Yeah, I’ve been busy again. Very.

The thing about working in large corporations is that you usually have fairly big things going on now and then, some of which tend to take entirely too much of your time.

And although I’m all for being enthusiastic about work, I find it that I am much more enthusiastic about a fair balance between work and private life, more so when it’s obvious that I need to compensate for the excesses of yore and aim to have proper amounts of rest and relaxation – without which I now find myself functioning below par.

There’s a lot to be said (and written) about the transition from gung-ho knowledge worker to middle-aged parent and how you need to be careful with the order in which you mix such sensitive ingredients. I suppose that will be a recurring theme here over the next few years, but I might as well take a stab at it right away (I hate postponing things).

To me, it’s all about getting the right mix of flexibility, enthusiasm, and order, with the one in the middle being the fulcrum on which you balance the other two.

And although freely admitting that enthusiasm for work and business has been somewhat diminished by the current state of economic downturn, I’m more than happy to believe it to be balanced by family stuff (which is fun, regardless of the added physical and psychlogical strain of having to mind a toddler).

It’s not as if you’re going to love your work 100% of the time, ever. Steve Jobs delivered a memorable and moving speech back in 2005 regarding this, but I am still in the process of connecting my personal set of dots and have adjusted to the usual ups and downs in morale and motivation by trying to think ahead years in advance.

All of the bad stuff will, eventually, go away. And I have plenty of good stuff going on right now.

Which means I now have around zero time for any kind of stuff that isn’t family-related, and if I have half an hour to spare at home, I’d much rather rest than read, peruse the news or fool around a bit with my personal projects. Work is, no matter how interesting, pretty much the last choice – I need my mental hygiene outside the office, and I need it bad.

As to flexibility and order, well… Flexibility these days is understood as being the number of different things you can juggle at any one time, and I boost mine through trying to maintain an almost obsessive degree of control over my time and environment – it’s not that I fret over wasting time or having things always neatly arranged (which I definitely don’t) – it’s just that things need to mean something to me.

I do order in a rather dynamic way, by systematically organizing and re-organizing stuff in whatever way makes the most sense for the stuff I have to do at the moment. And over the years, I’ve found that Mind maps are a great way to go about that in the broadest sense, with only two major shortcomings:

1. They are pretty much worthless if you have to collaborate with other folk. You can use them to brainstorm, summarize or present an initial idea, but most other folk won’t use them and:
2. They handle very poorly over time – after six months, you have to start all over because the problem space is completely different and the maps are crowded with irrelevant stuff that piled up inside.

Add to that people’s usual attention span (I’m atypical in that I can/need to keep track of stuff over years without much trouble), and you’ve got quite a few interesting problems in terms of Knowledge Management that I’d love to be able to fix (for real) without becoming one of those vacuous consultants that can’t find their way out of a paper bag.

But that’s not really the point – more of an interesting sideline I’d like to explore later, in another of those half hour slices.

This one’s up.

I am beyond annoyed with this. My wife and I have also taken to swapping photos of the kid by e-mail and gripe daily about the lack of MMS on the iPhone (which forces us to have another phone just to send pics to the grandparents), and now Apple lets this one past QA. Just goes to show you that ignoring common services and/or use cases on a phone is not the way to keep your customers happy (link found via just as I was going online to check if it was a known issue).

Update: Filed as #6395047, also on OpenRadar. For good measure, I also filed #6395035, #6395041 (minty fresh annoyances that have started happening since I upgraded yesterday) and #6395732, #6395733 which have been bugging me for ages (and that also pertain to MobileMe).

A couple of nights ago I grabbed my Eee PC 901, which so far had been running a variant of Ubuntu 8.04, and installed vanilla 8.10.

As a side-effect, I also ended up drafting the notes for this post. Here’s why I did it, in five paragraphs:

1. I wasn’t very comfortable with the idea of running Ubuntu-Eee or a netbook-tweaked version. As much as I like the idea of a tight-fitting, fully optimized distribution, my money would be on the Acer Aspire One’s Linpus and not on Ubuntu – plus I don’t really like using a sub-niche of a niche OS.
2. In flaky and opinionated environments like Linux there is more security in numbers, and even though I have had very poor experiences with Ubuntu (and hate Debian), the fact is that it’s pretty popular right now.
3. I had plenty of independent confirmation that it would a) be painless and b) work with all the built-in hardware (this bit turned out to be only 99% correct, which just goes to show you how much Linux folk actually test things).
4. It was that or XP, and, to be honest, I wasn’t keen on having to tweak XP for SSD use.
5. I was watching Oprah (no, seriously) and realized that if I didn’t try to do something technology-related my head would explode.

Plus I don’t really use the Eee for much more than browsing and the occasional e-mail. It’s a weekend/casual use machine, not something I rely on, so I can fool around with it without fear of wasting time.

Even then, I was parsimonious with the time I had – the whole thing took around an hour, and most of it was idle time watching TV and reading while stuff installed (actual keyboard time was more like 15 minutes)

Basically, I went through this piece, which was fairly comprehensive and had a non-sucky and short list of steps.

The Steps

I’m reproducing them here for my own reference (even though the likelihood of my doing this again for 8.10 is remote), since I did a few minor changes.

What I actually did was:

1. created a USB boot disk on another machine (around 20 minutes, including grabbing the ISO).

2. Set up Ubuntu using my current partition scheme (root and a few MB swap¹ on the 4GB SSD, /home on the 16GB one). That took another 20 minutes or so.

3. Added the array.org repository key:

wget http://www.array.org/ubuntu/array-apt-key.asc
sudo apt-key add array-apt-key.asc

4. Added the following software source with the GUI tool:

deb http://www.array.org/ubuntu intrepid eeepc

5. Installed linux-eeepc-lean and eee-control:

sudo apt-get install linux-eeepc-lean eee-control

6. I also tried to remove all the junk associated with the standard kernels:

sudo apt-get remove linux-generic linux-image-generic linux-source-generic linux-restricted-modules-generic

This, despite the original claims, does not prevent you from getting the stock kernel updates – you still get security updates sent to you².

I then went through this other piece and did a few of the tweaks (I skipped some things because I like browser cache to be persistent and would rather save RAM).:

7. Replaced relatime with noatime on all /etc/fstab entries.

Update: Later, I changed fstab to have:

... defaults,noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro,commit=15

As per this link (via Filipe Correia, in comments). I had googled for the delayed commit syntax but couldn’t find it offhand that evening.

8. Added a tmpfs line to /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

I don’t really like this much (since I sometimes need to have fairly large temporary files), but it’s fairly harmless for web surfing.

9. Added elevator=deadline to the kopt line in /boot/grub/menu.lst to change the disk access policy.

10. Followed the instructions here to set up the Private encrypted folder (which, by some asinine reason, isn’t set up by default). I’d much rather have full home folder encryption, but that’s OSS consistency for you:

sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils 
ecryptfs-setup-private

I then moved most of my “dot” files and configurations (including Firefox and Thunderbird profiles) into Private and symlinked them. I haven’t noticed any performance degradation whatsoever.

The rest was humdrum stuff (reinstalling a couple of local apps plus Citrix, setting up eee-control for sane hardware management, etc.).

UNIX diehards have always known that keeping your home partition separate ensures that 99% of the stuff you had running previously will find and use your old settings, so in practice I’ve had to re-configure, um… pretty much nothing on my desktop, browser, or mail client.

The Results

So far, things feel marginally faster than 8.04.1 (probably due to the disk tweaks), and suspend/resume seems to be cleaner. All the hardware seems to be properly set up, and 3G support mostly works out of the box, too – I still have issues with our custom APN and username format setup, but haven’t really looked into it and it shouldn’t affect “normal” users³.

The Catch

I do have some issues with audio (I had to fiddle with “Line In” to get decent audio playback, of all things, and seem to be unable to set audio gain for recording and Skype) which are nagging but not critical in day-to-day use (i.e., I don’t use Skype for anything but testing).

Afer a couple of days of some research and poking around these audio issues seem to be a consequence of the (recurring) flakiness of Linux audio, so I filed a bug on it.

More on this later, if I find the time.

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¹ Yes, yes, I know. Swap is supposed to be evil on SSDs, etc., etc. But I don’t buy into that. ↩

² In the end I decided it wouldn’t hurt to keep the stock kernel around in case of flakiness, but it bears mentioning. ↩

³ I fixed this by installing the Vodafone Betavine “driver” (i.e., a proper 3G aware dialer that actually understands about custom APNs and username@realm authentication. ↩

As years go by, I find myself less and less interested in fancy gifts and valuing the simple things.

I mean, it’s not as if I couldn’t go through my Wishlist and tick a couple of items off. I know I can afford a spanking new MacBook, and finally get a decent, lightweight laptop with a backlit keyboard. Or I could splurge on a big monitor. Or maybe do something crazy and order myself something like the Rovio.

But given the current state of affairs, it simply wouldn’t fit my lifestyle. Between my family (with whom I elected to stay home today) and work (which is, as usual, something I’d rather keep separate), I would have very little time to enjoy any of them, and the investment would hardly be sensible considering that I have a bunch of perfectly good (if slightly dated) computers and have, of late, been living and writing out of my iPhone and that Eee that I got a few months back¹.

Plus they say that good things come to those who wait, and I’m a professional waiter of sorts².

Then again, sometimes you just can’t wait. A week ago, anticipating my birthday, I got myself a copy of Little Big Planet and although I have had few and short occasions to fool around with it, I can confirm that it goes against the tide of stupid and unoriginal PS3 games that I found so lacking in comparison with the Wii experience³.

Little Big Planet isn’t perfect, but it is thoroughly enjoyable and easy to get into (even for a casual gamer like myself, who will probably never have time or stamina for creating new levels from scratch).

There is already a lot of controversy regarding banishment of custom levels based on copyrighted designs (and others not so obviously so, which is plain silly), but on the whole, I find the game to be a more than adequate antidote to my previous (pre)conception that the PS3 could never be as fun as the Wii.

It’s certainly a less social experience, but I’ve barely started doing online play.

In case we meet, I’ll be the sackboy in a suit and glasses with an obvious nickname and a silly grin on his face (or the occasional grimace when I’ve had another Dilbert day at work).

—

¹ More on that later, by the way. It’s not a qualified success, but it is definitely something I’m developing very strong opinions about. And it involves my dissing Linux, so the zealots can start sharpening their tongues. ↩

² This is an in-joke, but the gist of it is that I’ve watched a lot of things come and go in the industry, and besides being an internal consultant of sorts, I’m one of the few that’s still around. ↩

³ I’ve also downloaded the Mirror’s Edge demo, but find it marred by a somewhat flaky control scheme and uncertain hold points for some things (like pipes). Then again, nothing will ever be as fluid for me as bunny-hopping through q3dm6 while railing the bejeesus out of the opposition, so it’s probably me. ↩

As always, there’s a lot left unsaid here regarding mobile phones.

Last year I picked up a Nokia 6210 for my vacation, and spent quite a good while using it throughout the rest of the year (up until I needed to use a Blackberry again, with a brief upgrade to an E51).

This year, I have an iPhone 3G, which I have used pretty much uninterruptedly since July. And this is construed by many people as a Mac site, so it naturally follows that it should be the phone of the year, right?

Well, not really. Because, you see, I’ve been using two Nokia devices since early this year that have struck my fancy, and that cater to two distinct segments.

The first (and arguably the better if you don’t care much about e-mail and believe the megapixel hype) is the Nokia 6220 Classic. Despite a plasticky feeling and the usual cluttered and confusing S60 UI (no, Nokia hasn’t fixed those five things yet), the camera is pretty good (if still too slow to start up), and it is a very nice weekend phone – good battery life, ability to record short videos, decent GPS, etc.

Just don’t expect it to be very good at messaging (it will run Mail for Exchange, but the native mail client still doesn’t make good use of screen space) or to be speedy – it’s Nokia’s attempt at squeezing N95-grade functionality into a smaller form factor, and it carries over some of the slowness and compounds it with irritating (and slow) graphical transitions.

The second is the E71, which, feature-wise, I consider to be the second-best business phone currently available short of the Blackberry, which still bests anything else if you need Exchange integration as much as I do.

The calendar is pretty good (somewhat cluttered and hard to navigate in some views, but functional and responsive), the browser is passable (even though I found myself using Opera Mini for most things pretty quickly) and the camera does auto-focus (somewhat badly at times, but better than nothing).

But, for a Nokia, it’s pretty fast. Some people think it’s better¹ than the iPhone, and I would agree with it being a better phone than the iPhone, but don’t think they have a leg to stand on in terms of browser and e-mail functionality.

The thing is, I don’t really think of the iPhone as a mere phone. I won’t wax lyrical about it like John Gruber did (it’s not that life-changing for me, merely better than the things I used before), but the iPhone is, for me, a pocket computer that just happens to make calls and have ubiquitous Internet connectivity.

As such, being able to do a gazillion different things on it that are not commonly possible on a “normal” mobile phone is, well, not unexpected at all.

A phone (for me at least) is something that excels at making calls and reaching out to people with the least bit of fuss – and the iPhone, with its rather pedestrian phone applet, utter lack of basic functionality like voice dialling and hands free operation², simply isn’t good enough.

The E71, on the other hand, is an excellent phone. It is a passable Internet device, a poor media player, and a rather pedestrian e-mail client³, but it has none of the annoying limitations of the iPhone (as a phone, of course) and doesn’t get in the way of talking to people – whereas I have more than occasional trouble placing and answering calls on an iPhone due to its fiddly phone applet, the E71 just works.

It isn’t that user-friendly and will never be as flexible as the iPhone as a platform (even though it multitasks properly), but for 99% of the people out there, it will likely be a lot more satisfying to use as a phone.

So if I had to pick one phone to recommend this year, it would certainly be the E71 – it is, as far as I’m concerned, the best device Nokia has produced yet (better than the E90 in everything from usability to build quality), as well as surely better than the vast majority of the phones that I know will be available before Xmas.

And I’m glad to see that the E63 will bring some of its features to a lower (and arguably more sensible) price point.

I also think that S60 is an evolutionary dead end and that if Nokia wants to compete with Apple on usability, they’re going to have to toss everything out the window (including some prejudices) and start again from scratch.

It may seem like a strange thing to say, but truth be told that Symbian was once a much simpler and better OS. Over the years, they kind of lost it.

But that’s another story – and it doesn’t mean the E71 isn’t good enough right now⁴.

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¹ Ironically, they do so and simultaneously confess to not owning one or trying it out extensively, basing their comparisons on trying out the devices over less than adequate time (in my case, I actually use the things more than six months – and sometimes much more if I consider prototypes). Hey, that’s the kind of ridicule that idealistic, unfounded “highway blogging” exposes you to. ↩

² I will never, ever, be able to understand why proper Bluetooth audio services and car integration aren’t present. And I don’t even drive to work. ↩

³ Update: I actually forgot about it being an almost stupefyingly bad cameraphone due to the idiotic “feature” that requires that you hold “T” to focus instead of having proper auto-focus (as we had the opportunity to demonstrate to John Dvorak over dinner.) ↩

⁴ It just means they’re both playing in different ballparks. If you want more than a phone, the iPhone is the best personal electronics device money can buy right now. But the vast majority of people don’t need (or can’t afford) what it does. ↩