Archive for the ‘rants’ Category
The Korean Tamagotchi
My Samsung mobile dumb phone has the annoying tendency to complain in the middle of the night when it runs out of battery. For some reason this always happens in the middle of the night and already has woken me up several times. The alarm happens multiple times, so if you don’t give it its juice on time it’ll wake you up later again. It’s a bit like a small kid or a Tamagotchi (are they actually still used?).
It’s very annoying. It’s interesting to think how to designers could have avoided the problem. Check the current time zone and do battery alarms in a few hours in advance during normal waking hours?
Dependencies
Chris Wilson pointed me to a fix for the xterm font rendering problems I’ve been seeing on my Intel graphics laptop with Fedora 14. The fonts on each new xterm are corrupted until I resize it. I first blamed the Intel X driver (there were other xterm fixes in the past), but according to Chris it’s a compiz problem.
Anyways now I wanted to rebuild compiz-core to include the patch and see if it helps. First it took some time to figure out how to install source rpms with yum (summary: yum doesn’t support it; I guess I’m spoiled from zypper). Then
I ask yum to install all the -devel rpms which are dependencies for compiz-core’s source rpm. I got a full screen full of dependencies, culminating in yum asking me to install mysql-server. Yes, mysql-server to build a simple source rpm.
I guess it was taken in through some other dependencies, but installing a full database server for building some rpm is just crazy. I balked at that.
I guess I need to find now a script similar to SUSE’s build that builds in chroot or build it in build service
Fedora is not the only distribution with dependency hell. Some years ago I found out that one openSUSE released had a dependency from fvwm2 to gnome-print (which pulled in a lot of the rest of gnome)
Update: Fedora fixed this now with an update (see bug 614542) I’m really glad that the feels like 10 GB updates every day actually contain at least one valuable fix.
GUI design principle
Asking for a root password in response to someone pressing the power button on the machine
shows: the designer didn’t understand the problem to solve at all.
It told me that I need to enter the root password because someone else was logged in. That’s fine, but *I* can pull the power anyways.
The question is just: are the GUI designers or the security designers to blame.
(observed on Fedora 13)
Bloat
This is the recently announced “first usable” distribution of perl6 aka rakudo star. Just out of curiosity I compiled it for x86_64-linux using gcc 4.5.
Interesting results:
% size /usr/bin/perl5.12.1
text data bss dec hex filename
2778082 13076 584 2791742 2a993e /usr/bin/perl5.12.1
% size ~/src2/rakudo-star-2010.07/install/bin/perl6
text data bss dec hex filename
27972225 792 16 27973033 1aad5a9 rakudo-star-2010.07/install/bin/perl6
The text segment of perl6 is more than 10 times as big as that of perl 5.
Is it also 10 times as good?
That is progress I guess.