I read a lot of e-mail, mostly for Linux related purposes. Normally people use well behaved e-mail clients and everything is presented in a fairly standard fashion but there’s some that often stick out like a sore thumb.
The obvious one is Outlook, which has well known idiosyncracies but which some companies force their employees to use even for free software work. The other is GMail. GMail has two problems. One is that the UI appears to encourage people to insert their text into the middle of messages without deleting any context. This makes it hard to notice the new content in big e-mail threads or when someone’s commenting on large patches – searching for the new text is like looking for a needle in a haystack. That said, this is at least partly a user issue – many people manage to use GMail without doing this, it’s just that the GMail UI seems to encourage it more than most other UIs.
The other thing is is that it’s recently decided to format the author information for quoted text in a very odd way:
On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Mark
Brown<broonie@opensource.wolfsonmicro.com> wrote:
What’s happened is that it’s decided to remove the space between the author name and the e-mail address. This causes a very odd word wrapping on the very first line of the message and is really noticable when you’re reading. I’m not sure what inspired that change, there doesn’t seem to be any motivation for it, but it doesn’t seem terribly helpful.
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
Being stuck listening to hold music for an extended period is annoying. What’s even more annoying for me is when the IVR system regularly interrupts the hold music with a voice announcement, often telling you something enormously useful like pointing out that you’re on hold. Music I find easy to zone out without paying too much attention to but whenever you get a voice announcement it demands a bit more attention – at least until you’ve worked out that it’s not actually a human yet.
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
Linux 2.6.30 was released today. This has been a fairly quiet release from the ASoC point of view with no substantial API changes for drivers but there’s a few new interfaces which people may find helpful. Highlights include:
- A simple wrapper for the standard ALSA jack detection interface. This helps makes jacks a bit easier to use in a multi-component system, providing a framework for using multiple jack detection methods on a single jack (eg, for both headphone and microphone) and automatic integration with DAPM, allowing output paths to be powered up only when a jack is present. See sound/soc/soc-jack.c.
- A new SND_SOC_DAPM_PIN_SWITCH helper for machines exposing control of DAPM pins to user applications.
- More conversion of ASoC CODEC drivers to use the new device model integrated driver registration methods.
- TI DaVinci support now works in mainline, no out of tree patches are required for the DMA code.
plus a selection of new drivers and enhancements to existing drivers..
I recently implemented some enhancements to DAPM, the part of ASoC which minimizes the power consumption of the embedded audio subsystem by keeping any unused components powered off while avoiding audible artifacts as the power changes. Prior to these changes DAPM used to change the power for each component with an individual register write which with many systems would result in a lot of repeated writes to the same register. This can get noticeable on slow or heavily contended buses, especially around resume. With these changes DAPM will try to minimize the number of register writes it does while still trying to avoid audio artifacts. These changes are currently available from the dapm branch of my ASoC git repository and should make their way into 2.6.32. Once they are merged the dapm branch is likely to be removed.
As with any substantial change in the power sequencing there is a risk that there may have been some performance regressions on some systems – my biggest concern is that some thing were being helped by the delays introduced by the repeated register writes and may require special handling to fix. My hope is that this won’t happen if anything it should fix some problems by ensuring that both left and right channels of stereo paths get powered up together without wide testing that’s hard to guarantee. Any testing that you can do on your systems would be greatly appreciated.
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
The Mac OS X version of Twitteriffic has a shareware style registration model: the idea is that if you like the software you’re supposed to register it. Apparently one of the benefits you get from this is that when you start the registered version up it will, instead of prompting you to click through a pre-filled login dialog, simply log you straight in. Unfortunately there’s nothing in the UI that suggests that this is due to the lack of registration – instead it just looks like poor interface design. This meant that I didn’t even consider registering, the quality of the product appeared so poor. I only found out that this was an attempt at a registration nag recently as a result of a conversation with a friend who had registered.
Of course, almost all my production computing is done on Linux where this problem just doesn’t exist (my Macs exist to support my iPhone and provide media playback). So much better on several levels.
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
Working with multiple upstream kernel trees and keeping an eye on more my git repositories tend to end up with large numbers of remotes (this laptop has 22, for example). It’s getting to the point where I need something like etckeeper to keep track of them all.
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
I may be wrong on this but it looks like Microsoft SMTP clients (at least Windows Mail and Outlook) don’t like being sent a large volume of SSL certificate information when opening a TLS connection. They appear to assume that the data they are being sent is malformed and assume that STARTTLS failed, continuing with an unencrypted SMTP dialogue.
This can be triggered relatively easily on a Debian system by telling Exim to use all the certificates provided by the ca-certificates package (which is the default configuration). The Windows clients will give an unhelpful “the remote end dropped the connection” style error, caused by the server getting upset by the unexpected fallback to unencrypted SMTP. The server logs will show something like this:
2009-02-17 21:32:55 TLS error on connection from client.example.com (Client) [192.168.192.168] (gnutls_handshake): A TLS packet with unexpected length was received.
2009-02-17 21:33:00 SMTP protocol synchronization error (input sent without waiting for greeting): rejected connection from H=client.example.com [192.168.192.168] input="EHLO Client\r\n"
Configuring the MAIN_VERIFY_TLS_CERTIFICATES option in the Debian Exim configuration (which sets the tls_verifiy_certificates option in the actual Exim configuration) to point to something with less certificates in should avoid the issue.
On the bright side, at least they’re making an effort to avoid overflows.
Sunday, February 15th, 2009
When upgrading from older crm114 releases and trying to retain your existing configuration it is important to check that all the configuration options that the new version expects to be set have been set. While some will cause errors if they’re omitted others will appear to work but will cause unwanted behaviour at runtime. For example, omitting good_threshold and spam_threshold will cause everything to be flagged as spam in X-CRM114-Status even though the classifier is working well.
In practice there are relatively few configuration options that users are expected to configure so it may be easier to redo the configuration based on the example provided. For safety it’s best to delete your existing CSS files too in case they’ve been invalidated by a configuration or format change.
It’s all a bit manual but it’s worth it for what it does for my inbox.
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
One of my recent DVD acquisitions was Festen, the first of the Dogma 95 films. In spite of not having seen the film since it came out more than a decade ago (though I did re-watch it once then after first seeing it at the EIFF) it’s been one of the films I think back on most frequently so as soon as I saw that it was going to be released again I preordered it.
This being a Dogma 95 film there is little need to wait for a HD version – the Dogma rules are all about getting back to basics including all-natural lighting and handheld camerawork done with low end cameras. This means there’s really not any detail to miss, instead there’s a visceral, documentary style feel. Really the film is all one big sequence of formal exercises – the Dogma rules are obviously a big formalism, the plot is very Jacobean and the whole thing revolves around a rather grand birthday party with bow ties and a toastmaster. The thing that really hooks me is the contrast between all this formality and the content, which is fairly brutal and emphasised by the visual style. I find this sort of setup endlessly fascinating when it’s done well.
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
[This is a slight modification of something I posted to the alsa-devel list earlier today.]
One of the biggest surprises that people starting to use Linux seem to run into is that you can’t rely on any particular support level from the community – everything is done on a voluntary basis and the responses will depend on a range of factors, including things like how busy the people involved are. People moving to Linux for reasons other than freedom, particularly those using it commercially, often don’t seem to notice this distinction.
You can normally help getting a response by providing as much information as possible about your problem and the steps you have taken to resolve it – this makes it very much easier for people to reply since, for example, it’s more likely that something will jump out at them.
These web pages contain some suggestions on the sorts of thing to do in your e-mail to help get the best response:
How to ask questions the smart way
How to report bugs effectively (this is targeted at end users more than developers).
With the kernel community it can also help to send direct copies of your mail to people who have worked on the relevant code since people may either miss postings on mailing lists (there is often a lot of traffic) or in some cases not be subscribed to the lists at all. This doesn’t apply to all free software projects – you should check the normal standards for a given project before doing this.
If you need guaranteed responses or more detailed responses than you are able to obtain from the community the usual approach is to work with people with whom you have a commercial relationship – for example, your chip or software vendors, or consultants you have employed.