Fri, 24 Mar 2006

Eduroam, Tango and Kororaa
Two presentations this evening. The first from Steve Walsh about Eduroam, a system that allows academics from a participating institution to go to any other participating institution, log on using their own credentials, and get internet access from there. So I could go to University of Glasgow and log in using my ANU password and get internet access from there. It's obviously not "access as if you were a staff member of that institution", but it means you don't have to pay for dialup and roaming dialup logins or make special arrangements for each person visiting somewhere else. A simple idea and a good one, although their fights with LDAP servers and authentication systems need to go down in legend, preferably in Old English to sit alongside that of Beowulf.

The second one by Pascal Klein was about the Tango Project, which is a project to create an icon set under a Creative Commons license, so that a consistent look and feel can be applied to GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and (if Pascal gets his way), XGl. Too many old-school hackers deride anything more complex (or simpler) than a command line as dumbing things down, usually in the same breath as they whine about how proprietary operating systems are taking over the planet. You cannot underestimate how valuable it is - both for new users and old - to have a consistent interface. The same command-liners will probably cringe when you take their beloved emacs away from them and give them an ordinary GUI text editor, because it doesn't have their favourite alt-left-shift-control-spoon key combination for correctly indenting XML in a boustrophedontic environment. That's called the interface, you morons. Get with it.

The third, 'unofficial', presentation, was by Chris Smart, showing off Kororaa and XGL. Heaps of funky stuff, some borrowed from Mac OS X, some completely new. Pascal made himself dizzy by holding down Ctrl-Alt-Shift- Right-Arrow and watching the cube of the workspaces whizz around before his very eyes. Hopefully it will support i810 integrated graphics, because that's what Pascal's new laptop is going to support, and he's going to be a very disappointed boy if he doesn't get shiny and whizzy. Actually, I should lay off Pascal because he copped enough stick from Steve over his double-edged-sword work with Mark Shuttleworth. But we do need to register www.ucultu.com.

The thing I wanted to note here is that one thing I'm worried about with things like XGL is that we're just going to have rubberised windows as the only behaviour because it's whizzy enough. I think there are a lot of ways of making things behave on a desktop, and I think Linux is all about choosing what behaviour you want. Just on the issue of window moving, I see several more ways to make windows behave as you move them around the screen:

• As you drag the window, only the nearest edges come with you - the further edges from your direction of travel stay put and the window stretches out like rubber. Then when you let go it snaps into its new position and shakes briefly.
• You drag a partially transparent copy of the window around. When you drop it, it flies up toward you and falls back down to where you put it.
• When you pick the window up it pushes back into the screen, and then when you drop it it comes upward toward you into place.
• When you pick it up it starts folding itself into a little origami shape, and then when you drop it it unfolds into place.
• As you drag it around the desktop all the other windows are 'pushed out of its way', and they snap back into their original place behind the focus window's new position.
• (A novel new idea would be to do what Google Earth does with motion-drop: you can 'throw' a window by releasing it while the cursor is still in motion, and it slows to a stop further along the line of your 'throw' than where you released it.)

1. It has to be quick. Don't do some glacier-like melt and flow or a Cheshire Cat fade and reappear if it takes ages to do. People instinctively wait while these things happen, because (a) they think that the system is too slow for them to grab another window while the first one is moving, and (b) they want to know where that new window has ended up before they make any more decisions about what they can click on. If this takes more than about half a second, people are going to get very tired of waiting. It will feel slow to use and the glamour will wear off all the effects.
2. It has to show you where the window will go. Imagine starting to drag and only having the cursor go with you - the window stays where it was. Only when you drop the window does it appear in its new spot. What if that's not exactly where the user intended it? They have to guess again. That's bad. Providing constant feedback as to where the window will end up is essential. (It doesn't have to be perfect - you can just show an outline or a shadow or a translucent image. But the user has to know where it's really going to end up.)
3. It should maintain the idea that windows are semi-solid things that have a physical presence in some virtual space that we're looking into. Imagine if the window sort of melted into other windows as you dragged, and solidified into position when you dropped it (with all the other damage to other windows being undone in the process). People are going to be afraid to move anything in case it doesn't undo correctly, or in case the text from one window does get mixed up in the other.
4. It shouldn't startle the user or make them think that something's gone wrong. Rubberised windows is OK because as soon as you let go it all snaps back into place and everything's OK again. Having a dematerialisation process that throws electric sparks out of the window as if it's suffering a major electrical failure, and then plonking down the window in its new position like a new clone in Paranoia is going to be disturbing.

The Oldest Trick in the Book
Shortly after I got into to work this morning, I found out that one of the lab machines I administer (running FC4) has been rootkitted. Damn. I feel incredibly guilty for this, as if I've done something personally wrong by not examining the admin logs every day, as if that could prevent such a thing occurring. Fortunately, Fedora Core 5 has recently been released, so I can do my trick from last time - boot up off the network install disk and install from the ISO images through NFS back to the server. I go to work out whether everything has been backed up on the troubled machine, and it's got a screen saver lock. I say to the user, "Can you type in your password?" and he says "Oh, it's just the same as my username."

Oh dear.

Fortunately he hasn't used the same password elsewhere, so my main server and the dual-core Intel machine are still intact. As far as I and chkrootkit can tell.

I'm still going to be upgrading my server by blowing everything away and restoring, to finally blow away the lingering cobwebs of my problems with development and atrpms repositories that I had when I installed this thing when Fedora Core 2 was just out... My plan is to use dar to back up everything with the permissions intact, and then restore selectively from there using dar-static from the archive disk (a 250GB USB drive). Or at least, that's the plan once I've finished editing the paper I've got to finish.

posted at: 15:42 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry

Capslock cannot truly express my fangirly joy!
Another in the long string of movies I've placed on order at EzyDVD arrived today. I tore open the envelope and revealed Howl's Moving Castle, another in Hayao Miyazaki's string of animated classics. I'm still getting into Japanese Anime, and I think this is an excellent way to do it - brilliant animation, brilliant stories, and without the dodgy Fanservice, subtitles and inscrutable oriental plots of other more true Anime.

This is an adaption of a book by Diana Wynne Jones, which I have also read a little while ago. As such, from what I can recall it's not a perfectly accurate rendition of the book - I think the ending is a bit more twisted toward Japanese sensibilities. Given that I can't recall the ending or the subtle nuances of plot in the book, I don't think I'm really one to comment, though. I finished the book really wondering what had happened and why. The movie was a bit more straight forward, while still retaining the ambiguity that made it so interesting.

I won't attempt to summarise the movie. I think it does live up to its PG rating - I think the older of my four nieces (age 10) would probably cope but Megan, at 6, is going to be scared by some bits. But, in my view, this is why PG means Parental Guidance rather than Pleases Girls or Pretty Gruesome - it means that as long as an adult is there to say "It's OK" or to explain why some things happened the way they did, it's alright. Children only learn to be brave by learning that scary things aren't really that bad, and they only learn to be adult by observing adults in the same situation they've been in. And this is definitely a film (and a book) for kids.

The other thing I like about it is that it's a film with a message. In this age of Shark Tales and Treasure Planet, animations which dumb everything down and exaggerate everything up and spend more time painfully zigzagging toward the wonderful happy ending where everything works out, this is a movie which poses some questions and asks the viewer to think about them. An ongoing war which people seem only to be agitating for, not trying to get out of; the question of whose side people are on; looks being deceiving; the idea that some things are problems only to us while we let them be problems. These are things that the viewer has to work out - things that'll never be in a kid's movie done by a major studio because the hoary hags that sit on their thrones in the big studios think that children only like pabulum; they only want funny, silly stuff with more rapper slang than sensible dialogue. Eugh. Give me Miyazaki any day.

posted at: 09:24 | path: /personal/movies | permanent link to this entry

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