…seriously this layout was very difficult. It’s like I splashed paint willy-nilly all over the previously harmonious monochrome; you can count at least 4 or 5 colours which figure prominently, which is really odd but I wanted to experiment. The link hovers are really odd too (they are, however, growing on me in a strange way). There was lots of playing around with CSS and getting to know the 3-column liquid layout better. I am particularly fond of the yellow dot comments!

I am still not 100% happy with the header image (the red is weird) but, having worked on this layout since morning, I am too lazy to tweak it any more for now. I was also too lazy to restyle the comments section and probably won’t be restyling it as it looks adequate to me, at least (unlike the header).

And and, tangentially, I love the changes in Wordpress 2.7! The admin panel is now a thing of beauty and a joy to use.

My pet project over the past week has been to finally attain Linux mastery, or at least the ability to use it without stumbling every step of the way; I’ve been very intrigued by the increasing usability and popularity of Ubuntu and I’d been wanting to give it a go for a while.

Having run Linux for a week now, without booting into Windows the entire time (except once when I really wanted to use Photoshop), I am convinced that now is a better time than ever before for the average computer user to make the switch. Screenshots and a VERY long post - you have been warned - after the jump.

(I apologise now, by the way, if anyone reading this via RSS sees the entire post instead of an excerpt. I have no idea how it works.)

nine things i learned from a week of linux

NOTE: Everywhere below when I refer to “Linux”, I probably mean “Ubuntu” specifically, or “GNOME” even more specifically. I don’t think most people reading this will care about the distinction though, so heck.

1. Linux is NOT hard

Once upon a time, it probably was. It can still be, depending on which distribution of Linux you use - there are over 300. But the days when Linux was necessarily hard are long over; the leading distributions now make it absolutely painless for you to start them up. If you go with Ubuntu or any its variants, there’s even an installer for Windows called Wubi that allows you to install it like a normal program within Windows. If you, like me, are chicken and don’t want to manually partition your hard disk/don’t know what partitioning even means/don’t know what I’m talking about, Wubi is a no-brainer solution. You can even uninstall the whole thing from Windows if you decide you don’t like it.

And what about the interface, once you’ve got it up and running? Seriously, it’s dead simple. Which brings me to my next point:

2. Linux looks surprisingly familiar.

I didn’t take a screenshot of the default Ubuntu desktop before I got all customisation-heavy with it, so I’ve purloined an inexplicably tiny one from the official website: have a look. The bar on the bottom is your taskbar, the bar at the top contains your system tray and equivalent of Windows start menu. You can customise it like crazy and make it look just like Windows if you want. Get rid of the top bar and add the start menu and systray to the bottom bar, or the other way round. Add a million other panels. Get rid of the systray, get rid of the clock, get rid of the taskbar, add a million other panels, whatever you want. It’s awesome.

There’s a lot about Ubuntu that both Mac and Windows users will feel very comfortable with. The file browser, as you can see from the screenshot above (which gives away half my post), is virtually the same as any other graphical file browser in mainstream computing and very easy to work with. Ubuntu happily reads all your Windows data quite easily. Annoyingly enough it doesn’t work the other way, I can’t get stupid XP to read anything I save in my Linux partition, so I’m saving pretty much all my data on my Windows drives still.

3. Linux is friendlier than you think it is

This really did surprise me. I was bracing myself for driver and compatibility hell, but I got my wireless internet up and running with FAR less trouble under Ubuntu than I did on XP. Logged into a brand new OS without the foggiest of what to do, and expecting to struggle, I clicked the wireless network icon in the systray and this menu popped up:

So I selected mine, got a little window asking for my WPA key, typed it in, and… I was online. Just like that! After reading so much about how everyone has wifi problems with Linux, and going through no end of trouble getting XP to connect everywhere I go, I was very pleasantly surprised indeed.

Over the first few days of running Ubuntu, I threw every device I owned at it to torment it into not working, just to see if there was any truth to the cautionary tales I’d read. My camera breezed through the test, all I did was plug it in and the in-built photo management software happily fired itself up and imported my photos with no problems at all. Ditto with my printer:

Plugging in your printer causes the above screen to pop up. You choose your driver, print, and away you go; I had no issues with printing a test page even though you can see from the screenshot above that there are no Linux drivers for my printer model and I had to choose the closest approximation. I grant this may not work for all printers, but Canon seems to be pretty friendly.

My iPod behaved itself pretty well too. It was immediately detected and mounted as a piece of hardware, and after a bit of mucking around with my music player I managed to successfully transfer playlists and songs over. I should qualify that the mucking around is a fault with the player rather than with Linux as an OS. There are a considerable number of iPod managers available for Linux, I just wasn’t running one of them because I was too lazy to install something new.

(It just occurred to me that I didn’t try my phone yet, but I rarely bother syncing my phone anyway. If I do and there are notable results, I’ll post about it in future.)

4. Linux can do almost everything you can on Windows.

I can’t speak for the Mac side because I don’t use one, but a reasonable number of Windows programs that people use regularly are available for Linux too. Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, Skype and Picasa all run natively, there are notable feature lags in Skype, but that’s probably to be expected for applications which are geared mainly towards mainstream OSes.

As for Linux alternatives to Windows programs, there are very capable and full-featured office suites, chat programs, torrent programs - you name it, there’s probably something for your needs. I’ve been pretty happy with most everything so far and haven’t particularly missed any Windows programs (except Photoshop, but more on that later). And I have to give two programs special mention, the first of which is Amarok. There are a bajillion music players you can choose from on Linux, but far and away the most popular is Amarok which has been called Linux’s killer app, and with good reason.

(No, it’s not natively that green. I re-coloured it to match my desktop. It comes in a rather neutral and pleasing shade of blue by default.)

I’m pretty picky about my music players. They have to have smart playlists, ratings, iPod sync, cover art, lyric display, good sound, and speed; for the three latter reasons I ditched iTunes on Windows for foobar2000 last year (and I’m still convinced fb2k is the best music player for Windows). Amarok does it all and more with a prettier, easier interface than fb2k and 10,000 times more speed than iTunes. It has Wikipedia and last.fm integration, automatically looks up lyrics for you, and comes bundled with a huge directory of internet radio stations it’s pretty awesome. Amarok 2.0 is going to be available for Windows so do check it out when it is!

Second special mention: I was in love with Launchy for Windows - still have a very soft spot for it - and didn’t know if I was going to find anything similar on Linux that allows you to launch programs with a few keystrokes. Then up popped Gnome-Do, which is based more on the Quicksilver (for Mac) model than Launchy is.

After using this for about 15 seconds I immediately saw why Mac folks are always saying Windows users don’t know what they’re missing with Quicksilver. Gnome-Do launches files and programs with a straightforward Alt-Space shortcut, as you can see above, but it does much more than that. You can use it to rename, delete, or move stuff, you can also use it to change your Skype status, post to Google Calendar, post to Twitter… yeah. Brilliant. Suddenly Launchy looks pretty weak.

5. Linux brings the eye candy in spades

Another thing that surprised me. I think I’ve got pretty good at prettifying my Windows desktop, but it bugged me that it I had to jump through hoops to get it to look the way I want, and the more I tricked it out the slower it got. Ubuntu, however, came looking extremely pretty by default. Even if orange themes are not your thing, you can’t deny that window frame transparency, hundreds and hundreds of available themes, totally customisable system fonts (notice how Windows likes to protect the Tahoma font and won’t let you replace it systemwide?), and drop shadows on windows are all very yummy features. And that’s not all!

There are a number of fancy ways you can keyboard-switch between windows, besides standard vanilla Alt-Tab. Above is just one of them, something called Shift Screen which emulates the Mac Coverflow for your windows. You would think that something like that absolutely crawls, and you would be probably right in Windows, but it’s surprisingly snappy in Linux. Also, Linux has the smoothest, sleekest implementation of virtual desktops that I have ever worked with.

A quick keystroke brings up the above pretty screen, from which you can easily pick your desktop. I really enjoy having virtual desktops because it helps keep me focused and my workspaces neat - I can keep Firefox and random non-work stuff separate from my work desktop. Unfortunately every implementation of it I’ve tried on Windows (of which Dexpot was undoubtedly the best) has been kind of slow and clunky. Not so here, where I can just hover my mouse on my desktop and scroll from workspace to workspace as rapidly and smoothly as if I was scrolling a webpage. It’s absolutely seamless and very very fast. I haven’t even mentioned the Compiz Cube yet, which is probably the single most famous feature of Linux’s virtual desktops, mostly because I don’t use the Cube (it makes me dizzy). It is impressive though.

6. All that said - it’s not yet ready for primetime

With my massive praise of Linux out of the way, before this turns into a crazy fangirl review, I need to add that I did face a number of problems which I wouldn’t have on Windows. Although printing wasn’t a problem, I couldn’t get scanning to work at all. I also think the steps I had to take to mount and sync my iPod were too convoluted for someone who isn’t as persistent and stubborn as I am about bending their technology to their will. I had to manually edit a configuration file to make my drives mount at boot, which is something that no home user should ever be subjected to doing.

Ubuntu, in particular, does not come packaged with any proprietary multimedia codecs or plugins. Therefore you won’t even be able to play mp3s or DVDs until you install a whole bunch of things. I can’t imagine telling my sister that she has to go install something before she can play YouTube videos. It’s just not friendly enough yet out of the box for most casual users. Great strides have been made over the past years to reduce the use of the command line, a move which I heartily applaud, but unfortunately there are a lot of things you still need it for.

This is my terminal with a bunch of cryptic commands (I only typed the first line, I’m not that techie). Even with a squishy bear telling me something random every time I open a terminal - a nice little feature of Linux Mint, more on that later - the command line is daunting. There are some packages and programs that you can only install via the command line, so I’m pretty sure no one will be able to escape it. I know it’s powerful, and once you get used to it you do actually find it more convenient to install things this way rather than through a GUI (opening a terminal and typing “sudo apt-get install skype” retrieves the install automatically for you, and is FAR easier than going to find a download of Skype myself), but ultimately I think the average home user shouldn’t ever have to touch the command line.

AND - this is a big AND - ultimately, there are just some Windows programs that I can’t ditch entirely. Games are the most obvious example, and another is Photoshop. I forced myself to work with GIMP (the Linux equivalent) for a few days just to get used to it and see if I could adapt enough not to need Photoshop anymore, but even though I’ve got a decent enough grasp of it now to make it do whatever I want with an image, I can do everything much faster in Photoshop - not because I’m more accustomed to it, but because Photoshop just has some features that make image editing very much faster (adjustment layers - HUGE).

7. Being spoilt for choice can cut both ways

Sketchy overview: There are a few main desktop environments for Linux, the forerunners being GNOME and KDE. They’re kind of different ways of dressing up and working the same OS. There’s a good article here explaining the concept. Ubuntu runs on GNOME, so being restless and curious, I installed Kubuntu a few days later to check out what I was missing with KDE. It didn’t take me more than 20 minutes of use to switch back to GNOME. KDE was, I thought, everything that confuses users about Linux - it’s obviously very much more customisable (e.g. it took some doing for me to get different wallpapers set up for different workspaces on Ubuntu, in Kubuntu it was already a default option), but there are a MILLION options and menus that are simply overwhelming. Getting it to do the simplest thing is a task and a half because you just spend so much time even looking for the right menu.

Another distro that I really wanted to try was Linux Mint, which runs with Ubuntu as its base but comes pre-installed with multimedia codecs and a different interface, and has a reputation for being the most elegant, friendliest distribution to use out of the box. Unfortunately, unlike for Kubuntu when all I needed to do was tell the terminal to install it (because the *buntu family make it easy for you to install them side by side), Linux Mint required me to do it the hard way. In the install there was an option for me to either let them do all the hard stuff for me or to manually partition my hard drive myself, and being a fearless idiot with a tutorial by my side I bravely surged forth with the manual partitioning, which brought me to this rather terrifying screen.

It went off surprisingly well, however, and relatively pain-free except for the little surge of fear that came when I clicked “Install” and wondered if I had just nuked everything on my D:\. Happily, it all worked as planned, and unlike with Ubuntu, I didn’t have to install a million things just to get YouTube to play. Mint looks and feels very professional right off the bat, and I think I’m going to keep it and ditch Ubuntu.

8. The FOSS community is pretty amazing

That’s Free and Open-Source Software. I was concerned about whether I’d be able to find adequate tech support, but the Ubuntu forums are absolutely massive and very active and the Mint forums, while not as big, are friendly and responsive too. For pretty much every problem I’ve run into so far I’ve been able to find detailed instructions and fixes online. Granted, this isn’t ideal for an OS because a perfect OS should just work and not send their users Googling wildly for solutions to issues, but for something they give away for free it’s pretty impressive support. I’m even considering sending a few bucks Mint’s way once I have a job (ha, I should probably say “if” rather than “once”, the way things are going).

9. There is a strange sense of power in freedom

I always thought people who evangelised about only using free and open-source stuff were a bit over-the-top about it, to be honest. I mean, if my software works, it’s good software, whether I have to pay for it or not. Over the past week however, it’s dawned on me that the open-source concept really is pretty powerful. I know for sure that when I find a program I want to use, it’ll be free and I can get it right there and then; if it’s open-source I won’t ever have to worry about it being abandoned and deprecated because the community can always pick it right up and someone else can work on it. Open-source advocates often cite complete ownership of your data as one big reason you should ditch proprietary software - like, how can you be sure that your .xls file will be compatible with Excel 10 years down the road, that kind of thing - and I always thought it was a bit silly, but now I kind of get it. There’s an bizarre sense of empowerment in using software that belongs to a community rather than a corporation. I sound like a crazy commie I know, but I can’t explain it!

…and that’s it. If you made it to the end, give yourself a pat on the back.

Here is a song to detract from the eyecandy-geekness of this entry:

It’s “God Knows…” by Hirano Aya, and it’s that song from Suzumiya Haruhi that my sister and I were supposed to sing at Animania last week. Neither of us had heard it before and the chorus gave us a helluva hard time (try it, it’s FAST!), but the song itself is really catchy! If you’re inclined to snag it, right-click on the player and you should see a “Download this song” option.

Sadly my resistance has been assailed by the glut of iPhone articles I have been reading on my daily trawl of tech blogs, and by my sister’s recent acquisition of an iPhone, which my parents got for her because my dad was involved in Optus’s iPhone launch in Australia and could get it dirt-cheap. It’s so… shiny. The interface is lovely. There are some really fantastic apps available for it. There is, I have finally succumbed to realise, a wealth of benefits in having internet on the go. You can check out Google Maps if you get lost in the city. You can input appointments directly into Google Calendar instead of storing them on your phone calendar and processing them when you get home. You can watch Youtube. You can listen to internet radio (!!!)… and the list goes on.

I’ve always been thinking of making the switch to Mac when I move on from my Vaio, but I must honestly confess that my Macbook lust has never reached the level of iPhone lust I’m currently entertaining. Frustratingly, it is really incredibly expensive in the UK so I really doubt I’ll be getting it if I’m staying there to work. And I just changed my phone last year so there isn’t really an excuse to get a new one (I feel like this is my penance for impatiently dumping my cranky Motorola last summer - I should just have stuck it out till now huh).

Ah, shiny gadgets… why are they all so outrageously priced?

Every now and then, I go through a phase where I just want something dead simple. It usually comes after a layout which was very graphic-heavy and complicated, and goodness knows the previous one was. I was hoping not to use a single graphic in this layout actually but eventually succumbed to placing a teeny pattern background in the header to save the whole thing from becoming overly dull.

But the big thing about this layout, really, is that it is fully liquid (i.e. columns dynamically resize with your browser size and it should be cross-broswer compatible, give it a go); which is not such a great deal if you are a better coder than I am with CSS, but is a great deal to me because the 3-column liquid layout has been an elusive goal that I have aspired to for a long time now, and I never had the patience (till now, while dissertation-procrastinating) to carefully, slowly pick apart some sample CSS and try to figure out how it’s done.

I also have catchy new music to go with the new layout, available for download on the etc. page and for live preview here!

This is “Ikenai Taiyou” by ORANGE RANGE (theme song from the jdrama Hana Kimi), my song of the moment and one of the most incredibly catchy things I have ever heard. It is also my current jogging song. I have it pretty much on perpetual loop on my iPod when I run.

And this is “Exodus” by Maksim Mrvica (probably better known as just Maksim, of The Piano Player album fame). If you’ve been obsessively watching the women’s gymnastics Olympic events, as I have, you might recognise this as Anna Pavlova’s floor music. It’s by far the most amazing of all the floor routine background music and sent me on a mad hunt for the track when I first heard it. (Anna’s floor routine is also amazing, by the way.)

Anyway, I have a couple of fantastic songs up in the etc. section now, so check it out! And I should get back to work.

It’s kind of empty right now though because I have literally spent near on eight hours just working on this layout, wrangling PHP and CSS, tweaking colours, tweaking code, doing things with block elements that I’ve never done before, &c and I am too braindead to think of how to fill up my etc. section. I was going to upload some music, but I’m afraid you all will have to wait to hear the dulcet tones of The Byrds (whose cover of Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” inspired this layout).

*

I was stumped for something to write to make this a noteworthy first post for my shiny new (hopefully permanent) space, and then I remembered I had yet to post about the Matchbox Twenty concert.

L to R: kyle, rob ♥, brian, paul

As you can see from this photo, Jia Min, Jenny and I were in the unfortunate position of being stuck in the upper circle with many people’s heads and a lot of space between us and the stage. Sadly they’d decided to make the stalls standing room only, and as much as I love MB20 I wasn’t about to gladly sacrifice my feet for them.

But distance aside, the concert was wonderful. They did so many of their old songs - “Hang”, “3 AM”, “Long Day” all way back from their first album - and nearly all of my favourites - “Real World”, “Disease”, “Push”, “Downfall”, “Bright Lights”, “Unwell”, “Hand Me Down” - all songs that I’ve listened to over and over again, so so many times, songs that are so in my system that I could sing along to them in my sleep. Rob played piano on “Bright Lights” and I have such a weakness for my favourite musicians on the piano - so that was good. Undoubtedly (for me, at least) the high point of their performances for the night was “Bent”, which is probably fitting as it’s the title most people would name if you asked them to name an MB20 song off the top of their head. “Real World” and “Downfall” lacked a teensy bit of oomph - perhaps it was just that their live backing music was different from the CD backing tracks and I’m too used to the latter - but “Bent” was explosively powerful. I’m not actually such a big fan of the newer songs, I think the music isn’t as catchy as the Mad Season/More Than You Think You Are era and the lyrics aren’t as simple and honest either, but as always with a good band, hearing the songs live made me like them more.

The best thing about the show, as Rob himself said, was how many people were just so into it; he said the thing about being in the UK was that reporters always asked them what it’s like being here because they’re a band that’s so much bigger in the States, but then they do shows like this and they’re blown away by the realisation that there are so many people in the UK who’ll pay to come see them (the Manchester Apollo’s not a small venue at all, and it was absolutely packed). And it’s just… so true. I remember back in first year when my seminar group were having drinks at a pub and Beth and I were discussing the sex god that is Rob Thomas, and everyone else had never heard of him, and I’d always thought I’d never get to see them here because they just aren’t that famous in the UK. But everyone at the concert were clearly fans, everyone was singing along, so loudly that you could hear the audience as a collective voice singing their hearts out along with Rob. The girl sitting in front of me couldn’t have been more than 10. She was wearing an MB20 T-shirt, and she and her mom were clearly having a ball of a time, and her mom knew every word to every song.

rob at the piano

in all fairness, MB20 isn’t the best live act I’ve seen in my concert experience (that would be Michael Buble). But for some reason, some inexplicable reason that I can’t put my finger on, they’re a band that mean a lot to me; I remember the heartbreak I felt when Adam Gaynor left and it came back fleetingly, wrenchingly, when the band took to the stage and there was only 4 of them and not 5, I remember singing out loud in my room to Mad Season late at night when it was just me and my CD player and a last-minute assignment, I remember all these individual songs that spoke to me at different periods of my life - “Bent” and “The Burn” in secondary school, “Bright Lights” and “Unwell” in JC, “Mad Season” and “Real World” in university - so many times, I’ve just been listening casually to my iPod and suddenly the lyrics of an MB20 song would hit me with that yes yes yes feeling. I feel like if there’s any band I can say I grew up with, it would be them, they’re the one band from my teenage days that I haven’t grown out of and who’ve followed me all this way here to York. And seeing them live was such a big thing for me… I almost feel that I’ve come, in an odd way, full circle.