Category: Rant

Well, that could have gone better

I volunteered to give a presentation to Linux Users Group of Rochester (LUGOR) about LVM, the Logical Volume Manager. I knew I had half an hour, and so I made a presentation, rehearsed it several times, and knew I could go through it in half an hour. I did it on my laptop, using VirtualBox to stand in for a computer that I could virtually add and remove drives from. I was told the room we were presenting had a projector that took HDMI input, and my laptop has an HDMI output, so I figured I was set.

First hitch was arriving to find out that we had been bumped from our room because some musicians were warming up for a concert they were giving elsewhere in the building, and the new room had a projector that only took VGA or DVI. Oh, and also I’d evidently gotten my signals crossed and I was really supposed to present next month. But no mind, the guy who was supposed to give the second talk today wanted to go first because he was sick and wanted to bail early, and the guy who was supposed to give the first talk wanted an hour not half an hour and would rather postpone. So the guy who wanted to go first talked first, and got me all intrigued about “ownCloud”. I may be setting that up one of these days.

Then the first room became available again, and we trooped back to it. And then I plugged in my laptop, got the two screens non-mirrored all set up so I could do the Powerpoint presentation part of the show, and then the projector screen started randomly flashing between what it was supposed to be showing and a green screen with something about HDCP displayed on it. I didn’t know it at the time, but that means that the copy protection stuff on my laptop isn’t compatible with the copy protection stuff on the projector. We spent some time trying to wiggle wires, change settings on both the laptop and the projector, etc, and finally I gave up.

Another guy gave a good quick little presentation on the Raspberry Pi. Amazing power in such a small cheap package. I’ve got one on order for another project, but it might be many weeks before I see it.

While he was talking, one of the other members handed over his laptop. It was an Acer that isn’t as high end as my MacBook Air, but it had two things going for it:

  1. It had already proven it could display to the projector, and
  2. It had VirtualBox installed on it.

I copied my VirtualBox disk files and my PowerPoint over to his laptop, and when the Raspberry Pi presentation was over, I started my presentation. And that’s when the next problem reared its ugly head. Every time I booted my VirtualBox instance on my laptop, it takes about 10 seconds or so. Every time I booted it on his computer, it took literally 10 minutes or more. Since I had to reboot several times in the presentation (because I was simulating adding and removing disks), this caused the presentation to drag out drastically. Fortunately there were lots of things to talk about during those long pauses. Charles, the organizer, used one of the pauses to explain in great detail what exactly I was doing with the VirtualBox and which parts of what I was showing belonged to it and which belonged to the guest OS and which belonged to LVM, something which I fear I hadn’t even though to explain in my presentation. With all the long pauses and delays, my “30 minute talk” ended up being somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half. And worse still, on the very last boot of my talk, I discovered that if I increased the number of virtual CPUs from 1 to 4 the boot went much, much faster. I’d only ever used 1 virtual CPU on my own laptop and hadn’t noticed any problem – I don’t know if that’s a difference between my i7 processor and the loaner laptop’s i5, or because mine is hosted on OSX and his is hosted on Linux. I wish I’d discovered this earlier in the talk, though.

If you care, slides are available at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y4822v4k6am0s9s/IFhrMz-HEW/lvm.pptx but probably not for too long.

There’s pain, and then there is pain

As well as the knee pain, which is and has been pretty much a constant feature (although with intensity that waxes and wanes) in my life since the late 1970s, I get this strange hip pain. The hip pain, which feels like it’s emanating from the “point” of my hip, comes around every now and then, and stays for a week or two, and then it goes away. It means that during that time, I can’t get comfortable sitting anywhere and I end up moving from chair to chair to bed to chair trying unsuccessfully to get comfortable. Other than that, it doesn’t really interfere with my life. It came back a week or so ago on my right hip, but it’s hardly noticeable because of the new pain in my life.

We got a lot of snow over Christmas, and the city wasn’t very good about clearing the sidewalks. And unlike in Ottawa, the sidewalk plows don’t spread sand or salt. Consequently, the sidewalks ended up being thick with ice, except in the few stretches where the home owner was diligent about clearing their own sidewalk. Consequently, I got very sore groin muscles from walking the dogs on the slippery ice. (For those who’ve never experienced it, when you walk on ice you need to keep your weight entirely over your front foot and you walk with a sort-of penguin-like shuffle. You also need to use muscles you don’t use as much in regular walking to keep your legs from splaying out and falling on your ass.) And after that started to fade, I got a horrible pain deep inside my left hip. You know how you put a knife blade in the joint to get a turkey leg off the carcass? Yeah, that’s what it feels like is going on inside there. Sometimes it’s just sore, sometimes it’s very stabby, and sometimes it takes my breath away it’s so painful. It’s very inconvenient when I’m walking the dogs, and it comes on really bad and I find myself wishing I could just stop in the middle of walking the dogs and call Vicki to pick me up. I’ve tried various stretches that sometimes help with the other hip pain, but they don’t seem to be helping this one.

So right now I’ve got the pain in my right hip that I used to consider bad, and the pain in my left hip that’s 10 times worse. And I’ve still got dogs to walk and erging to do and all that stuff.

Get it together, guys

If there is one thing that iOS and Android developers seriously need to come together on it’s a common standard for showing “my app is currently waiting for something to arrive from the internet”. I mean, half the time in Android all you can see is a tiny barely visible exclamation mark or something on the wifi signal strength meter. The spinner on the titlebar that seems to be the “normal” iOS one is at least slightly more visible, although I think we need something more visible when your app is actually blocking (as opposed to just filling stuff you can’t see yet). Some apps have taken it upon themselves to replace the “default” spinner (or lame exclamation point) with a much more visible one in the main screen – in the Facebook app on iOS it’s both, and they aren’t 100% in sync – but there is a lot of different spinners and throbbers in different apps, and it’s inconsistent and confusing. Then you get the god-awful flashing color bars in the G+ app on iOS. Please stop trying to be clever. Maybe if Android’s wait notification wasn’t so lame people would actually use it, and then at least we’d have some consistency. (It doesn’t help my case that Chrome on my iPad currently has the spinner up on the title bar spinning even though nothing is loading.)

UX fail

Last week, in an effort to broaden my horizons, I joined a bunch of groups on Meetup, including one for “UX” (User Experience). There was a meeting scheduled for today (Wednesday) at 6:00pm, and I clicked the button to indicate that I’m planning to go.

Almost immediately, they announced that they were moving all future communications from Meetup to another similar service which appears to be mostly oriented towards start-ups, something which I’m not at all interested in. (Been there, done that, lost my t-shirt and 17 SAN.)

Then they announced that they were changing the location, but they weren’t sure where they were changing it to.

Then they announced it was at the “Center for Student Innovation” at RIT, but with no further details of where in this building.

I got there at about 5:40. There were no signs indicating where it was. I went on-line and discovered that they’d announced a room number at around noon today. The room was in use, and it looked like a class or a seminar going on. I sat down to wait for 6:00. 6:00pm came and went, and whatever was going on in the room never broke up, nobody entered, one person left, but the door remained closed. Nobody else appeared to come up to the door to try it or ask where the meeting was. I decided that either the group I was attempting to meet was in that room, but nobody had told them that an open door is more welcoming than a closed one, or the regulars saw the closed door and decided to go somewhere else without bothering to put up a sign or troll the lounge area looking to see if anybody was waiting to join the meeting. Either way, I felt unwelcome so I left.

So the User Experience experts managed to give me a lousy User Experience and wasted my evening. Thanks guys.

Let’s get realistic here for a moment.

The fact of the matter is that my shoulder is not getting better. My pain level is actually worse than it was before my first surgery, and has not been getting any better for two years. Basically every time I do my physiotherapy exercises, which I’m supposed to do every other day, I’m in pain for 3 or 4 days afterwards so they don’t get done as often as they should.

So barring some miracle happening in the next couple of months, I’m facing either not kayaking, or kayaking in pain. Judging by the way it’s gone in the past when I’ve tried to continue a sport with pain, if I’m really lucky I’ll get maybe one year to recover my fitness, and another year to race, and then the pain will be too great to continue – if I’m unlucky I’ll wimp out of the pain in March, sell all my boats and go back to being a limpet. So I guess the realistic thing to do is to prepare myself to train and race in pain, and hope for a miracle. And the best training for training in pain is to start doing my physiotherapy exercises in spite of the pain that they cause me. Who knows, maybe they’ll actually start doing me some good?