gmail generation

Gmail got extremely popular about 2-3 years ago. That's probably because of kinda simple and at the same time powerful web interface it has. Even my mother has a gmail account these days and uses it all the time and has no problem with it at all.

But there's a bad, very bad thing about it: it makes people format messages awfully. It's been written in various places that default quoting method is top-quoting, which is really annoying in most of the time. Moreover, people who read mails sent by normal mail clients like mutt, have problems with viewing them. Because text placed after a quoted message will by most likely formatted as a quotation as well by gmail. And inline quotation must be a real PITA for gmail users.

Moreover, it forces people to over-quote because it leaves all messages from the thread, not the last one.

As a result, most e-mail threads in which gmail users take part look like: several lines on message and then lots of lines of the previous messages quoted.

It's really painful to read and I guess anti-gmail campaign would be more actual than ascii ribbon campaign these days.

PS Actually not gmail, but it's formatting, because in general service seems to be OK.

bike again

It's raining for the second day in a row and looks like will be rainy all the week. So using car instead of a bike. Bike is a drug, really.

bike

So I've started biking more or less often: biked last weekend and started to ride at work on a bike instead of car. Actually, I have a pretty positive impression - it takes about same time as getting to work by car, maybe even faster. Road to work is almost all the way downhill, so when I came at work I don't feel tired etc. Obviously, all the way back is an uphill, but it's also nice because it trains me I guess. The only inconvenient thing about it is that I'm feeling kinda tired after getting home and I still have a jet-lag after US trip, so I go to bed early and don't have much time to do useful stuff. But I hope in a week or maybe I will adopt to uphill and cope with jet-lag.

recent Xorg fashion

I've been using free *nix systems for about 10 years now and almost always used X11 servers on them. Back then it was XFree86, not Xorg. First it was something like 3.3.x and then 4.x versions of XFree86.

I always wondered how X was easy to configure. Actually, I've never had problems with X configuration. It was just a matter of generating a configuration file once and forgetting about it - it just kept working after upgrades etc. Probably only once I had problem with it (not sure "problem" is a right word though) - when "keyboard" driver was renamed to "kbd" driver. And I'm not even sure it actually happened in XFree, not Xorg.

But with Xorg, I have problems all the time, esp. last few months when I switched to xorg with hal support. It's like... grab Ubuntu, install it, disable gnome, start openbox and figure out that shortcut for layout switching is "shift-alt" instead of "shift-ctrl". Ok, go to xorg.conf and see that you're configured "shift-ctrl", go "wtf?" and dig into /etc to find some gnome leftover scripts which probably re-configure xkb. Fail at that, google up the problem and figure out that xkb settings in some hal xml configs override the ones in xorg.conf. WTF? I totally don't get it why to make it possible to configure single item in two different places, esp. considering that in one place configuration doesn't make any sense. It's sooooooooo linuxish so it's even frustrating.

Or another example - I've installed freebsd on my laptop today and installed Xorg. When X starts, I cannot get mouse moving etc... input basically doesn't work. I go to Xorg.log and see something like "AllowEmtpyInput is not set, disabling input devices". WTF??? What kind of reasoning process made it think that I don't need input devices? I don't even care what is "AllowEmtpyInput" and I don't know why is it so critical that I should be punished for not setting it in such cruel way. SO I've added it and got stuff working.

I assume it's somehow related to hal. What I don't get is: I don't need hal. I guess a lot of people don't need hal in X (I don't know any who needs it). Why the hell stuff cannot just work in a way it worked before without hal? I think it would be more fair if people who need hal would fuck with it to enable it instead of people who don't need hal having to fuck around it to get things working like they're used to see.

MacOS X first impressions

By occasion I had to develop stuff for iPhone whole this week and therefore used MacBook as a primary computer. I've never used MacOS before except that once I've tried to install Hackintosh on my laptop but I could not used it because it didn't support neither wifi nor ethernet.

So, well, MacOS X. It seems very hard to use in default configuration. Like, MacBook screensize is 13.3" (or something like that, lazy to check), considering that it's weird that the dock consumes so much screen space. I don't know how is it supposed to be usable, because the menu bar + window title + dock in default size consumes almost 1/4 of the screen space, it's weird. The only option is to set it's size to minimum and make it auto-hide.

Window manager also seems to be kinda unusual. The first strange thing is how spaces (or whatever it's called) are implemented. I wonder why "Alt-Tab" shows me windows from all spaces instead of windows from the current space only. I was told it's possible to configure it, but I don't spot such option in the preferences. I also cannot find how to move a window from one space to another.

Next disappointment is xcode, and first of all, it's editor. It feels like notepad with the only difference that it has syntax highlighting. For some reason, in the default configuration when you hit 'build and go' button it doesn't just to the first error/warning line in the sources. Seems to be kinda weird as well... Other stuff made me curious as well, for example, I wasn't able to find an easy way to rename a project.

I don't know if xcode is positioned as IDE, probably is, but it looks like it's missing a lot of useful features available in other IDEs, for example I wasn't able to find any refactoring stuff there, while e.g. Idea has great support of various refactoring stuff.

As for hardware, keyboard is weird in macbook. The thing that makes me feel uncomfortable is the "fn" key located in usual place of "ctrl" key. Space between the keys are also kinda large and it's unusual as well.

Now I have an impression that OSX is not OS of my choice, I'm happy with freebsd/openbox or linux/openbox at least and the only interesting thing to me in osx is their API, esp. the UI part of it, because it looks like it's way better than for example QT or GTK+. ObjC is also quite interesting, I think I'll play with it in the future.

Trip to US, part2 - food

As promised, here's a quick post about my food-related experience in US.

* First, the most impressive thing is a size of portions - they _veeeeeeeeeery_ large. Like, when you order a sandwich, they bring you two of them and bring some extra stuff like cakes or probably free. It's a lot of food, esp. for the breakfast.

* Coffee - coffee is very tasty. I tasted coffee in peet's, starbucks and probably something else I forgot and it was pretty good everywhere. Muffins and cakes there are also pretty yummu.

* The above two items lead me to conclusion that I don't really need a traditional breakfast, I'd better grab medium size coffee and a muffin or two and it's enough for me and cheaper.

* As for various kitchens, Thai and Italian are pretty good. And due to size of portions you can order chicken or pizza, eat part of it, ask for the box and use it for lunch or even for two.

* This item is closer to service than to food itself. When you order food you always get asked additional questions, like "what do you want it to be served with" etc, and it's pretty hard to tell, because I learned English from UNIX manpages and then IRC and don't know all these words =)
It's kinda problematic, because "I don't care" almost never works. But it's ok, just have to learn more food-related words :)