I usually don’t go in much for stuff with swords and/or dragons, but I’ll admit, the novels totally sucked me in, and I’m pretty excited for the series to start.

Generally, I find the amount of attention that many Linux review tend to devote to the installer to be excessive. Still, it is the first experience a lot of people will have of a Linux operating systems, so it’s pretty important that it not be a mess.

As for the 10.10 proposal, I really like the idea that it will auto-detect stuff like the keyboard layout and the timezone. The mock-up of the drive partitioning dialog is pretty sweet too:

I have installed Ubuntu more times than I can count, and I *still* find this step to be confusing. I understand drive partitioning and I know what I want to do, but translating that into reality via the confusing jumble of sliders, radio buttons, and drop-down menus the installer has historically provided can be a challenge.

I do wonder, though, whether it is realistic to think that a newbie-friendly drive partioning wizard is possible. In my experience, most day-to-day computer users do not know what a partition is, or why it might be necessary.

If they are really expecting non-technical users to be using this installer, they’d be better off presenting a plain-language question like, “Do you want the ability to keep using Windows on this computer, or do you want to get rid of everything and use only Ubuntu?” If the user picks “Keep using Windows,” then send them into the partitioning dialog. While it probably violates some sacred and arcane rule of UI design, I can see some benefit to having some “Tell me more” links in the partioner that would allow the user to pull up additional detail about what partitioning means and what options they have.

I’m sure it probably violates some sacred and arcane rule of UI design, but I could see some benefit to having some sort of “Tell me more” link

Anyway, the old behavior was that when updates to the OS or any installed-from-the-repositories applications were available, you’d get a little icon in the notification area. Clicking the icon would bring up the Update Manager.

In 9.04, they changed it so that instead of generating the notification area icon, Update Manager would open automatically. I guess the idea was that the notification icon (and perhaps its associated notification bubbles) was too annoying, or that people were likely to ignore it and end up with unpatched, out-of-date systems. That’s fine, except that Update Manager opens somewhere in the background. What keeps happening to me is that at some point, while switching windows or desktops, I discover it’s been sitting there for god knows how long with a bunch of updates that I need to run.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to restore the old behavior. In Gnome’s Configuration Editor, go to the update-notifier section under “apps” and uncheck the “auto_launch” box:

After that, hey presto! You get the notification icon whenever updates are available.

I should state here that I *hate* the term “lifestreaming”, but can’t think of a better replacement. The idea, however, is pretty cool—have one site that pulls in the updates from all my other various public online activities.

While the idea of lifestreaming isn’t particularly new, I hadn’t really found a workable, non-annoying way of doing it. Sure, there’s the WordPress TwitterTools plugin that sucks a daily digest of my Twitter posts into this blog, but then there’s Flickr, and Delicious, and the stuff I share and comment on in Google Reader, and a bunch of other random sites. Apps like FriendFeed and the now AOL-owned SocialThing make various runs at the problem, but then you’re dependent upon those 3rd-party sites. If they go down, get bought, change their policies, etc., you and all the data you’ve added to them are at their mercy.

Sweetcron seems like a pretty cool solution. It’s a PHP app with a MySQL back-end, and aside from a few minor quirks, it’s pretty easy to get up and running on any LAMP-stack host. Themes are extremely limited, and there aren’t many bells and whistles, but the first issue can be solved with some CSS knowledge, and the second is more of a feature than a bug.

I’ve got a very bare-bones instance running at http://stream.downdb.net/. I’m using one of the pre-installed themes, so it’s pretty ugly right now, and most of the templates still have the filler text provided by the guy who wrote the code. I also need to figure out how to have it *not* pull in a ton of random tags from Google Reader. Still, it’s a nice little app, and I really like that it lets me keep using all the various external services, but pulls my data in to a single site that I own and control.

Used to be, your television heroes explored the edges of the universe and confronted unimaginable nightmares. And then they’d end up back where they started. Now television gives us arcs, that continue from week to week. Is that really better?

It’s the classic trade-off: on the one hand, self-contained weekly episodes are newbie-friendly and easy to show in reruns, because it doesn’t matter what order you show them in. On the other hand, how deep can your characters and universe really get when nothing ever changes and the situations get fully resolved within 43 minutes?

While not specifically stated in the story, it is a general response to a curmudgeonly Guardian article published a few months ago complaining that “Torchwood has succumbed to the story arc craze.”

Then this week, io9 follows up with “Did Dune Ruin Science Fiction Novels?”:

Gone are the days of the 200 page book, which could be devoured in a couple of days. Instead, he [a poster on LibraryThing] says science fiction novels are less interested in telling interesting stories with novel ideas than in cramming in every detail until the book is better as a doorstop than a form of entertainment. Moreover, reading these tomes can take weeks, turning what should be a simple pleasure into an onerous commitment. The poster implores Herbert-loving science fiction writers to take their cue from William Faulkner (when rewriting, “kill your darlings”), and trim the fat from their books, leaving a trimmer, more engaging story behind.

While I suspect the articles in question are largely contrarian link-bait, I find it troubling that this “Complex storytelling is bad!” notion keeps cropping up.

Given the choice between a long, well-written book and a short, well-written book, I will pick the long one every time. There’s more space for character- and world-building, and frankly, a complex story is nearly always more interesting than a simple story. And let’s face it—it’s not always easy to find a good book. When I find a good read, the longer it lasts, the better.

As for TV shows, the complaint about story arcs is equally bogus. I’ve gone into this topic in more detail elsewhere, so I’m not going to spend much time on it here, but the “problem” with most sci-fi on television isn’t story arcs. The problem is bad writing.

In either case, I just don’t find it that surprising that viewers and readers enjoy long-form stories with well-developed characters and complex plots. The only real complaint seems to be that new viewers won’t know what’s going on, but that doesn’t hold much water in the era of Netflix and Hulu.

First, a word or two on what I got. It’s an HP Mini 110 with an Atom N280 (1.66GHz, 512KB L2, 667Mhz FSB) processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 16GB SSD drive. The GPU is an Intel 950, and I got the 10.1″ (1366 x 768) display. The Mini comes with either HP’s custom Linux distro or Windows XP installed. I got the XP version, as Linux version only comes with a 1024 x 576 display. Annoying, but one gets used to this sort of crap when one is a Linux user.

Upon receiving the Mini, I immediately reformatted the drive and installed Crunchbang Linux, a relatively lightweight distro that is based on Ubuntu and uses an OpenBox front end. Aside from a minor (and quickly resolved) sound driver issue, it works like a charm on the Mini. So far as I can tell, other than the higher resolution display available on the XP model, there is no hardware difference between it and the model that comes with Linux preinstalled.

In terms of performance, the Mini has been pretty much what I expected—fine for day to day browsing activities, not so great for any processor-intensive stuff. Compiling even simple stuff is a lengthy process, and playback of high definition (>480p) video is hopeless. Standard xvid-encoded .avi playback is fine, though, as is online video like Hulu.

I really like the keyboard on the Mini. For the first day or two, I was mashing some keys together, but I quickly got used to it. Given the overall compactness of the machine, they’ve done a great job of squeezing in an almost-regulation-size keyboard. The trackpad buttons have taken a bit more getting used to. Having them to either side of the trackpad (as opposed to above) makes for some awkward thumb motion. However, it’s a worthwhile space-saving compromise.

My one gripe so far is battery life. I got the standard 3-cell battery, and get 1.5-2 hours of life out of it. If I’m watching video, it’s less. I suspect that has more to do with poor power management by the Linux distro I’m using than with the Mini itself, but it’s still annoying.

The focus of the article is WRPI, the radio station of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. “Great,” I think as I read the article, “I’ll check it out!” Sadly, when I go to the stations website and click the “Listen Now” link, I’m greeted with a 16kbps RealAudio stream and a 64kbps Windows Media stream.

Seriously?

I realize we’re talking about a college station with limited resources, but these are the sort of offerings I expect from a commercial station. If you’ve only got so much to spend on your online stream, how about going with a format to which everyone will be able to listen?

So far, it seems pretty cool—it’s fast, simple, and I have yet to run into any errors or broken web sites. I had some problems installing it, but that turned out to be an issue with Symantec Endpoint Protection, not Chrome.

My main gripe after a few hours of usage is the lack of extensions/plugins, specifically my trusty Firefox AdBlockPlus extension. Given that Google’s primary source of income is advertising, though, it does not surprise me that they wouldn’t be eager to allow users to block inline advertisements.

There’s been a good deal of chatter around the web regarding the manner in which Chrome’s release will shake up the browser market. Conventional wisdom seems to be that Google is taking a shot at Internet Explorer. However, should Chrome become a hit, I’m guessing the big loser will be other alternative browsers.

Typically, web users are divided up based on the browser that they use. In this case, I’d say the better way to look at the situation is to consider that users fall into two general categories: people who are liking to install/try alternate browsers, and those who are content (for whatever reasons) using the browser that came with their computer. IE’s continued dominance of the browser market is based squarely upon the second category, and those people aren’t going to suddenly start switching over to Google Chrome, no matter how awesome, secure, or feature-rich it might be. The same goes for Safari users on the Mac side of the aisle.

No, it’s the first category of web/computer users who will likely install and use Chrome, and those are the same people already using Firefox and Opera. As a result, success for Google in the browser market will likely come at the expense of those other browsers, not IE and Safari. The other possibility is that people using Firefox and Opera are used to having a full-featured, extendable browser. If that’s the case, the initial appeal of Chrome may quickly wear off.

Yeah, it’s about as crappy as a bootleg could be, but I gotta say, it looks pretty cool. I’m not sure about the unenclosed light cycles, but otherwise, I like it!