Month: May 2011

Sobering details of the startup

For those who know me personally you know that I haven’t been able to shut up about this platform that I have been working on for the past few months.  Its been a lot of hard work, especially because it was happening after I would do  my 9 to 5.

Unfortunatley, a competitor has gotten to market with a product very similar to ours.  But, if you know anything about people who try things like this, thats just water on a ducks back.  We are aware that the market has changed, but, we are still convinced that we can develop a viable platform and a good company.  You see thats what we are really after, not so much to be the most well known or to be the most profitable, but, just to be sustainable and reputable.

At this point I only have the following advise:

  1. Do something you believe in.  Don’t be caught doing something that you wouldn’t want to be doing when you die.
  2. Remember that the race belongs to the dedicated and wise, not the quick.
  3. You have to be doing this for a reason other than making money, because frankly you can make money selling internet porn or as a mail carrier.
  4. God rewards those who pursue their dreams with a singular conviction.  You may not get exactly what you thought you would get, but, trust me it will be something so much more worthwhile.
  5. Don’t limit yourself to just what you can imagine.  There is a whole universe out there and you can’t imagine what the boundaries of it are and of where you might fit into those boundaries.
  6. Have a fine German Ale every once in a while, it will reboot you very quickly.

Best of luck on your adventures my friends, I am actually enjoying my own.

Why I can’t upload pictures on my laptop using Ubuntu

I have been a Linux user since at least 1995.  That was the year I bought my first distribution copy of SlackWare 96.  I have fiddled with almost every distro you can think of over the years.  I can remember going through all the dramas with Linux:  the Window Manager wars, the libc mess, the Gnome wars, the growth of Redhat.  During all of these moments I honestly didn’t hold it against Linux that I always needed to have a copy of Windows available to get real work done sometimes.  Linux was usually the best environment to get development work done for Java or LAMP so I never had a problem not having a proper Office Application.  The Dual boot thing was annoying, but, I could get over it with the rock solid stability and close compatibility with other Unixes. 

In the last 5 years I have somewhat settled on using “Desktop” distributions.  My reasons:
1.  Easier to update so I could see new features without having to do some funky configuring.
2.  Less maintenance.  I like to pretend that my computer is not a hobby that requires constant caring and feeding like a house pet.
3.  Easier installation of addons and new software.
I know I’m losing patience with my old age and quite frankly I don’t have the time for spending overnight to get printing to work.

Honestly I was in a state of Détente with Linux because I wasn’t really happy with a few things.  Driver support in Ubuntu has always been atrocious and this distro had some of the best driver support.  I hated how simple things would not work like my HDMI port.  Don’t even get me started on Linux’s lack of support for the Hybrid Graphics in my Dell laptop. 

This weekend I updated to Ubuntu 11 with its new Unity Interface and I just realized that I had been using Linux for 17 years and I was still unable to do something very basic:  Upload images to PicasaWeb that were loaded on my laptop.  First off, all my years mucking about with fstab made me know to load my windows partition as a mounted drive when I installed Ubuntu (that saves a lot of headache, but, frankly why doesn’t Ubuntu mount every partition it sees on the drive automatically?).  So getting to the pictures wasn’t the problem.  The problem was the the new Nautilus interface that popped up inside of Mozilla Firefox was complete indecipherable.  Now, I am something of a UI geek (its why I went to Ben Schneiderman’s school for my undergrad and tried to get a job in that lab) and I have worked with computers with all sorts of weird interfaces (look, I programmed doom into my TI 85 calculator, so I know how to get things done).  Its hard to admit, but, I couldn’t figure out how to get to my windows mount inside the file list window.  I thought I was losing my mind so I tried another browser, but, they all default to using the Nautilus file browser.  I’m sorry, but, after trying for about 15 minutes I gave up.

Good job Ubuntu, I just gave up on Unity at that point.  Its clear they never tested this with any user groups.  I had Gnome running pretty nicely with CompWiz (Desktop Cubes, extra effects, :)).  I switched back to Ubuntu “Classic”, but, I decided to boot into Windows to upload my pictures.  The funny thing is that I see how quickly Android has gotten away from the mistakes of Linux.  For one thing there is only one GUI for Android (though folks implement add-ons).  I find it very satisfying using the stock Android 2.2 Ui on my G2X (drool).  Over the years I have been forced into liking stock interfaces and I can say that Android is a nice one.  The travesty that is Unity is not ready for prime time.  If you can’t bring in a user group consisting of basic users and see how productive they are in using the UI then you can’t make that UI the default.  Regardless of Shuttleworth’s feelings about Gnome the decision should have been made to keep users productive even if you are using a messy code base.