Me versus Microsoft: Ryanair

Recently, Microsoft introduced a competitor for Flash on the web and it's called Silverlight. I'm not normally a huge Microsoft fan, but since I usually don't have to deal with their products, it's not a big problem.

Well, for some reason, Ryanair decided to take down their Flash version of their map and put up a Silverlight version. I thought, this is pretty annoying since the old map worked great, but I'll just install Silverlight. After all, it's "cross-platform". Well, it seems that to Microsoft, cross-platform means Windows and Macs and since I'm a Linux user, I can't a access the website.

Now, I know that Linux users don't make up a very sizeable portion of the internet, but why would they change a perfectly good map to the same one using a technology that clearly is not cross platform? Is Microsoft paying them? Are they getting free computers out of it?

The worst part about it is that they don't even have a link to the old version. I had to use this one:

http://www.airlineroutemaps.com/Europe/Ryanair.shtml

One more reason to avoid Microsoft.

Tim

Me vs. Telus: Calling Germany

So, I'm going to England in August for a conference and I'm planning on visiting my friend in Berlin after I'm done with the conference. I haven't talked to her in a while and there's a bunch of details that need to be worked out that won't be easy over the internet. I ask her for her phone number and then go searching for how much it will cost to call her.

I assume, being the year 2008, that calling from my cell phone would be easy and cheap. I briefly search the internet and find a page telling me that it will be $1.88 a minute. I think to myself, this has got to be wrong. What telecom company could possibly get away with charging this much to call between two first world countries? A quick call to Telus's customer service and I discover that not only is this charge correct, but that there is no plan that reduces this fee to something more reasonable.

Now, I know how communication networks work. It's really cheap to send data from computer to computer over the internet. It's free for me to call locally within Toronto. I don't know how much receiving calls in Germany is but it can't be more than a few cents a minute. This seems to leave a whopping dollar and eighty something cents unnaccounted for.

Still, a part of me can accept that telecom companies need to make money and a big part of their business model is hitting people with big phone bills after the fact. However, what struck me the most was that after discussing my needs with Telus, they told me that I should not in fact use their telephone services to call my friend but that I should use someone else's. A quote from Telus customer service:

"Calling from cell phones is expensive. You should use a land line and a phone card".

Welcome to 1985.

Critical Mass: Riding the Gardiner

Critical mass: the event that pits the cyclists against the motorists for an afternoon on the last Friday of every month. The event is controversial for essentially everyone who is aware of its history and its motives. For some, it is an infrequent hippy event, somewhat like a parade, that rolls by and is gone in a few minutes. For the occasional rush hour driver, it can add half an hour or more to an already terrible commute. For the activist cyclist, it provides the one time a month when cyclists can take the road within the safety of a large, slow moving group.

Having been to a few critical mass rides in Vancouver, I knew what to expect for the ride in Toronto. However, because the May 2008 Toronto ride occurred during the first week of bike month, I thought that perhaps something more interesting than minor conflicts with motorists and people on crazy bicycles might be in the works.

The first hour of the ride was fairly uneventful. A group of several hundred cyclists draws applause from some and ire from others, but this is hardly new for any who has attended one of these events before. However, when we reached the Jarvis onramp to the Gardiner expressway, my interest was piqued. Several hundred cyclists is a significant force, but taking over a freeway was not going to be easy. Even if we could take the lanes, climbing onto the Gardiner moved the group from sitting mostly in legal territory (although near the edge) into sitting clearly on the wrong side of the law.

However, after losing a few cyclists on the climb up to the highway, the cars yielded quickly allowing us to push all the way across and take all three lanes. On Sunday, during the Becel Bike for Heart, a much larger number of cyclists will be doing exactly the same thing, but there was still a surge of excitement in the fact that we were traffic here and not just out for a joy ride.



As we rolled by the Spadina exit, I remembered the most appealing things about critical mass from my Vancouver rides: The complete lack of organized leadership. As we rode up onto the Gardiner, I assumed that we'd be getting off at the earliest possible exit, but that belies my assumption that someone had planned this and that they were acting in the same conservative (and responsible) way that most of society's leaders act. However, having observed the process of decision making in these kinds of groups before it was most definitely a small group of people taking initiative while the rest hesitantly followed.

It was a couple of kilometers past Spadina when I began to hear the police sirens and a squad car come roaring by at a ridiculous speed. At this point, we knew we were trapped between the police barricading the road at the next exit and the police in the traffic behind. For a quick second, I thought that maybe we were in real trouble, but the rational part of my brain took over and decided that they just wanted us off the highway as soon as possible. A few cyclists, either desperately wanting to avoid any confrontation with the police or vastly misunderstanding the purpose of their presence, decided to climb the embankments on the highway to get themselves out of the situation. There was a brief pause on the hill descending towards the Jameson exit with the police below before we continued up the offramp and back into the city streets.



A minority of people wanted to ride by the cops and continue down the Gardiner but most of us just wanted to continue on our way. At least one guy was thrown to the ground and subsequently arrested. The crowd wasn't very happy about the force used, but dispersed fairly quickly nonetheless.

On our way back into the city, we all had the time to reflect on what taking the Gardiner would mean to critical mass in Toronto and perhaps the wider relationship between cyclists and motorists in this city. After news making events such as these, crowds are always left in awe and always have the same look of bewilderment. Still, no one seemed to come to any conclusions other than being proud of accomplishing something that raises awareness without anyone getting hurt. I continued pondering until I arrived home and realized that for most of those not involved in the actual event, confusion about the motives of critical mass is probably widespread. An article in the Toronto star best illustrates the disconnect between critical massers and the general public. A common slogan heard at critical mass rides is "We're not blocking traffic, we are traffic". The Toronto Star and the Toronto police seem to both miss this point when the article closes with the following line:

"[Seargent McBratney] said police were unsure as to why the cyclists were blocking the lanes."

Linux on a laptop

The time came when my old HP Omnibook 6100 finally died and I needed to get a new laptop. I was sick of dealing with the crap that was Windows (WGA checks, inflexibility in general and bad development environments) and decided that I wanted to try Linux again. I'd tried various incarnations of Linux a couple of times before, once in 1999 (a version of RedHat) and again in 2004 (with a version of Mandriva) but both times it took so long to get the basics working that I'd given up.

I looked into laptops that had official linux support and the only product that I could find was the Dell Inspiron 1420 which was shipping with Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. This laptop suited my needs (small form factor and cheap) so I went ahead and ordered one. Overall, my experience has been a good one, with a few great experiences and one or two annoying experiences.


The Dell Shopping Experience

Living in Canada, but having spent the summer in the US, I browsed both the dell.com and dell.ca sites looking for the best deal. On both sites I was only looking at Inspiron 1420's with 2GB of RAM, a dual core processor around 1.5Ghz and either a 120GB hard drive at 7200rpm or a 160GB hard drive at 5400rpm.

I found that I could only order the linux version (which ships with Dell's factory installed version of Ubuntu 7.10) from the US site but that I could order the windows version from either site. The strange part was that the windows versions of the laptops were actually cheaper than the linux versions. I confirmed that this was in fact the case based on a slashdot article. I ended up getting the windows version from the dell.ca site because it was something like $200-$250 cheaper than the systems from the dell.com site.

Setting up the basics

My 1420 arrived and the first thing that I wanted to do was scrape Vista off of it and put on Ubuntu. I could have installed the Dell factory image which probably would have eased installation but I didn't realize this was possible until I had solved several of the initial problems. The basic install went fine, with a little bit off difficulty getting the partitions right.

I booted up and the first thing that I tried to do was connect to my wireless network. I had a fair amount of difficulty doing this, mostly because I hadn't installed the correct driver for my Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g Mini Card. The confusing part was that their was no indication from the networking UI that I hadn't installed the correct drivers. Having had a little previous experience with linux, I figured that this was the problem but this would have been pretty difficult to resolve had I been a less experienced user. This sort of UI problem will come up again later and is my single biggest complaint about Ubuntu 7.10. After I installed the right wireless driver, connecting was pretty straight forward.

The next step was installing the various pieces of software that I'm used to, which was pretty straight forward using the apt-get utility. I noticed that there was a graphical UI to this but I found this more difficult to understand and for some reason I didn't trust that it was doing the same thing as the command line utility.

The only other major difficulty that I had getting the basics working involved some difficulties with suspend and hibernate. Initially, resuming after a suspend caused crashes and when it didn't crash, the sound wasn't working correctly. After some brief research, I found that there was a problem with the Inspiron 1420 sound card and suspend and the fix involved adding some lines to a script. This wasn't too difficult to fix, but getting the basics working really shouldn't involve editing OS level executables.

In contrast to these initial annoyances, my experience trying to download pictures from my Canon Powershot A520 was great. I expected to have all kinds of problems with this but after I plugged it in, a popup came up telling me that I'd plugged in a camera and asking me what I wanted to do with the pictures. I'd always had difficulty getting windows to do what I wanted (even with the Canon downloading utility) so this was a very pleasant experience.

All in all, I spent about as much time getting the system to this level as I would have with windows if I had had the same level of experience with both.

Getting a little more advanced

In addition to getting these basics going, I wanted to get SAMBA working and my VPN into school to work.

Getting SAMBA working was actually pretty straight forward, after some initial setbacks. Having been used to lots of difficulty with SAMBA, I tried using the command line smbclient package to connect. As it turns out, the graphical UI is much more intuitive than the command line UI. Also, in my brief usage, Ubuntu's graphical UI is better at interfacing with SAMBA shares than the native windows client. It was just a couple of quick clicks and I was browsing my windows computer and copying files.

Mounting my home directory from school and getting the printers set up there was also straight forward and I ended up spending less time doing this than I did when I tried to do the same thing on my old windows machine.

Finally, I tried setting up VPN into school which is where I thought I'd gain some real advantages over my old windows system. The windows VPN client was always causing problems and I was always deleting my connection because it caused some really annoying popups. I thought that I had installed the right VPN packages and ended up having the same problem as when I set up the wireless networking. The UI gave no indication that I didn't have the right drivers installed which cause a lot of confusion when my connection didn't work. After some quick research, I determined the problem and my VPN was working.

Conclusion

The experience I had here was far superior to my previous experiences with linux distributions. In retrospect, most of my difficulties resulted from an unfamiliarity with the linux interfaces which wouldn't have been much different had I switched from linux to windows rather than the other way around.

This all causes me to give the recommendation that linux is ready for the casual user, as long as they use hardware that is fairly mainstream. It really helped that a lot of other people had installed Ubuntu on Inspirons which produced tons of useful posts in forums.

My first major complaint is that the Ubuntu desktop UI is not very good at indicating that the correct drivers aren't installed. I'm not sure why there is any wireless or VPN utilities accessible at all when the system doesn't have the correct drivers to allow these types of connections.

My other major complaint is that installing the basics of an OS should be possible without having to type in complicated commands and editing OS level executables. It's not difficult to have basic patches for each of these hardware problems for the major linux laptops and I could imagine this scaring off some moderately savvy users and forcing them back into windows.