Dissociated Press

In online life, the most annoying thing is probably spam. Followed by pop-ups/unders, and so forth, and sites that are almost entirely a new version of Flash that doesn’t work with Linux.

Right after that, the forums that turn up in Google searches and require that you have an account to actually read them. Yeah, because I want to have to register for about ten new sites a week just to read one damn post.

I don’t mind (that much) sites that require a valid account to post but I despise having to sign up for an account off of dozens or hundreds of sites just to read one bloody article.

Quick linky to the MySQL story I wrote up today. MySQL is dropping the Berkeley DB storage engine in the 5.1 series, which is unlikely to cause pain for many users, and Brian Aker is working on a memcache storage engine plugin — which should be fairly interesting for those that use MySQL to power dynamic sites with heavy traffic loads.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at OSCON listening to everyone blather on about the wonders of Web 2.0 and software as a service and how “licensing doesn’t matter” because everything is going to be running “in the cloud” on the big player’s networks, like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and so forth.

Yeah. When I can count on having zero downtime with a service like Gmail for six or seven months, then I’ll consider using Web services to replace my desktop apps. I know Gmail, for example, is in “beta” (does “beta” really mean anything anymore? That’s a topic for another post…) but I’ve noticed service interruptions on Gmail a number of times in the past few weeks. Usually, less than 20 minutes, but that 20 minutes might be crucial for times when email really is “mission critical.” If I’m on a deadline, not being able to get to an email with an interview can be deadly.

Yesterday, Amazon was down for a short period — if the big players fall down from time to time, imagine online service providers that don’t have the same level of resources.

I’m okay with using del.icio.us, Gmail, Flickr, and others because it’s not vitally important that I be able to reach my Webmail or photos every second of every day — when they’re down, I can make do with my locally stored email and photos if necessary. It’s going to be a long, long time before I feel like I can trust anything important to online services, though.

It’s bad enough that a lot of people have their data trapped by proprietary software, these folks have their cars trapped by proprietary software:

In the course of a contract dispute, the city of Hoboken had police escort the Robotic employees from the premises just a few days before the contract between both parties was set to expire. What the city didn’t understand or perhaps concern itself with, is that they sent the company packing with its manuals and the intellectual property rights to the software that made the giant robotic parking structure work.

The Hoboken garage is one of a handful of fully automated parking structures that make more efficient use of space by eliminating ramps and driving lanes, lifting and sliding automobiles into slots and shuffling them as needed. If the robot shuts down, there is no practical way to manually remove parked vehicles.

Can you imagine how annoying it would be to park your car for a concert or to go shopping downtown, and then find out that you can’t get the car out of the garage? Yeesh.

Just reading Mark Shuttleworth’s response to Matt Zimmerman’s summation of the community’s expectations of the Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 LTS release. One thing stuck out about Zimmerman’s comments, that’s the complaint that users still have to use the command line for some tasks.

I know, the Holy Grail for a lot of users is to be able to pointy click their way through life, and that’s just a bar that Linux will be measured by no matter what, but I find it odd that so many users seem to have such a deep fear of text. Or is it the command line that they fear?

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The other day, I downloaded a PDF about the making of Revolver by The Beatles. It’s more than 100 pages long, so it’s unlikely I’m going to read through it in one sitting.

It dawned on me, while reading the book in Evince, that there’s no bleeping way to set a bookmark in Evince. Usually, PDFs are short documents, a couple of pages. Lately, though, I’ve gotten a number of PDFs that are lengthy — manuals for Virtuozzo, or full-blown PDF magazines for example — and it’s been a enormous pain when I need to close the PDF reader and come back to the document later, because there’s no way to do something as simple as set a bookmark.

I checked Evince, xpdf, KPDF, and Adobe’s Acrobat Reader for Linux — not a single one has a way for the user to create a bookmark. (Unless it’s a hidden function or well-buried, in which case I’m sure I’ll be hearing about it shortly after saving this post…) Acrobat Reader supports bookmarks when the PDF is created, so a publisher can set bookmarks, but I couldn’t find any way for the user to set a bookmark.

And people wonder why ebooks aren’t all the rage? I found a really cool site with free downloads of classic literature as PDFs. I’d consider actually using these if I could actually save my place between sessions. I’m probably not going to finish Crime and Punishment in one sitting.

So, I’m curious — does anyone know why such an obvious feature has been overlooked so thoroughly? Is this seemingly simple feature just amazingly difficult to implement for some reason, or what?

I can see why Adobe hasn’t implemented the feature — they save it for the full, paid version of Acrobat. This is a mistake, I think, on their part — they’d increase adoption of PDF ebooks if readers could actually set bookmarks. But I can’t think of any reason why the Evince, KPDF, or xpdf developers haven’t added bookmarks. It shouldn’t be necessary to save bookmarks to the PDF itself, they could simply create bookmark file under the config directory for the program and save bookmarks to that.

If I were to compile a list of applications that I use most often on my Linux desktop right now, it would look something like this:

1. Vim
2. Konsole
3. Firefox
4. Sylpheed
5. Konversation
6. Rhythmbox
7. KSnapshot
8. Gimp
9. Gaim
10. Akregator

Now, I’m only including desktop apps, not utilities — otherwise I’d also be including SSH, sudo, apt-get, ls, cp, mv, etc. And I’m not including “Web 2.0″ apps that I use often, like Gmail, del.icio.us, WordPress, etc. I get to those through Firefox — which is probably the most rapidly changing application on that list. Vim and Konsole, for example, are relatively stable apps — sure, they get new features occasionally, and still undergo regular development, but they don’t really change that much between new versions. The same is pretty true for most of the apps — Gaim hasn’t revved in a while (though 2.0 is still on the burner), KSnapshot is pretty basic and feature-complete as it is. Konversation has just about everything I’d want for IRC already.

But Firefox is still adding features and evolving pretty rapidly. I had the chance to sit down for a bit with Mozilla’s Mike Schroepfer at OSCON, and took the opportunity to talk to him about the upcoming 2.0 release, and other things that the Moz folks are working on. Check out the article at NewsForge for more, and video of Schroepfer talking about new features in Firefox and what’s ahead for JavaScript. (It’s so much nicer, I think, to be behind the camera for this sort of thing.)