I’m not too bothered about the amount of different devices which use the Android operating system, which certain people seem to focus on.  What does concern me are the slow handset manufacturers who aren’t updating their phones to the latest version within a reasonable amount of time.  The Motorola Droid was one of the more successful Android 2.0 devices which has been updated to 2.1, which probably explains why there are still a few users still on the 2.0 series (inexperienced users who don’t know how to update), but could be much worse if this device wasn’t updated.

Manufacturers need to update all their recent phones within a reasonable amount of time, otherwise the future of the platform is going to be an awkward one.  Users are often spending hundreds of pounds on phones which they consider to be smart phones, yet their manufacturer is treating them like the existing dumb phones – where you get updates if you’re lucky.  Customers are paying a premium for what they think is an alternative smart phone to the likes of the Apple iPhone.  Smart phones deserve a respectable lifespan of updates after the release.

At the moment my HTC Hero is due an update in June 2010, this is 5 months after the release of 2.1 on other platforms.  I love Android, however I no longer like HTC.  I’m sure there are others who love the operating system, but hate the way their manufacturer is treating them with updates.

Just remember HTC – other phone manufacturers are releasing Android powered devices too.

One particular web app which isn’t that great is IRC web chat.  Most IRC servers are keen on users connecting from their real connection, as it’s hard to track abuse when connections are being proxied by a web server.  Using AJAX or JSON with a web server isn’t that ideal either, browsers have to constantly poll and refresh with the server to receive the data, this typically requires a light weight web server as Apache with PHP or Perl is hardly efficient for multiple users.  The most common approaches over the years has been CGI:IRC, but this is just yet another inefficient Perl script which keeps the connection open.  One of the oldest methods is using a hefty Java application, hardly friendly for users.

So, why not use sockets with JavaScript?  Obviously JavaScript can’t do it directly, but with Adobe Flash and something like socketBridge (or this improved version) you could control a socket with mostly JavaScript.  The only problem with Flash and sockets is that it would have to connect to a policy port before being authorised to connect to that particular port, however it would be a much lighter solution for the server compared to all the polling techniques.

I’m tempted to try and create a web IRC client using JavaScript and the Flash socket bridge.  Even if other IRC networks won’t open a port for Flash policy requests, you could do something similar to the other web chat apps – use your server as a proxy.

To forward all mail to another account, simply remove your existing forward, create a new filter from * (matches any sender), then forward it to your main email address – making sure you’ve got Never send to spam selected.  You’ll probably want to choose Delete it as well, this means any incoming mail on that specific account will be forwarded and deleted on the original account – but you’ll still have 30 days until it gets removed from trash.

This way you’ll get all mail forwarded from Gmail – including spam.  Now you can see all the spam from any other Gmail accounts incase there are any false positives.

I don’t mind if RSS feeds are either partial feeds to show users the first paragraph to attract users to visit the site, or full feeds to show users the entire article, however putting in adverts is highly annoying.  To me RSS feeds are there to entice me to go and visit the site itself.  RSS feeds are mostly used by fairly technical users – putting in adverts where the people reading them are most likely to ignore them seems a bit pointless.  Adding other little buttons/icons to enhance the feed is annoying as well, I just want the article and nothing more!

I don’t usually bother with advert blocking, but after seeing more feeds with adverts in I’ve finally installed Adblock Plus for Firefox.  Good riddance to pointless adverts!

Various USB printers have done this for quite a while, you have to buy the cable separately.  Whilst it’s sometimes understandable with cheap products, it’s still slightly annoying that the product you buy isn’t usable until you go and buy yet another cable.  What I find really annoying is spending £300 on a console such as the PlayStation 3 and they’re too cheap to include an HDMI cable.  This is a console designed for high definition gaming, yet they don’t even bother including a cable for it.

It feels like the modern equivalent of “batteries not included”, certainly not something which should happen if you spend large amounts of money on a new device.

Certain games decide that they need to run as Administrator from the moment the patcher starts up, even though the patcher might not need to download any file at all – therefore not needing to write any files to the Program Files directory.  So the entire game runs under admin privileges, just incase the patcher might need to update files – Mythic Entertainment are guilty of this with Dark Age of Camelot.

Other games are still living in the old days where they still write any configuration files to the game directory for all players, instead of the relevant application data directory for the user.  This is just extremely lazy and makes things awkward for users, instead of a clean split between game data and user data – everything is just lumped together in one directory.  If I wanted to make a backup of my computer, it would be far easier to just backup my user profile which would contain any important data – however keeping this data along with the game itself makes it difficult.  If I wanted to restore my machine from a backup, I’d lose any settings from the game.

There are other games which are complete failures, getting players to go with workarounds such as changing the permissions on the installation directory.  After installing Lord of the Rings Online I didn’t even get a shortcut to the game from my start menu.

If game developers could just put a bit of extra effort into game installation it would make things so much easier.  I know the aim of these developers is probably just to get the game running on these platforms, but a fully functional game which works properly would save users so many headaches.

Server Name Indication is a TLS extension which sends the hostname during the TLS negotiation, which means the server can switch to the appropriate certificate – allowing a web host to potentially have as many HTTPS sites as they want on a single IP address.  It’s a great solution, however the only problem is that any chance of it’s currently being held back.

Firefox 2.0, Opera 8.0 and even Google Chrome supports SNI, however Safari on OS X currently doesn’t support it and Internet Explorer 7 only supports it on Windows Vista and not Windows XP.  So SNI is being held back due to a lack of support from IE and Safari, these are two fairly significant browsers which many people use – admins can’t ignore either of them.

SNI is only just becoming available in Linux distributions with Apache 2.2.8 and the latest versions of OpenSSL, so it isn’t available to everyone just yet.  However being unable to use it for many years due to the fact that any Internet Explorer user on Windows XP won’t be able to view any SNI sites is going to be a huge hinderance towards adopting it.

type=AVC msg=audit(1223922183.059:22): avc:  denied  { getattr } for  pid=2654 comm="smartd" path="/dev/twe0" dev=tmpfs ino=8940 scontext=user_u:system_r:fsdaemon_t:s0 tcontext=user_u:
object_r:device_t:s0 tclass=chr_file

A good administrator will probably want to add some custom SELinux policies, but the lazy admin might just want to disable SELinux.  I went with the disabling of SELinux as the easier option!  It’s not a recommended solution though.

Eventually I got smartd working again, so I’ve now got decent monitoring of the disks on the machine.

A common situation we’ll see are MMORPGs, games with thousands of players mostly with Windows clients connecting to servers powered by Linux.  Occasionally you’ll see people trying to run their game client under WINE, but it isn’t quite the same as running a native game.  These companies use Linux to run their gaming servers, web servers and possibly many other parts of their infrastructure, but when it comes to building a Linux client for their game they’ll rarely consider it or even dismiss it without even considering the feasibility of it.

I don’t think anyone expects companies who use Linux to start contributing hundreds of lines of source code back to various projects, but it would be nice if they considered a Linux client of their product where it’s viable as a way of saying thank you. They’re getting the benefits of many hours of effort being placed into a freely available operating system, but they’re not helping this operating system by refusing to release their product for it.

In an ideal world we’d see multi platform clients, maybe we’ll see more if it one day.

The AspireOne page on the Ubuntu wiki explains how to get you Ubuntu up and running.  The Aspire One supports PXE booting, which I found far easier to setup than fiddling about with a USB stick just to get the install going.

The Ubuntu Netbook remix includes some great packages which are useful for running GNOME on a small screen, I did try them all however I wasn’t too happy with the UME launcher.  I’d highly recommend Maximus, an application which maximises open windows and removes the top bar from running programs, window-picker-applet which is ideal with Maximus and doesn’t hog too much space for switching between programs, and human-netbook-theme for a few visual tweaks.

Overall I’m fairly happy, now I’ve got the power of Ubuntu for this laptop.  Hopefully the weird quirks and bugs which the Aspire One has will be ironed out in future releases.