Tag Archives: opinions

I’m a highly opinionated person and always up for a good debate over something. There are my personal opinions and don’t necessarily reflect that of my company, my clients or other business involvements.

Android 4.2.2 Issues

10 Replies

Having just flown from Sydney AU to Christchurch NZ, my Galaxy Nexus suddenly decided to finally offer me the Android 4.2.2 upgrade.

Since I got the phone in 2012, it’s been running Android 4.1 – I had expected to receive Android 4.2 in November 2012 when it was released by Google since the Galaxy Nexus is one of Google’s special developers phones which are loved and blessed with official updates and source code.

However the phone has steadily refused to update and whilst I was tempted to build it from source again, seeing as 4.2 lacks any particular features I wanted (see release changes), there was little incentive to do so. However after 4.2.2 was magically revealed to me following changing countries, I ~~decided~~ was nagged to death to update and ended up doing so… sadly I wish I hadn’t….

Google have messed with the camera application yet again completely changing the UI – the menu now appears where ever you touch the screen, which does make it easier to select options quickly in some respects, but they’ve removed the feature I use the most – the ability to jump to the gallery and view the picture you just took, so it’s not really an improvement.

Secondly the Android clock and alarm clock interface has been changed yet again – in some respects it’s an improvement as they’ve added some new features like stop watch, but at the same time it really does feel like they change the UI every release (and not always in good ways) and it would be nice to get some consistency, especially between minor OS revisions.

However these issues pale in comparison to the crimes that Google has committed to the lock screen…. Lock screens are fundamentally simple, after all, they only have one job – to lock my phone (somewhat) securely and prevent any random from using my device. As such, they tend to be pretty consistent and don’t change much between releases.

Sadly Google has decided that the best requirement for their engineering time is to add more features to the lock screen, turning it into some horrible borg screen with widgets, fancy clocks, camera and all sorts of other crap.

Go home lockscreen, you’re drunk. So, so, drunk.

Crime 1 – Widgets

The lock screen now features widgets, which allow one to stick programs outside of the lockscreen for easy access (defeating much of the point of having a lock screen to begin with) and offering very limited real benefit.

Generally widgets serve very limited value, I use about 3 widgets in total – options for tuning on/off hardware features, NZ weather and AU weather. Anything else is generally better done within an actual application.

Widgets really do seem to be the feature that every cool desktop “must have” and at the same time, have to be one of the least useful features that any system can have.

Crime 2 – Horribly deforming the pattern unlock screen

With the addition of the widgets, the UI has been shuffled around and resized. Previously I could unlock by starting my swipe pattern from the edge of the device’s physical screen and drawing my pattern – very easy to do and quick to pick up with muscle memory.

However doing this same unlock action following the Android 4.2 upgrade, will lead to me accidentally selecting the edge of the unlock “widget” and instead of unlocking, I end up selecting a popup widget box (as per my screenshot) and then have to mess around and watch what I’m doing.

This has to the single most annoying feature I’ve seen in a long time purely because it impacts me every single time I pickup the phone and as a creature of habit, it’s highly frustrating.

And to top this off, Android now vibrates and makes a tone for each unlock point selected. I have yet to figure out what turns this highly irritating option off, I suspect it’s tied into the keyboard vibration/tone settings which I do want…

Crime 3 – Bold Clocks

We’ve had digital clocks for over 57 years, during which time I don’t believe anyone has ever woken up and said “wow, I sure wish the hours were bolder than the minutes”.

Yet somehow this was a good idea and my nicely balanced 4-digit 24-hour clock is unbalanced with the jarring harsh realisation that the clock is going to keep looking like a <b> tag experience gone wrong.

I’m not a graphical designer, but this change is really messing with my OCD and driving me nuts… I’d be interested to see what graphic designers and UX designers think of it.

So in general, I’m annoyed. Fucked off actually. It’s annoying enough that if I was working at Google, I’d be banging on the project manager’s door asking for an explanation of this release.

Generally I like Android – it’s more open than the competing iOS and Windows Mobile platforms (although it has it’s faults) and the fact it’s Linux based is pretty awesome… but with release I really have to ask… what the fuck is Google doing currently?

Google has some of the smartest minds on the planet working for them, and the best they can come up with for a new OS release is fucking lock screen widgets? How about something useful like:

Getting Google Wallet to work in more locations around the world. What’s the point of this fancy NFC-enabled hardware if I can’t do anything with it?
Improve phone security with better storage encryption and better unlock methods (NFC rings anyone?).
Improve backups and phone replacement/migration processes – backups should be easy to do and include all data and applications, something like a Timemachine style system.
Free messaging between Android devices using an iMessage style transparent system?
Fixing the MTP clusterfuck – how about getting some good OS drivers released?
Fix the bloody Android release process! I’m using an official Google branded phone and it takes 5 months to get the new OS release??

The changes made in the 4.2 series are shockingly bad, I’m at the stage where I’m tempted to hack the code and revert the lockscreen back to the 4.1 version just to get my workflow back… really it comes down to whether or not the pain this system causes me ends up outweighing the costs/hassle of patching and maintaining a branch of the source.

Ebook Debate

Pestogate

1 Reply

I hate it when the supermarket runs out of the larger 350g Pesto containers – particularly when they charge $2.57 per 100g vs $5.11 per 100g depending which size container is purchased…

PESTOGATE!

Incidentally the above pictured Genoese-brand pesto is the most delicious thing that has ever graced the shelves of the supermarket, I will literally scoop this stuff into my mouth with my hands at times.

Android alarm UI WTF

1 Reply

I like Android, but there are a few times the UX (User Experience) is a bit messed up compared with the way the user thinks. For example, take the newly introduced alarm clock time selection interface added in ICS:

So the alarm time selection gives me the ability to drag the time up/down, simple enough, most users understand dragging on touch screen devices. However if one decides to tap the up/down buttons instead…

I guess the developer decided that the up button should increase the time and the down should decrease which would make sense if it wasn’t for the fact that the user can see the preceding and following numbers which changes their perspective from the arrows being for numerical incrementing to the arrows being for sliding/rotating the displayed numbers on screen.

It’s even more annoying since it worked logically on pre-ICS devices only to be changed and broken in this confusing manner. :-(

IRD online services registration

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I recently signed up with IRD’s (New Zealand’s Tax Department) online Kiwisaver service, so I could view the status of my payments and balance of New Zealand’s voluntary superannuation scheme.

The user sign up form is pretty depressing (and no, not just because it’s about signing up to tax rather than cool stuff):

The 70s called, they want your security consultants back.

My first concern is passwords being limited to a maximum of 10 characters, it’s way too short for many good passwords (or even better, passphrases), any system should take at least 255 chars without complain.

Secondly, the “forgotten password phrase” is the most stupid thing I’ve ever seen, it’s basically a second password field – if you forget your password, you can contact them and give them this second password…. except that if you’re stupid enough to forget the first password, how the hell are you going to remember a secondary normally never-used password?

I’d also love to know how secure the secondary password phrase requirements are, because since it gives you access into the account, the security is no stronger than whatever you put in here – and how likely are users to choose something good and secure as their “backup phrase”?

This is some pretty simple security concepts and I’m a bit dismayed that IRD managed to get these so wrong – at least it shouldn’t be hard to correct….

Exchange, I will have my revenge!

1 Reply

It’s been a busy few weeks – straight after my visit to Christchurch I got stuck into the main migration phase of a new desktop and server deployment for one of our desktop customers.

It wasn’t a small bit of work, going from 20 independent 7-year old Windows XP desktops to new shiny Windows 7 desktops and moving from Scalix/Linux to Exchange/Win2008R2. It’s not the normal sort of project for me, usually I’ll be dealing with network systems and *nix servers, rather than Microsoft shops, but I had some free time and knew the customer site well so I ended up getting the project.

The deployment was mostly straightforwards, and I intended to blog about this in the near future, I honestly found some of the MS tech such as Active Directory quite nice and it’s interesting comparing the setup compared to what’s possible with the Linux environment.

However I still have no love for Microsoft Exchange, which has to be one of the most infuriating emails systems I’ve had to use. We ended up going with Exchange for this customer due to it working the easiest with their MS-centric environment and providing benefits such as ActiveSync for mobiles in future.

However with myself coming from a Linux background, having grown up with solid and easy to debug and monitor platforms like Sendmail, Postfix and Dovecot, Exchange is an exercise in obscure configuration and infuriating functionality.

To illustrate my point, I’m going to take you on a review of a fault we had with this new setup several days after switching over to the Exchange server…..

* * *

On one particular day, after several days of no problems, the Exchange server suddenly decided it didn’t want to email the upstream smarthost mail server.

The upstream server in question has both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, something that you tend to want in the 21st century and it’s pretty rare that we have problems with it.

With Exchange 2010 and Windows Server 2008, both components have IPv6 enabled out-of-the-box – we don’t have IPv6 at this particular customer, since the ISP haven’t extended IPv6 beyond the core & colo networks, so we can’t allocate ranges to our customers using them at this stage.

For some unknown reason, the Windows server decided that it would make sense to try connecting to the smart host via IPv6 AAAA record, despite there being no actual upstream IPv6 connection. To make matters worse, it then decided the next most logical thing was to just fail, rather than falling back to the IPv4 A record.

The Windows experts assigned to look at this issue, decided the best solution was to “disable IPv6 in Exchange”, something I assumed meant “tell Exchange not to use IPv6 for smarthosts”.

With the issue resolved, no faults occurring and emails flowing, the issue was checked off as sorted. :-)

Later that night, the server was rebooted to make some changes to the underlying KVM platform – however after rebooting, the Windows server didn’t come back up. Instead it was stuck for almost two hours at “Applying computer settings….” at boot – even once the login screen started, it would still take another 30mins before I could login.

This is the digital equivalent of watching paint dry.

After eventually logging in, the server revealed the cause of the slow startup as being the fault of the “microsoft.exchange.search.exsearch.exe” process running non-stop at 100% CPU.

After killing off that process to get some resemblance of a responsive system, it became apparent that a number of key Exchange components were also not running.

I waded through the maze that is event viewer, to find a number of Exchange errors, in particular one talking about being unable to connect to Active Directory LDAP, with an error of DSC_E_NO_SUITABLE_CDC (Error 0x80040a02, event 2114).

Every time I have to use event viewer I miss syslog, tail and grep even more.

Naturally the first response was to review what changes had been made on the server recently. After confirming that no updates had been made in the last couple of days, the only recent change was the IPv6 adjustment made by the Windows engineers earlier in the day.

Reading up on IPv6 support and Windows Server 2008, I came across this gem on microsoft.com:

"From Microsoft's perspective, IPv6 is a mandatory part of the Windows
operating system and it is enabled and included in standard Windows
service and application testing during the operating system development
process. Because Windows was designed specifically with IPv6 present,
Microsoft does not perform any testing to determine the effects of
disabling IPv6. If IPv6 is disabled on Windows Vista, Windows Server
2008, or later versions, some components will not function."

I then came across this blog post, from someone who had experienced the same error string, but with different cause. In his post, the author had a handy footnote:

"The biggest red herring I found when troubleshooting this one from
articles others had posted was related to IPv6. I see quite a few people
suggesting IPv6 is required for Exchange 2007 and 2010. This is NOT
true. As a matter of fact, if the server hosting Exchange 2007 or 2010
is a DC, then IPv6 must be enabled otherwise simply uncheck the checkbox
in TCP/IP properties on all connected interfaces. You don't need to
buggar with the registry to "really disable it"....just uncheck the
checkbox."

The customer’s Windows 2008 R2 server is responsible for both running Exchange 2010 as well as Active Directory

To resolve the smart host issues, the Windows team had disabled IPv6 altogether on the interface, resulting in a situation where Exchange was unable to establish a connection to AD to get information needed to startup and run.

To resolve, I simply enabled IPv6 for the server and the Exchange processes correctly started themselves within 10 seconds or so as I watched in the Services utility.

This resolved the “Exchange isn’t functioning at all issue”, but still left me with the smarthost IPv6 issue. To work around the issue for now, I just set the smarthost in Exchange to use the IPv4 address, but will need a better fix long term.

With the issue resolved, some post-incident considerations:

I’m starting to see more cases where a *lack* of IPv6 is actually causing more problems than the presence of it, particularly around mail servers.
Exchange has some major architectural issues – I would love to know why an internal communication issue caused the search indexer process to go nuts at 100% CPU for hours.I’ve broken Linux boxes in terrible ways before, particularly with LDAP server outages leaving boxes unable to get any user information – they just error out slowly with timeouts, they don’t go and start chewing up 100% CPU. And I can drop them into a lower run level to fix and reboot within minutes instead of hours.
I did a search and couldn’t find any official Microsoft best practice documentation for server 2008, nor did Windows Server warn the admin that disabling IPv6 would break key services.
If Microsoft has published anything like this, it’s certainly not easy to find – microsoft.com is a complete searching disaster. And yes, whilst they have a “best practice analyzer tool”, it’s not really want I want as an admin, I want a doc I can review and check plans against.
I’m seriously tempted to start adding surcharges for providing support for Microsoft platforms. :-/

* * *

Overall, Exchange certainly hasn’t put itself in my good books, issues like the IPv6 requirement are understandable, but the side effect of the search indexer going nuts on CPU makes no sense and it’s pretty concerning that the code isn’t just “oh I can’t connect, I’ll close/sleep till later”.

So sorry Microsoft, but you won’t see me becoming a Windows Server fanboy at any stage – my Linux Sendmail/Dovecot setup might not have some of Exchange’s flashier features, but it’s damn reliable, extremely easy to debug and logs in a clear and logical fashion. I can trust it to operate in a logical fashion and that’s worth more to me than the features.

Bit Flipping Cycle Lanes

Fixing Blogging

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I’m finding an increasing number of friends and people using services like Tumblr or Google Plus as blogging services, or at least as a place to make posts that are more detailed an indepth than typical micro-blogging (aka Twitter/Facebook).

The problem with both these services, is that they deny interaction from external users who aren’t registered with their service.

With traditional blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, or other custom developed blogs, any visitor to the blog could read it and post comment – the interfaces would vary, the ease of posting would vary and the method of validation of posting would vary, but you could 99% of the time still be able to post comments and engage with the author.

This has not been the case with social networks to date – platforms like Twitter or Facebook require a user to be logged in, in order to communicate with others – however this tends to work OK, since they’re mostly used for person-to-person messages and broadcasting, rather than detailed posts you will sent to users outside of those networks (after all 140 char tweets aren’t exactly where you’ll debate things of key meaning).

The real issue starts with half-blog, half-microblog services such as Tumblr and Google Plus, which users have started to use for anything from cat pictures to detailed Linux kernel posts, turning these tools into de-facto blogging platforms, but without the freedom for outsiders to post comments and engage in conversation.

Tumblr is one of the worst networks, as it’s very much designed as a glorified replacement for chain email forwards – you post some text or some pictures and all your friends “reblog” your page if they like it and users all pat themselves on their back at how witty and original they all are.

But to make a comment, one must reblog the post, add a comment and have it end up in the pages long list of reblog and like statements at the bottom of the post. And if the original poster wants to comment on that, you’d have to re-blog their blog. :-/

Yo dawg, we heard you like to reblog your reblogging.

The issue is that more people are starting to use it for more than just funny cat pictures and treat it as a replacement to blogging, which makes for a terrible time engaging with anyone. I have friends who use the service to post updates about their lives, but I can’t engage back – makes me feel like some kind of outcast stalker peering through the windows at them.

And even if I was on Tumblr, I’d actually want to be able to comment on things without reblogging them – nobody else cares if Jane had a baby, but I’d like to say “Congrats Jane, you look a lot less fat now the fork()ed process is out” to let my friend know I care.

Considering most Tumblr users are going to use Facebook or Twitter as well, they might as well use the image and short statement posting features of those networks and instead use an actual blog for actual content. Really the fault is due to PEBKAC – users using a bad service in the wrong way.

Google Plus is a bit better than Tumblr, in the respect that it actually has expected functionality like posts you can comment on, however it lacks the ability for outsiders to post comments and engage with the author – Google has been pretty persistent with trying to get people to sign up for an account, so it’s to be expected somewhat.

I’ve seen a lot of uptake with Google Plus by developers and geeks, seemingly because they don’t want the commitment of actually using a blog for detailed posts, but want somewhere to post lengthy bits of test.

Linus Torvalds is one particular user whom I might want to follow on Google Plus, but there’s not even RSS if you wanted to get updates on new posts! (To get RSS, you’d have to use external thirdparty services).

Tumblr at least has RSS so I can still use it in my reader like everything else, even if I can’t reply to the author….

Follow Linus! Teenage fanboy Jethro squeee!

And of course with no ability for posting comments by outsiders, I can’t post Linus comments requesting his hand in marriage after merging a kernel bug fix for my laptop. :-(

So with all these issues, why are users adopting these services? After all, there are thousands of free blogging services, several well known and very good ones, all better technical options.

I think it’s a combination of issues:

Users got overwhelmed by RSS – we followed everything we loved, then got scared by the 10,000 unread posts in our readers – and resolved by simply not opening the reader in fear of the queue waiting for us. The social media style approaches used by Google+, Tumblr and of course Twitter and Facebook focus less on following every single post by users, but rather what’s happening here and now – users don’t feel bad if they miss reading 1,000 posts overnight, they just go on to the next.
Users love copying. The MPAA & RIAA love this fact about humans, we love to copy and share stuff with others. Blogging culture tends to frown on this, but Tumblr’s reblogging style of use makes it more acceptable and maintains a credit trail.
Less commitment – if I started posting pictures of funny cats or one paragraph posts on this blog, it wouldn’t be doing it justice or up to the level of quality readers expect. However on social network based services, this is OK, there’s no expectation of a certain level of presentation and effort into a post. A funny cat picture followed by the post about you raging about by GNU Hurd will always be better than BSD is acceptable – on a blog, you’d drop the funny cat and be expected to write a well detailed post explaining your reasoning. Another label would be that it’s “more casual”, than conventional blogs.
Easier interactions with your readers (at least with Google+) – there’s no standards with blogging for handling notifications to users about changes to your blog or replies to comments. Even WordPress, one of the most popular platforms, doesn’t provided native email notifications to comments.
I noticed a major improvement in the level of interaction between myself and my readers after adding Subscribe to Comments Reloaded plugin to this site, using email notifications to users about replies to my blog post. And considering how slack many people are with checking their email, I do wonder how much better it would be if I added support for notification to new posts and comment replies via Twitter or Facebook.
Conventional blogs tend to take a bit more effort to post comments, some go overboard with captcha input fields that take 10 attempts or painful comment validation. I’ve tried to keep mine simple with basic fields and dealing with spam using Akismet rather than captcha (which has worked very well for me).

In my opinion the biggest issue is the communication, notification and interaction issue as noted above. I don’t believe we can fix the cultural side of users such as the crap they post or the inability to actually make the effort to read their RSS but we can go someway towards improving the technology to reduce/eliminate some of the pain points, to encourage use of the services.

There have been some attempts to address these issues already:

Linkback techniques such as Pingback address the issue of finding out who’s linking to your blog (although I turned this off as I found it really spammy and I get that information out of awstats anyway).
RSS handles getting updates of new posts on a polling basis and smarter RSS readers offer better filtering/grouping/etc.
Email notifications for blog comments and updates.

But it’s not good enough yet – what I’d actually like to see would be:

Improvement of linkback techniques to spam pages less, potentially with the addition of some AI logic to determine whether the linkback was just “check out this cool post!” or some actual useful content that readers of your post would like to read (such as a rebuttal).
Smarter RSS readers that act more like social network feeds, to give users who want more of a “live stream” feel what they want.
Live commenting technology – not all users have push email, so email notifications kind of suck for many users. A better solution would be to use the existing XMPP standard to send notifications to the user’s XMPP server (anyone using Gmail already has an XMPP service with them and numerous geeks run their own – like me ;-), so the user gets a chat message pop up. If the message format was standardized, it would be possible to have the IM client recognize it was a blog comment reply and to hand off to the installed RSS reader to handle for better UX – or fall back to posting text with a link to the reply for support with any XMPP standard client.
(I did see that there is an outdated plugin for XMPP on WordPress as well as some commercial live-commenting packages that hook into social networks, but I really want a proper open source solution that does everything in one plugin, so there’s a more seemless UX – rather than having 20 checkboxes for which method the user would like notifications via.)
Whilst mentioning XMPP, we could even consider replacing RSS with XMPP based push notifications – blog servers sending out a push message when they get an update, rather than readers polling services. Advantage is near-instant update of new posts and potentially less server load of not having thousands of wasted polls when there hasn’t been any update to fetch.
Comment reply via notification support. If you send someone an XMPP IM, email, tweet, virtual sheep or whatever to alert to a comment or blog post, they should be able to reply via that native medium and have the blog server interpret, validate and integrate that reply into the page.

My hope is that with these upgrades, blogging platforms will extend themselves to be better placed for holding up against social networking sites, making it easier to have detailed conversations and long running threads with readers and authors.

Moving to a new generation communication platform build around the existing blogging platforms would be as much of an improvement for real time social responsiveness as shifting from email to Twitter and hopefully, the uptake in real time communications will bring more users back to decentralised, open and varied platforms.

I’m tempted to give this a go by building a WordPress plugin to provide unified notifications using XMPP / Email / Social Media, but it’ll depend on time (lol who has that??) and I haven’t done much with WordPress’s codebase before. If you know of something existing, I would certainly be interested to read about it and I’ll be taking a look at options to build upon.

Half a Terrabyte

7 Replies

With companies in Australia offering 1TB plans, us New Zealanders have been getting pretty jealous of only having 100GB plans for the same money.

Except that a couple days ago, my ISP Snap! upgraded everyone’s data allowance by at least 4x…. taking me from a 105GB plan to a 555GB monthly plan at no additional change.

Was a great surprise when I logged into my account, having only previously skimmed the announcement email which went into the mental TL;DR basket.

Good thing I got upgraded,used almost 50GB in 2 days :-/

I’m currently paying around $120-130 per month for half a terrabyte on a naked DSL line and to quote 4chan, it “feels good man”.

Of course it’s only DSL speed – although if I was planning to stick around long term at my apartment, I’d look into VDSL options which are available in some parts of NZ. And the first Ultra Fast Broadband fibre is starting to get laid in NZ so the future is bright.

For me personally, once I have 10mbit or so, the speed becomes less important, what is important is the latency and the amount of data allocated.

I suspect snap!’s move is in response to other mid sized providers providing new plans such as Slingshot’s $90 “unlimited” plan, or Orcon offering up to 1TB for $200 per month on their new Genius service.

TelstraClear is going to need to up their game, for the same price for my half terrabyte, I can only get 100GB of data – although supposedly at 100mbits/10mbits speeds (theoretically, since when they previously offered the 25mbit plan I couldn’t get anywhere near that speed to two different NZ data centers…)

Even with it’s faults, TelstraClear’s cable network still blows away DSL for latency and performance if you’re lucky enough to be in the right regions – they should press this advantage, bring the data caps up to match competition and push the speed advantage to secure customers.

Meanwhile Telecom NZ still offers internet plans with 2GB data caps and for more than I’m paying for 555GB, I’d get only 100GB. Not the great deal around guys… :-/ (yes I realize that includes a phone, that has no value to me as a mid-twenties landline-hating, cellphone-loving individual).