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With the help of a coworker, I’ve tried again and had much greater success.

The major problems I’ve had is lack of both general and specific documentation, rather than any technical problems. I haven’t yet found a good overview guide.

Overview: For instance, you can use apt-get, aptitude or synaptic to install packages. The only one I knew about a few days ago was apt-get, which seems to be the weakest of the tree.

Specifics: As an example, package descriptions rarely describe how a package is invoked. For instance, nowhere when installing KDE did it explain how to invoke it. I found that on my own, but wouldn’t the package description have been a logical place to put it?

I can and should have discovered this stuff on my own, but I can’t help but wish it was better documented inside the OS. This isn’t a flaw specific to Linux, although both Mac OS and Windows do a better job on it (Mac installs all its applications in a single, almost flat directory and Windows highlights new packages).

I’ve also noted some interesting flaws. Attempting to remove Evolution in synaptic listed ubuntu as a dependency. I did not proceed.

I decided to try to install Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Linux again this weekend. It looked like it might have been ready.

I’m sad to report it isn’t. Not even remotely.

What worked well:
Ubuntu has a partition resize feature that allowed me to resize my Windows partition and create a ext3 and swap partition.

What didn’t work:
For some reason, this tool kept refusing to recognize the swap partition. This sent me in a loop around the paritioning tool. It eventually let me out, but I still have no idea what I did differently the last time.
Upon rebooting to Windows XP later, the NTFS partition was corrupted. It seems to have recovered. Maybe that’s expected.

Almost everything else about this experience could go into the “things that didn’t work” category. I installed the ATI drivers, and they worked and worked well. But for no reason that I’m able to discern (there certainly aren’t any error reports) I’m back at the OSS ones.

Compiz looked interesting in screenshots and movies I found online, but none of the instructions I found worked. Apparently this is a new breakage. I suspect this is what killed my ATI drivers.

I don’t know how anyone can suffer under the delusion that this is ready for Joe Consumer - I’ve never struggled for two days to keep using the right video driver under Mac OS X or Windows.

Anyway. I guess I’ll try again next year.

Last night I tried to connect my Canoscan N656U to a computer.

First, I tried the Mac. Connecting the device did nothing. Pushing the button on the device did nothing. A search of Canon’s website revealed a driver, but the installer seems to have been written by rabid monkeys. Eventually, I discovered how to make the installer work (you need to already be running on an admin account, because it doesn’t know how to authenticate) and restarted, to find… still nothing.

So after a few minutes of that, I decided to try to install on my Windows desktop. This worked a little better right from the start, as Windows at least noticed there was something there. I had to download a driver from Canon’s website and use some trickery to install it, but a few minutes later the scan button is launching Picasa2.

Verdict: Canon’s installers suck. Completely on Mac, almost completely on Windows.

John Gruber has a quick look at Apple’s latest batch of announcements, but lingers on the problems and trade-offs involved. He reminisces on the style of Steve Jobs and the growth of Apple’s iTunes/iPod empire. Good read.

Working with Xcode and Visual Studio on a day-to-day basis, it’s natural that I’d compare the two tools. The following is not intended to be an unbiased comparison. These are my opinions only. They’re based on how I work, and how I expect tools to work.

Project Configuration: Xcode
Xcode wins cleanly for its configuration editor, which can display all settings at once, predefined groups of settings, or only customized settings. Visual Studio, by comparison, can only display predefined groups of settings. Putting Xcode even further ahead is its ability to filter the settings view as you type. Visual Studio gets some points for having a more capable path editor, but that’s really all it has going for it.

Subprojects: Visual Studio
Visual Studio does Xcode one better by showing all the details of the subprojects, including exactly which sources make it up, right in its solution explorer.

Editor: Xcode
Xcode scores a weak win here for having more useful keyboard customizations available. Part of this is the additional meta key available on the Mac.

Window Management: No winner
Visual Studio offers more in the way of window management, but the options are not ones I find useful. On the other hand, Xcode offers more styles of working, but I only use one of these as well. Comparing Visual Studio’s style with Xcode’s, I see no advantage to either.

Stability: Xcode
Visual Studio’s Intellisense is worse than useless, making it impossible for me to work unless I use an undocumented trick to disable it. A quick Google search shows I’m not the only one having problems.

Price: Xcode
Xcode is free. Visual Studio isn’t. Adding a replacement for Intellisense makes Visual Studio even more costly. (Swapping out hardware to prove to management that Visual Studio was the culprit and not my system made it even more costly.)

CVS: Visual Studio
Visual Studio does not include CVS integration. Xcode’s CVS integration does not work for me. It would be a draw, except that Xcode’s textual project files have minor differences when the project is cleaned vs. built. (I’ve been told this will be fixed in Xcode 3.)

Menu Layout: Xcode
Xcode provides a more logical menu layout, with fewer regularly used commands in sub-menus. In particular, Visual Studio banishes search/replace tools to a sub-menu of Edit. Visual Studio offers a way to customize menu commands, but I’d much rather have a logical if locked layout.

Source Search Tools: No winner
While I find Xcode’s search tools more useful, both sets are so pathetic that I refuse to give it a win here.

It may seem like I usually come down hard on Microsoft software. The simple reason for that is that Microsoft software is worse than Apple software. But that doesn’t mean Apple software is flawless.

After the user double clicks a file with no extension (or any other kind of type data), Mac OS X offers a chance for the user to pick an application to use to open the file. So far so good. After clicking the application, I got this message.

If you can figure out what’s being updated, or why Cancel is different than Don’t Update, you are either the developer who wrote this useless message or have the same kind of brain damage. Either way, it’s not too late for you — seek professional help.

Just a quick pointer to a strange picture that somehow got featured beside the “Shuttle ready to launch” story on Yahoo News. If ever there was a good “I wonder what that’s about?” picture, this is it.

Edit: I see they’ve replaced the picture. It was a picture of a spider above the ground in the foreground on the left third (presumably hanging from a web, but you couldn’t see that) facing the shuttle in the background in a posture that looked like it was attacking.

Whole Tomato Software makes a product called Visual Assist X that makes Visual Studio’s text editor almost tolerable. This replaces the evil demonic spawn Microsoft calls “Intellisense” with something that doesn’t seem to crash.

Every time someone tells me how great an IDE Visual Studio is, I wonder if we’re talking about the same Visual Studio. Just to be clear, the one I’m using is from Microsoft.

Here’s an error message I ran into today. See if you can guess what it means; it occurs when you try to drag a source file into your project.

The text, in case you don’t want to look at the picture closely, is “A file, filter, or folder already exists at the current scope in project ‘calc’ or access was denied for the desired operation.”

Give up? It means That file is already in your project. It does not mean it is in any particular place in your project, and the group it is in is probably hidden.

I hate overloaded error messages. I hate overloaded error messages where each overloaded error message makes no sense even more. I call for the head of whoever wrote that message! I’m not singling him out; I want the head of everyone who writes useless error messages. And yes, I know that includes my own head, but I’ve already got it, see…

Beta 2 of Firefox 2.0 is available.