Amatriciana Sauce

Strangely enough, earlier this week I made dinner of my own volition.  Not only that, but I made it from these things you'd actually call "ingredients" rather than taking something out of a package and heating it.  It's ludicrously easy to make, so anyone interested can follow the recipe I used, available here.  A word of caution to the obscenely stupid out there: a clove of garlic is one of the small bits inside the skin.  It is not the word for the whole damn thing.  In case you're wondering, I fell into that obscenely stupid category.  Peeling garlic is a pain in the ass, and having to do less than one whole bulb makes this pretty quick.  I'm going to have to make it again sometime, and this time avoid being an utter windowlicker to see what it's actually supposed to taste like, as the garlic drowned out the pancetta a bit.  It's recommended anyway.

Life on the Bleeding Edge

Background:

If you're a technologically inclined person like me, you've probably heard of linux, the free open source operating system.  You may even have run it once or twice on the side, just to see what the fuss is about.  I did so a few years back, and wound up building a box almost specifically for linux use.  That box is dead but its legacy lives on in the box I'm typing this from.

The specific distribution I settled on was Gentoo, at the time an upstart little distro that had the gall to require you to compile your packages for the mad optimizations.  It still gets flak for that, and rightly so in some cases.  Where this comes in handy though, is with up-to-date packages.  Unlike some distros, it's extremely easy to get packages ready for mass consumption, since you offload the building process on the users.  That as an aside I can make sure I'm not running a package built for only the capabilities of a 386 on my Core 2 Duo is just gravy here (if I was running 64 bit the difference between the standard Debian packages and my own would be much, much lower to the point of not mattering).  However, sometimes letting the Gentoo devs test packages before giving access to this source isn't fast enough.  For the mildly adventurous, there's the unstable branch, which you can hit on a per-package basis, or for the whole system.  Then there's the truly insane, where you get direct access to the developer repositories via source control (typically subversion or git these days).

Guess which category I fall into.

I've used wildly pre-alpha window managers before (compiz, beryl, and compiz-fusion), and vacillate between the newest and newest with compatable ABI (svn for ffmpeg breaks other packages at the moment, though it works on its own), but I've finally met my match.  The offending package here, astonishingly, is KDE 4.  To be fair, it was a subversion build of KDE rather than the current stable, but that didn't particularly matter as KDE being stable was a little horribly relative.

The Good:

KDE 4 finally dumps Qt 3 for Qt 4 as the main windowing toolkit.  This is mostly an under-the-hood thing, but I'm a programmer so I appreciate it.  Also, there are some nicer Qt 4 themes (both widget and window decoration) than are available in the older toolkit.  It's worth noting that Qt 4 is actually three years old now, and is only just becoming the standard.  The new window manager does 3D compositing, like OSX has for a couple major revisions, Windows Vista's Aero engine, and the three I previously mentioned.  If you have a modern 3D card, this basically means you'll have much better performance for basically every program window related function, as well as support for some useless but neat eye candy.  KDE 3.5.10 has no such thing, but dumping compiz-fusion in place of KDE's own KWin allows you to pretend it does.

The Bad:

Everything else.  No, seriously, it was an awful experience for a number of reasons.  For the unaware, the KDE suite includes far more than a default install of Windows from official Microsoft media (if your disc came from your computer manufacturer, it probably comes with things not originally intended to be there).  Most of those other things, however, don't work well yet.  Mapping keyboard shortcuts, for example, is an exercise in frustration.  KDE versions before 4 used an audio manager called aRts to do sound mixing, though most people these days make sure it is either never installed or at the very least never run.  The kernel level sound system allows you to perform the same function, but in a much less irritating way as it doesn't block out everything but KDE apps.  I'd list aRts' demise under the previous category, but sadly its replacement isn't good enough to make me cheer for it.  Worse still, you can't do a damn thing about it now.  Phonon is theoretically less intrusive than aRts was, as you can theoretically make it work with ALSA (the kernel drivers), but it takes a bizarre level of work that just raw ALSA users never had to touch.  Also, this impacts every sound playing application in the suite, like the music player Amarok.  An equalizer is something you expect in all modern music players, whether you use it or not (I do occasionally), but Amarok 2 stripped it because they're not compatible with Phonon.

Amarok is actually a whole can of worms in and of itself.  On the back end, Amarok 1 uses a database for its music library.  By default, it uses SQLite, a mature product designed to give you a database without a server, which makes it easy on regular users.  Odds are, you've used an application that uses SQLite and not even known it.  Any Mac user who has used Mail.app has, for example.  The user could, however, decide to use an actual standalone database server if he wants.  As someone who has done his share of web development, I have mysql running anyway, so using it instead of SQLite (good for most uses, can get slow for particularly large databases, like mine) was a no brainer.  Amarok 2 removes both of these, instead requiring MySQL embedded, which performs like SQLite but requires MySQL be installed (another virtue of SQLite is that you can just link the source into your program directly rather than requiring it installed separately), and is less free in terms of license.  If it performed as well I might not care, but it's definitely slower than my older version.  Worse, it seems prone to explosion with albums by more than one artist, as there are a number of bugs in the Various Artists handling, ranging from the inability to remove albums from that listing to creating pointless duplicate entries that also cannot be removed.  The scripting API from Amarok 1 has been completely removed, so there is no period of backward compatibility whatsoever.  If you cared about any scripts (I personally  use weekalarm and amarokpidgin regularly) you'd better hope that you didn't care much as they don't work and there's no alternative written in the new style yet, and the documentation for writing new scripts isn't even good enough to expect either available anytime soon.  Also, if you've used Amarok 1 and really enjoy the context tab, you're in luck!  The majority of the program's UI is now devoted to that data.  If, like me, you never used it, you now are stuck looking at it anyway, while the playlist is crammed off to the right side and collapsed significantly, and you can't do anything about it because the developers don't want you to.  A final insult here comes from the controls; the previous and next buttons (and functions via dbus) will actually start the player, rather than merely move around the playlist.  The play function will occasionally not work if the the playlist pointer isn't active (highlighting a track doesn't help this directly), and when it does work at all most of the time it starts playing the NEXT track.  If you want to play the first track in a playlist, typically you'll need to right click its entry in the now smaller and further away listing, and push play there, as the much larger button will sometimes skip it just because.  Some other more minor features have either changed or been removed, but since some are planned to return (not in time for 2.0 final admittedly), and because this is already too long, I won't get into them.

KTorrent's new release fares better, but not much.  Two extremely useful plugins were butchered: RSS and UPnP.  The RSS Plugin simply doesn't exist anymore, though it may return.  If akregator were more up to snuff (I'm getting ahead of myself) I'd give that a pass, but as it stands that's quite irritating.  Also, the UPnP plugin still exists, but it doesn't work properly; it is for whatever reason causing issues with all libupnp applications, so things like MediaTomb (not KDE and therefore working properly) fail to run while that plugin is active.  The KDE3 version has no such issue despite providing the same functionality.

Akregator is a special sort of mess, as the svn build I was using did not allow you to read articles in the default mode.  Imagine the value of an rss reader that fetches feeds and tells you when you have new articles waiting, but refuses to show them to you.  The mode I eventually stumbled on essentially renders the rss with an XSLT sheet applied to a set of the feeds, but does not let you pick which articles to read directly.  As a result, you must mark the entire feed read at once, since it's showing you all of the articles and therefore marking none specifically.  Adding torrent site rss feeds to this almost replicated the functionality of the ktorrent plugin, though the torrents could not be passed directly to ktorrent, but first had to be handed to Opera (my browser of choice).  Also, obviously the auto-download features weren't going to work.

The Ugly:

K3b.  The KDE4 subversion version of this (it's a CD/DVD burning front end, if you're unfamiliar) simply does not work.  The lead developer claimed yesterday on a bug report that it's pre-alpha, though I'm wondering why such things are in this sort of repository at all given that.  Typically these are for very early testing of usable applications rather than useless builds.  The most bizarre part of this though, is that the GUI seems to work perfectly fine, it's only the burning features that fail miserably, but the burning is not handled by k3b itself.  It basically passes off your file list and options to command line programs like growisofs.

Plasma's Plasmoids deserve a special bit of derision too.  Plasmoids are basically like OSX dashboard widgets, which KDE used to use via the application SuperKaramba.  There is a KDE4 version of SuperKaramba which is basically an interpreter so you can theoretically use old themes with Plasma.  It doesn't work reliably in that fashion, and the two I use (one is a system monitor, the other is a weather montior) don't work with it.  A few others I tried did, but there's no indication why mine were different here.  I mentioned OSX dashboard widgets specifically for a reason though; Plasma is supposed to be able to render them as plasmoids.  To some extent it does.  That extent, however, is not even remotely usable.  The alpha channel simply doesn't work, so each of them has a large solid color box in the background.  Also, the few I tried (all weather type) didn't even fetch data or let me pick my locale, so they weren't even functionally ugly.

If there's one thing KDE 4 had going for it, it was that KDE3 apps can run inside of it.  Unfortunately, this creates a bunch of mostly useless overhead as you need the KDE3 versions of every support library to do this, but worse Qt 4's Qt3 support does not let Qt 3 apps use the widgets of your current style.  This means you're able to use versions of the KDE apps that actually work, but only if you're willing to make your whole system disjoint and ugly.  Worse still, you lose the ability to change the KDE 3 apps' style/colors to even come close to what you're using for the Qt 4 apps.

Conclusion:

Needless to say, I dumped the overlay I was using from my system, but sadly much of KDE 4 (version 4.1.2) has made its way into the "unstable" branch of Gentoo.  This of course suggests that much of it is considered quite usable by the developers, and reasonably safe in a Gentoo system itself, as only full releases ever get unmasked at all.  This also means that I'm currently building a large number of these applications, because it's easier than manually masking all of them to keep them out, and much easier than adding the unstable keyword to every package I currently have built for the unstable branch (removing the keyword from a global context would keep KDE 4.1.2 from building, but require basically everything else to be downgraded).  Fortunately, they run side-by-side, but most of these things are a nuisance at best, so it's a bit of a waste of time, bandwidth, and harddrive space.  Best advice here is stay the hell away from KDE 4.  The best things about it can be replicated in KDE 3.5 without much difficulty, and the worst things require you to have most of KDE 3.5 around anyway.  Don't bother.

Paperboy

I got up this morning and looked out my front door to see if anything had been delivered. Upon doing so, I was greeted by the sight of no newspaper on the porch, and no newspaper further down at the edge of the driveway. This, curiously, is actually correct behavior, though you wouldn't know it if you had driven by any morning since Monday.

I should probably explain. For something like twenty weeks now, we've been signed up for Sunday only newspaper service. Before that we were getting Friday-Sunday service as there is no weekend only for whatever reason. Before that, for years, we were on daily service, which is the last time they got it consistently right. Shortly after downgrading to the three day service, we noticed that we would get the newspaper on seemingly random days. No two consecutive weeks would pass with exactly six papers delivered on the correct three days. This probably shouldn't be rocket science, but somehow they just couldn't get it right. Almost every time the deliveryman failed to deliver on a day he was supposed to, Mom called to complain about it. The dispatcher always had some excuse about a new deliveryman or that the regular one was sick for months at a time which caused a substitute or something else asinine and pathetic of that sort. Finally she was fed up and canceled the service entirely.

This should probably offend most of you, as newspapers for years were delivered by young children on bicycles with a far higher success rate than this. In fact they made a video game about it, sharing a name with this entry in fact. Of course, that was not unintentional. I was never particularly good at this game, truth be told, though I never really played it on anything but somebody else's Game Boy, so I never really had the time to get good. It occurred to me for a moment that perhaps I'm being too hard on the deliveryman as a result, but I quickly dismissed that as terribly stupid of me. For starters, newspapers are now mostly delivered by grown men in cars, not young boys on bicycles. Furthermore Paperboy, like all video games based on mundane activities, is full of artificial challenge boosts because if it were particularly realistic it would be a horribly boring game.

No, whoever was responsible for this mistake was a moron of the highest order. However, Mom quickly missed the paper, and the paper itself missed our money, so they offered to give her 13 weeks without payment, and if she was still dissatisfied no payment would be necessary. At some point during this mess, the deliveryman decided (though he is not alone from what I've heard) that the Sunday paper was getting too large with all the inserts and the added bulk of the paper itself, so he was going to add those to the thinner Saturday paper instead. Of course, this meant if he failed to deliver on Saturday (as he was wont to do) we wouldn't get them even if he did deliver a Sunday paper. Also this seemed problematic as this latest attempt at service (the free 13 weeks) was Sunday only. How would he accomplish this? Wouldn't that mean stuffing some papers with the inserts and some without? How does that help the overall problem? Wouldn't that actually be more work and make things more confusing? There are answers to these questions, and all of them are what you'd expect if you assume this was a stupid idea. Well, behold and lo, at the end of 13 weeks we probably had 13 papers delivered, but not all of them were on Sunday nor were all the Sundays covered. Not even close actually.

The dispatcher begged Mom over the phone for one last chance, and for some reason she gave it to them. Well somehow the moron managed to get it right, delivering a full paper between the storm door and main front wooden door on our porch. He also delivered the thinner paper-only bit to the porch, but not between the doors. Strange, but at least we got what we ordered. Well despite this not even bringing their accuracy to 50% she decided to pay up for the next cycle (thinking back I'm not sure if we had to pay for the previous weeks after deciding they were not worthless [though they were] or if they were completely free). Since then we've gotten the paper every Sunday but one, usually with the inserts on Saturday, and Sunday, and occasionally with an insert-free copy also on Sunday anyway, and usually on the porch despite there never being a request to do that. Also of course they would often deliver on various days that are not Sunday or even Saturday but not for the entire week as you expect of the promotional free weeks newspaper companies enjoy doing in vain.

I cannot understand how these buffoons fail so utterly at such a simple concept week in and week out, but I don't really care; it isn't my money paying for their mistakes, and frankly they're actually losing money on us due to their incompetence so I at least get a smile of schadenfreude. Perhaps we should actually return to the age of small children delivering papers from their bikes, or at least require some sort of test before allowing someone to take on this seemingly difficult job. Perhaps set a benchmark score in Paperboy for job acceptance. Can't make things any worse than they are right now.

Update: An unfamiliar newspaper on the sewing machine in my garage (don't ask) found when getting the mail leads me to believe I may have been premature in suggesting they got something right.  It's more likely he simply didn't deliver to the door for no good reason this time, but still delivered erroneously.