can give me an erection that lasts for 10 hours. Then you tell me, just for half a second in very small print, that you are making no approved therapeutic claims? It turns out that the BFAD (just like the US FDA) classifies these things as “food supplements” and companies must label their products to indicate that there are “no approved therapeutic claims”. There seems to be nothing specific as to how these things should be labeled. Which is why there are times when the disclaimer is barely even readable. They could also care less if the people who watch these ads even know what this disclaimer even means.

Basically this means that they can make dubious claims about the effectiveness of their products but they are cannot be held liable(?) if the product works for you or not. If the product works for you, cool! You can probably send them a letter telling them how effective their product is and they will probably put you in their next ad. If the product does not work for you, too bad for you, they made “no approved therapeutic claims” after all.

I can only wonder how many people, like my friend’s cousin, took these things thinking they will get better soon only to succumb to complications of their disease. If this were a perfect world, the disclaimer will be prominently displayed and explained, in layman’s terms, before and after the glossy ad is shown. But that’s probably asking too much. After all, who in their right mind would buy this crap if we all understood that it may or more likely may not work as advertised.

R.I.P. Steve.

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Right, so I already paid $0.99 to download the DRM-protected, 128Kbps format. If I want to “upgrade” to the DRM-free, 256Kbps format, they want me to pay them another $0.30. WTF?!? So they doubled the bit rate and removed the DRM. That’s just great. 99% of their customers (myself included) will not be able to tell the difference between 128Kbps and 256Kbps bit rates, but that must make that 1% really happy.

See, now this is why people “pirate” all your shit. You want us to pay for one copy in one format and you want us to pay for another copy of the same thing in another format. But ooohhh! It’s 256Kbps and look at the slick GUI! I’m probably going to pay to get my albums “upgraded” anyway so why the hell am I whining? See you all on “the bay”.

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Reading the IRC chat log that lead to the “backslash as namespace separator” decision just affirms my impression that the PHP language is in the hands of neurotic, crack-smoking monkeys. Well except for a few people like Dmitry. Apparently there are two problems with “::” that prove too difficult for them to solve:

1. There are some modifications needed for “::” to work properly but these modifications will break existing code. I would say, what the hell! Break existing code! PHP6 will break existing code anyway. But no, they also want namespaces in PHP5 so there!

2. The engine can’t detect ambiguity without calling autoload. It introduces the so-called “autoload bomb”. Apparently, calling autoload once for each namespace as Dmitry suggested is “impracticable[sic] because it relies on the programmer to know when ambiguity arises”. Huh?!? Forgive me but isn’t it the job of the compiler/interpreter to detect such an ambiguity and tell the programmer???

So instead of fixing the fundamental problems with the engine, they want to use the band-aid solution of adding a different syntax for namespaces. Oh wait, maybe it’s because the engine is so horribly designed that it’s impossible to write in sensible changes without having the whole thing fall apart completely?

I have been fighting so hard to keep this from swaying me away from PHP. I have lived through and worked around the inconsistencies and quirks of the language, but this “backslash as namespace separator” crap is the last straw. It sucks that I have to maintain a lot of PHP code but from this point onwards, I will no longer use PHP for new projects.

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So, they want to replace the de facto standard namespace separator “::” with “\”. That’s right: replace double-colon with a backslash! Why? It’s because “::” is already being used in class method invocations and it will cause problems during parsing. Consider the following:

class Lol {
    public static function whut() {
    }

namespace Lol;

function whut() {
}

Elsewhere:

Lol::whut();

When you write Lol::whut(), which one are you talking about? Is it the static function in the class Lol? Or is it the function in the Lol namespace? I can think of a few solutions to this very simple problem besides changing the damned separator character.

1. Throw an exception during parsing/compilation and complain that the symbol Lol has already been defined. Ideally it should say something sensible like: “Class name ‘Lol’ defined in main namespace conflicts with existing namespace definition ‘Lol’ found in FILE, line LINE.” For dynamically generated code, throw a runtime error and halt program execution. This is how C++ handles it, I can’t see why PHP can’t do the same. I would prefer it this way because I don’t want some moron programmer who is using my Lol library to write a class named Lol in the main namespace!

2. Throw an exception like in #1 but make it a non-fatal exception and just let the class method defined in the main namespace take precedence. Or even let the function in the namespace take precendence. Do it one way over the other but tell the programmer that there is a problem with his code!

3. Force Lol::whut() to resolve to the class method and ::Lol::whut() to resolve to the function defined in namespace Lol. Or vice versa.

I would really love to see arguments leveled against the 3 solutions above because changing the separator character is just plain stupid. Oh, and it’s butt ugly too. Sure it’s just in RFC but if this sort of stupid shit makes it into PHP6 then it’s time to say bye-bye PHP… It looks like they have their hearts set on using backslash as the namespace separator and it’s pretty much set in stone.

On a side note, when I was reading the RFC I had to take a second look at the date to make sure that it does not say April 1, 2008. They were considering the “smiley” as a namespace separator?!? Surely you jest!

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Too bad for Gen. Eliseo de Lapaz that he got caught and now he is stuck playing a game of political hot potato with his bosses. Be a man Gen. de Lapaz, you’re going down anyway so just take those shitheads down with you!

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There are a some things on this laptop that really irked me. For one, there’s the design. When the thing is closed, it looks like this black gem on your desk. While it’s not as good looking as a Macbook Pro, it’s not half bad either as long as you keep it closed. Opening it is another story, “ceramic” is just a fancy term for “all you get is a boring gray plastic finish”.

Another thing is that the keyboard has that “cheap plastic” feel to it. As a programmer, I spend inordinate amounts of time typing and a good keyboard is a must. There are times when the left Ctrl or Shift key would get stuck and it would pop out making a scary “click” sound. When I first heard that sound, I thought something had just overheated and popped.

But these are minor annoyances compared to the biggest annoyance of all.

Acer calls it “Empowering Technology”. It’s virtually impossible to get just a clean Windows install on new laptops these days without having to go buy a barebones kit and making one yourself. I don’t know what it is with these manufacturers these days but a lot of them have been shipping units without system recovery discs. My wife’s HP Compaq laptop didn’t come with a recovery disc and neither did this Acer. They want you to burn your own copy of the recovery discs on DVD+R. Say what?!? In my experience, those things don’t even last more than a year even if kept in a “cool, dark place”. I really don’t understand why they can’t just provide a pressed DVD like they used to. If this is supposed to stop piracy, then it’s not working. I have seen OEM copies of Vista floating around on “scener” sites and on TPB, fully patched to SP1 and the latest updates! “Empowering” indeed.

While I can live with not having pressed recovery DVD’s and pre-installed crapware, the thing that really irks me the most is the fact that I cannot upgrade my ATI drivers. I tried downloading the latest drivers from the ATI website but they won’t install. Even though the installer finishes without problems, it does not install the latest CCC and the drivers. It stays stuck on the drivers provided by Acer which are over a year old. After a bit of searching I found this statement from ATI:

Currently AMD does not provide any driver support for Mobility Radeon™ products. All driver and technical support for Mobility Radeon™ products is provided by the original laptop or notebook manufacturer. The drivers that are available for download at ati.amd.com are for desktop products only.

To download Windows Vista Mobility Radeon™ drivers or driver updates for your laptop or notebook product, please visit your laptop or notebook manufacturer’s website.

So I’m stuck with the Acer provided drivers? The suck just keeps on getting stronger on this one. While I can understand the reasoning behind this, OEM’s want to be able to control everything on both hardware and software fronts as much as possible. They modify the drivers to make sure that they work properly. But the only modifications I can see on the Acer provided drivers is that the CCC is crippled to the point of being completely useless. There is no “Advanced” CCC with the Acer provided drivers. The “Advanced” CCC is important because there are many tweaks and settings that you can only access using the “Advanced” view. Most important for me is the option to “Preserve Aspect Ratio” when switching from 16:9 to 4:3 resolutions. Some games I am running do not have support for widescreen and so I have to fall back to using standard resolutions (800×600).

I have heard of the so-called “Omega ATI Drivers” which are supposed to allow you to install the ATI Desktop drivers on ATI Mobility hardware. At the time of writing, they only support Windows XP. After a few more days of searching I finally stumbled on this thread from FPSLabs Forums which led me to this website. After following the instructions on DriverHeaven.net, I was able to install the latest ATI drivers with a full-featured CCC. So far, everything seems to be going along swimmingly. I must stress that following the instructions on DriverHeaven.net may probably void your warranty as you will be running unsigned drivers (not signed by WHQL). But I have read my Warranty Information Booklet and there is nothing in there that implicitly or explicitly states that installing the “reference” drivers from ATI will void my product warranty. It is clear though that I cannot expect any help from either ATI or Acer if there are any problems caused by the driver.

Remember, if things go haywire you can always undo the driver installation using Vista’s “System Restore” feature.

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In a number of ways it’s failed for me:

1. Cuil is pronounced “cool”. Okay, so how do I tell people about this new search engine? “Hey try this new search engine ‘cool dot com’.” And they go type cool.com which gives you another one of those parked domains with a “search engine”. And then people who try cool.com get search results for all sorts of malware and pr0n pushing sites. Definitely not cuil.
2. The service if flakier than twitter. That’s right. One hour after being posted on reddit, the thing goes down. So you’re going to take on Google huh? You should be on stage at your local comedy bar.
3. Cuil is not as omniscient as they claim to be. I noticed this when I typed in “vim workspace” and it had nothing. One user on Mixx has also pointed out that they don’t have anything on “iraq war”.

Three strikes and you’re out.

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