Ever wanted to diff the output of two commands? Usually it’s done by first piping each command to a temporary file and then diffing them.

The following syntax creates a named pipe for the command and uses the pipe’s name instead of a filename. Bash takes care of everything automagically so all you have to do is:

sort <(cat /etc/passwd)

That’s a dumb example, but how about this?

diff <(command1) <(command2)

The commands can be as complicated as you need them to be!

A very interesting conversation erupted today, beginning when a coworker sent a lengthy email stating his reasons for altogether leaving Ubuntu 11.04’s new Unity desktop interface and instead resorting to the good, old-fashioned Gnome 2 “Classic” session.

In it he makes some very valid points about functionality that’s different to what he was used to. This understandably affects his workflow, so instead of wrestling with a new interface, he chose to go with the old one, hopefully until Unity matures enough for him to be able to customize it to his liking.

What’s interesting was the amount of responses it got, where everyone spoke about their “pet peeves” with Unity. The vast majority were changes in how Unity handles things, that interfered with people’s workflows. It’s understandable that even a small change in how your user interface behaves, when you’ve become adept at working with it, disrupts things enough (and annoyingly enough) that you either go back to the old user interface, or just start fiddling with the new one until you find a way to get things to an acceptable state.

Which is what struck me as curious about this thread: there were basically two camps, those who flat out abandoned Unity for the time being, and those who actually went looking into how Unity behaves and integrates with the environment, and came up with ways to make Unity more comfortable to those used to the “old ways” of Gnome 2.x and its desktop interface.

Without demerit to the original poster, whose points were quite valid, a lot of responses suggested ways to solve about 80% of his complaints about Unity. However, the fact that it took a team of experts to solve the problems that a user (and another expert, at that) was experiencing, is testament to the fact that Unity could still be made more intuitive, easier and more customizable.

I finally upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity this past weekend. Like many, I experienced some usability issues, where the desktop wasn’t behaving the way I was used to. However, my use of the system means that I basically want the UI to stay out of my way. So the main change I had to make was to get the Unity dock to auto-hide, so that it only appears when I ask it to. The rest of the time it’s hidden away. Everything else, well, it’s admittedly different than what I’m used to, but that’s change for you. Was Unity making a change for change’s sake? Maybe so, but I think it’s change in the right direction. Even if it somewhat alienates experienced users (for whom, however, workarounds exist that handle nearly all their concerns), I think the true success of Unity is in how it works for new users. And here are two examples.

Another coworker posted his experience with showing Ubuntu and Unity to a newbie, fresh-from-Windows user. The user’s comments were along the lines of “this looks nice”, “It’s easy to use” and “I’m keeping it”.

Also, even though some have complained about the app lens being hard to use (and it’s a complaint I’ve seen already twice), I’ve seen users realize “but hey, if it’s really that messy, you can use the search field to find what you need, right?”. So yes, end users are realizing this, and it’s just a matter of polishing how things work. If all, I think it’s great to move users away from the “the computer has only two buttons” mindset and get them using the keyboard a little more.

So yes indeed, I’m staying on Unity, and I’m looking forward to seeing it maturing into a better desktop interface. as Mark Shuttleworth said, it’s a foundation on which the next generations of Ubuntu user experience will be built. I’ll be thrilled to be along for the ride.

Finally, for a great write on why your desktop changed, and why the developers would appreciate you giving it a whirl and helping improve it (even just commenting on the stuff you find hard, unintuitive or just plain wrong) is better than just swearing off these newfangled changes (without which, face it, you’d still be using fwm and MIT Athena widgets), please drop by Federico Mena-Quintero’s activity log and read his wonderful and short article “Moving into your new Gnome 3 house“.

I remember an easier time when all keyboards had the same layout (C-64, anyone?) and if you wanted to type special characters you had to resort to arcane command sequences, if they were at all possible.

My, how times have changed.

My first PC compatible had a spanish keyboard, and you could very simplistically tell the OS (MS-DOS) about your keyboard layout. For a while this worked pretty well. Then someone decided that Latin America was so different from Spain, that we needed our very own keyboard layout; this layout just moves stuff around needlessly, destroying many years of experience for those of us who were accustomed to the spanish keyboard. I understand removing the ç as it’s not used in Latin America, but why move all the rest of the stuff around?

So basically I got used to the spanish keyboard which has worked well in all kinds of OSes, from MS-DOS to Windows, OS/2 and yes, Linux. While the Latin American layout was such a pariah that, at some point, it got overwritten by the Latvian keyboard (la), so when doing a system upgrade, all of a sudden your keyboard was in latvian, and you had to select “latam” for Latin America.

Eventually I happened to get a laptop with a Canadian French keyboard. Luckily, this is not the dreaded french AZERTY keyboard, but basically an english keyboard layout with most symbol keys mapped very strangely. So if you want to type the basic alphabet you’re OK, like you’d be with an english keyboard, but things start getting weird when you need to create special characters or compose accents, cedillas and stuff like that. This was so different from any other layout I’ve used, that I was basically freaking out. I could just ignore the red characters on my keyboard, and/or use it as just an english keyboard, but I routinely need to compose text in spanish and in french, so how would I go about doing this?

And no, the ages-old trick of memorizing ASCII codes for special characters doesn’t cut it: for one, it’s unreliable on Linux (especially on graphical mode), and for another, it’s just primitive! I used to chuckle at all the people I’ve seen through the years who had a nice “cheat sheet” glued to their desktop with ASCII codes for frequently-used accented characters, as opposed to taking 15 minutes to correctly configure their keyboards to do this natively.

So anyway, what I came across while checking out the available keyboard maps under Linux and trying to figure out how to type stuff on the Canadian keyboard, was this wonder of wonders, the US International with AltGr Dead Keys layout.

Basically, it takes the right Alt key (labeled AltGr on my keyboard, a monstrosity I was already used to from the LatinAmerican and spanish keyboards) and uses it to “compose” or “deadkey” stuff (dead keys are like accents, for instance, where you press the accent key and then the next letter you type will be accented). In combination with ~, “, ‘ and `, this enables me to type nearly all accented characters with relative ease.

Also, I can use AltGr+vowel to type acute-accented vowels (áéíóú), and AltGr+n for ñ.

Grave accents (è) and tilded letters (ã) can be composed by AltGr+accent (use ` for grave, ~ for tilde), and then the letter you want to type.

What I like about Linux’s keyboard selection thingy is that you can see an actual layout map. Thus, even if my keyboard doesn’t have the characters stenciled in, I can take a quick peek and see where stuff I need might be.

Thus I can do things like use ç or €, all with a minimum of fuss. Also more complicated stuff like ï œ ø is still just one AltGr+key away. All this while preserving a layout that’s very familiar to everyone (english), and where most strange characters using while programming {}][\|~ are also much easier to use than on the spanish keyboard I was used to (it needs AltGr for all sorts of braces and piping, which makes it very painful on my hands).

So there you have it, if you see yourself wrestling with choosing a good physical keyboard layout *and* making it work on your OS, stop pulling your hair out, get an english-layout keyboard and use US International with AltGr Dead Keys!

I have no idea what the CRTC is. But they recently ruled on something that means that, my internet provider, which I chose based on the fact that they had no download caps (unlike other greedy providers like Bell, Rogers or Videotron), will now have to institute said caps.

In practical terms this is how it looks. If I had my link downloading stuff at 100% capacity, I could potentially download 1500 GB of data in a month. I’d pay 45$ a month for this. Now, however, they limit me to 30GB a month, for the same price. If I go over, they charge me 1$ per extra GB, up to a limit of 60$ a month, at which point I’ll have downloaded 90GB. At this point they stop charging extra and I can download more. However, if I hit 300GB, they cut me off for the rest of the month.

This is basically them not honoring the contractual obligation which says I get X amount of service for Y amount of money. This is extremely unfair for me, and although I understand the position ISPs are in, at the mercy of big telcos, I certainly wish they’d put up a bit more resistance to this.

So indeed, the problem for the end user is that it’s more expensive and inconvenient to use bandwidth. And however much telcos whine about how “power users” are the ones saturating the pipes, the fact is, these power users pay for the bandwidth they use, at the rates set by the providers, and now the providers wanting to basically charge more for the same service, is a bit ridiculous and speaks of greed and money-hunger. Also, it basically stifles innovation, the kind that would move big media out of the picture, since I’m actually penalized for doing stuff like watching TV online, which is very convenient for me, but uses quite a bit of bandwidth (that, in the other hand, I’d already paid for).

I’d be inclined to go with this counterproposal to my ISP, and ultimately to the big telcos.

Previously I could download 1500 GB in a month at 45$, meaning each GB would cost me 0.028$ (compare this to the abusive 1$ a GB for overage, which is a 3500% increase). So what I propose is, if you want to limit me to 30 GB, then I’ll pay only 0.84$ a month, which by their previous rates is a fair amount. Hell, limit me to 300GB, for which I’ll pay only 8.40$ a month.

Optionally, OK, charge more if I go over 30 GB. But conversely, and if the power user / common user argument holds any value, prorate for users who go UNDER the 30 GB; so if I download only 10 GB in a month, I only pay 15$ for internet access.

I bet no ISP would like going with either of these proposals. Guess what: We users don’t like your proposal either. So please go to www.stopthemeter.ca and raise your voice against this idiotic measure that puts Canadians at a huge disadvantage technology- and connectivity-wise.

It’s long been argued that peripheral support in Linux is far inferior to that under Windows, and that this has been a factor for Windows’ dominance in the desktop. More and more, the myth that Windows has any kind of technical superiority leaves place to the fact that marketing, and being bundled with nearly every PC sold worldwide, are Windows’ only keys to its widespread adoption. And here’s a story to prove that point.

I bought a printer (HP Photosmart C4780). It’s one of those cheap, $50 numbers that eat through ink like crazy. So I come home, wondering if I’ll have to install 500 MB of crap as included in the bundled CD to get the printer to work with my Mac at home.

As is usually the case with the Mac, I just plugged it in and it worked, both the printer and the scanner, without a hitch or problem.

I then proceeded to do the same on a freshly installed Ubuntu 10.10 laptop. Same story, the printer just worked, and Ubuntu even recognized it when being plugged in, no need to install drivers or anything.

Now, on Windows the printer wouldn’t have worked at all without installing a boatload of crap, HP is notoriously bloaty when it comes to their bundled software.

The usual wisdom is that hardware manufacturers care more about Windows, and ship all their hardware with drivers and stuff to make it work. It would seem, then, that the burden is on Apple and Linux distributions to provide drivers and support to most hardware. It would seem like a daunting task. But they do it, and the end result is that Mac OS and most Linux distros include drivers for everything, right out of the box. This puts them a step ahead of Windows, when it comes to ease of use, at the cost of maybe a slight bloat. Still, my Ubuntu installation is much leaner than the 16-GB behemoth that is Windows 7.

So there you have it, the myth of better hardware support on Windows, finally debunked.

Now, if I could only get the braindead wireless support on the HP printer to work…

I’ve always been a hater of Macromedia/Adobe Flash. Now that the entire Apple-Adobe controversy has rekindled the debate of whether the web is a better or worse place because of Flash, I realized why it is I don’t like Flash.

Also, I realized most technically-inclined people dislike Flash too, because they recognize a lot of its shortcomings, unlike the layperson who only cares about the web being pretty, full of animations and beeps and stuff.

Now, before I begin, let me state this: I’m griping about Flash as a web content creation platform/tool. I couldn’t care less about its use as a mobile development tool. A lot of bloggers have expressed more informed opinions on this topic.

For me, a true flash hater, what Flash does is take control away from the end-user, the consumer of content, and give it to the content creator, the designer.

If you’re the designer this is all fine and dandy; you can control exactly what the user sees, you can tell your application to be exactly this many pixels wide, this many pixels high, and how to look and behave down to the pixel and the microsecond. This is why designers love Flash; it not only lets them work in a familiar environment and with familiar tools, but it also gives them complete control about how and what the user sees and can do.

By the way, don’t be fooled; a designer that claims to know web design but uses only Flash is not a web designer. Flash was created to allow designers (Adobe’s primary clientele) to be able to say (untruthfully) they can design web sites.

The problem is, the web wasn’t meant to be this way. Fundamentally, the kind of content the web was created for, was meant to empower the user. This is why the web browser was designed from the very beginning to not impose those very parameters (width, height, fonts, and so on); the content should adjust to whatever the user’s agent can display. So web content reflows to adapt to your browser; it should degrade for those systems that for any reason lack a certain capability (think Lynx and visually-impaired users). It should also allow me, the user, to alter how it looks and is rendered. This is why I can disable cookies, javascript, replace or even remove altogether the CSS used to format my content, decide not to display images, and so on. Even the most complex non-flash web page consists of text and images; and with a bit of cleverness I can get both the text and the images and incorporate them in the rest of my workflow; paste them into a document, translate them, email them to someone else, the possibilities are limitless since web content is delivered to me as-is, as bytes I can not only look at, but also manipulate as I would any other kind of information on my computer.

This freedom is lost on a Flash-only (or mostly) website. What’s worse, instead of the content being, well, content, stuff I can get out of the browser and process and manipulate in other ways, it becomes merely an image, a photograph or a movie trapped in the clutches of the Flash plugin. I can’t copy the text, I can’t scroll except through the provisions the designer made for me, I can’t easily extract the audio or the images, and I’m basically limited, not by the constraints of my browser, but by those set forth by both Adobe through its display plugin, and the designer. And let’s face it, most designers are also clueless about user interfaces and ease-of-use, unlike the people who designed my web browser, which is rendered mostly useless on a Flash site.

It is this loss of freedom that makes Flash so dangerous, and why I think it would be a good thing for Flash to disappear eventually.

Flash adds nothing of true value to the Web, as we could all live happy without all the animations, all the desktop-apps-masquerading-as-web-apps made in Flash (write a Web app from the ground up, it’s not that hard), all the stupid content that forces me to work its way instead of my way, and luckily, thanks to the advent of HTML5, the one thing for which Flash has proven to be indispensible (web video) we won’t need it even for that. Because, let’s face it, web video was Flash’s killer application; everything else that could once be done only in Flash is now doable in AJAX, CSS and Javascript. And honestly, if Flash had been such a good technology for those things, we would have stayed with it and not bothered with anything else.

If anything, the existence of so many alternatives to Flash and whatever it can do, is evidence that the world at large truly does not like Flash.

Update: It appears Amazon is indeed listening; I was able to preorder Robert J. Sawyer’s latest for Kindle delivery, and most of the titles I talk about in this post are alerady available in my region. Thanks Amazon!

Like (according to Amazon.com) millions of people, I own a Kindle e-book reader. However, I’m a bit irked by the fact that Amazon is treating Kindle users as second-class citizens. As early adopters who paid a hefty sum for Amazon’s flagship product, I think we deserve better.

I’ve been a fan of e-ink technology since I first learned about the early, clumsy prototypes. When the original Kindle came out, I nearly jumped at the chance to get one. However I decided that the hassle of having a Kindle in a non-supported country (Mexico), meaning I’d have to jump through hoops to get content into the kindle, was not worth being an early adopter.

So patiently I waited, until, in late 2009, Amazon finally started selling the Kindle, complete with wireless content delivery, in Mexico and a host of other countries. “Great”, I thought. “I get to have my nice gadget, save on shipping costs and delivery time, and I still get to read a lot”.

The story has been a bit different. And it has more to do with politics and commercial interests than with technology. Let’s get this out of the way right now: I have only ONE complaint about the tech side of the Kindle, and it doesn’t even have anything to do with the product itself. More about that later.

So I got my shiny new kindle and went online to get some books for it. I naturally searched for my favorite Sci-fi author, Canadian writer Robert J. Sawyer.

To my dismay, there’s very little from him available as Kindle content. None of the books I was interested in were available: nor Calculating God, the first RJS book I read; neither Factoring Humanity, my all-time RJS favorite; I can’t get the Quintaglio Ascension trilogy, one of the very few RJS titles I haven’t read. They’re simply not available for the Kindle.

Titles are being “kindlefied” all the time. However selection is still quite shallow.

Sometimes I do find the title I’m looking for, only to be greeted by the message “not available in your region”. Amazon, if you CAN send physical books to my region, why can’t you deliver them to my Kindle? I know you’re going to say it’s not the same, but to me, that doesn’t cut it.

A few days ago I received a notification for Dan Simmons’ latest book. Black Hills was to come out in a few days, and I was offered a nice pre-order discount. However, it didn’t apply to the Kindle edition. So you mean to tell me that, even though I’d click on “buy now” this minute AND wait for the book to actually come out and be delivered to my Kindle, I can’t? and that the only way to take advantage of the discount is to wait for the dead-tree version to actually come out? well, never mind, because the book is for sale right now and there’s no Kindle edition in sight. So anyway I have to either get the hardcover or wait until the publisher decides it’s OK to let the Kindle edition out. It’s ridiculous that a hardcover book delivery will actually have me reading it sooner than the instantly-delivered electronic version.

Amazon, this is one area where you have to work with publishers and let them see what a big market they’re missing, and help them reach it. Because all these artificial restrictions, stemming from the irrational fear they have of electronic distribution, will only end up hurting their bottom line. I’m able (and more than willing) to purchase books. Look at my past history if you don’t believe me: even with a 50% delivery overcharge (the joys of not being in the United States) I routinely spent over $500 a year on books. Now I’m a bit weary of ordering physical books, since I’d prefer to offset the delivery cost with my Kindle; however, many of the titles that interest me aren’t available for the Kindle.

Interestingly, I find myself loading mostly classic literature on the Kindle; from Wilkie Collins to Jules Verne, these wonderful titles are available for free in Kindle-compatible formats. This is a consequence of the titles I want not being available on the Kindle; so if I have to choose between Jack London’s Call of the Wild  (old book, I’ve read it 1000 times, I can get it for free at mobipocket.com) and Robert Sawyer’s Starplex (haven’t read it, but is not available for the Kindle), guess what, I’ll get the former.

Now for my one technical quip: What’s this about “optimized for large screens” books? so now I need a Kindle DX to read content? That just sucks.

So Amazon, you have the clout, but also the flexibility to work with publishers and stop (both you and them) treating us like second-class citizens, just because we find the convenience of the e-book reader worth the high admission price. A lack of reasonably-priced content shouldn’t be part of that price.

So my iPhone fell and got damaged. To its credit I have to say I did hit it pretty hard several times in the past, and it’d survived. However this time it didn’t, and I had to get a replacement. I had to pay for it since it was out of warranty. However the truly painful thing was spending one week without the perks of the modern smartphone.

I had to dig out my trusty 5-year-old Nokia 7210 (not the SuperNova, I mean the original funky-buttoned 7210), a stylish and compact phone which, however, is pretty featureless by modern standards. You can talk on the phone, send SMS (barely; I don’t know how I sent messages without a full QWERTY keyboard) and that’s about it. It has no camera, no network access, the screen is only 128-color and uploading stuff requires a tedious conversion process, and it only supports 4-voice MIDI polyphonic tones.

This was due in no small part to the death of my Blackberry’s lame battery; the ‘berry would have been a decent temporary replacement for the iPhone,even though it’s not compatible with my data plan. So here’s a tip: when your phone is about to be left indefinitely in a drawer, remove the battery.

Being without the iPhone, what I missed the most was:

• The QWERTY keyboard, without a doubt, is the most-missed feature. Whether virtual or real, it’s a necessity if you plan on composing a lot of text.
• The camera, believe it or not, is really useful for a lot of purposes.
• Synchronization with my computer’s address book. A lesser phone can do it but the Nokia lacked connectivity (only infrared).
• The browser, being able to access the internet anywhere, anytime has become a true necessity.
• E-mail. Yes, also not being able to receive emails periodically or, at least, on demand, is crippling and makes me feel out of touch and claustrophobic.
• Music, I guess it’s a case of “if you have it, you will use it”. Somehow carrying the iPod around in addition to the Nokia didn’t seem like a good idea.

What I didn’t miss:

• Ringtones. However weak the Nokia’s ringtone support is, it’s very loud and adequate, and my favorite ringtone ever (acceleration.mid) was available. I like it so much, I made an MP3 of it and loaded it on the iPhone.
• GPS. It’s cool to have it but I really don’t use it all that often.
• Most of my games. I don’t play on the iPhone that often. I must point out that neither the Nokia nor the iPhone had the “snakes” game from older (and newer) Nokia phones. I guess this 7210 got stuck in the past.

Also in case you hadn’t noticed, the entire point of this rant was so that I could have a new post before the 12th and thus keeping my blog updated “more than once every 6 months”.

BerryUnitConverter has been released. Featuring conversions for pennyweight, micrometers and millimeter (can’t believe I’d forgotten that one). Get it at the usual place.

OK, so I happily hack away on my  Rails application on a Debian box with Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.1.0, and then deploy to a Fedora 8 server with Ruby 1.8.6 and Rails 2.2.2. All of a sudden a particular release causes Passenger to spit an error page on application startup. The key error was:

undefined method \`empty?’ for nil:NilClass

Now I’m combing all over my code to find where I’m using “empty?” but I’m sure it’s somewhere that gets run on application startup, otherwise it wouldn’t show up when Passenger tries to start the application. But I find nothing and I’m about to shoot myself.

Following the trace I end up hacking Ruby’s erb.rb file, as there appear to be some bugs in this; indeed, this one from 1.8.6 is different from what I have in 1.8.7, so the app runs fine here. I try to fix instances where empty? might get called on a nil object, but after fixing 3 of these the app stops responding altogether. Hmm, so something, somewhere, depends on erb.rb’s buggy behavior. Best to leave it alone.

HOWEVER, on the deployment server, running with script/server works fine; it’s only when using Passenger that things blow up.

Finally I find this thread that points me in the right direction:

One of the users dropped some
JPEG files into the /app/views/static directory, and that seems to be
jamming up the works with 2.2.2.

Indeed, as part of my last set of revisions, I’d left several samples of static content I was converting into dynamically generated pages; sure enough, they included JPGs and whatnot. Just to be safe, I decided to move the entire directory into public to avoid any problems.

Now the app runs just peachy and I only wasted 2 hours chasing down this bug. Thanks to the guys at Nabble!

Eventually it all boils down to this Rails bug reported at Lighthouse. So hopefully it’ll be fixed soon. In the meanwhile, keep binary files out of your views subtree.

I’m attaching the entire Passenger error page, in case it’s useful to anyone. Mainly so that Google can find it faster for other people with this problem.