darkness

I totally warezed FC4 on Saturday night, because I’m a fanboy. I did an upgrade on my laptop which was an FC2 install with a few third-party packages. I had done a good job of sticking with the “major” third-party repositories, making sure everything was packaged, etc.

The upgrade went smoothly, though slowly. I think the slowness is because of a problem on my laptop. I suspect the CD-ROM. I can’t seem to play any DVDs with it; instead I just get this nice kind of “I’m not playing that” clicking noise. I’m hopefully going to test it with Doofus’ CD/DVD drive from his T41 next week-ish.

After upgrade, a few things didn’t work. waproamd was the first I noticed: some kind of hanging when it started up. Oddly the logs seemed to indicate the appropriate script(s) had run, and I had an IP, but waproamd thought the process failed. I looked at wpa_supplicant but it lacks certain functionality. My university disabled ESSID broadcast on all their access points, so my ipw2100 card makes them appear as <hidden>. waproamd happily sets your ESSID to <hidden> (and it always specifies a specific AP to talk to, a la iwconfig <iface> ap 00:11:22:33:44:55). So as part of my waproamd script for those access points (which I have to list by MAC; I guess I could name a script essid:<hidden> and it would probably work, but that would cover all “cloaked” APs) I do something weird like

ESSID=theRealESSID ifup $IFACE
(sleep 5s; iwconfig $IFACE ap any essid theRealESSID) >&- 2>&- <&- &
disown -a

to start the AP. You’ll notice that background process. That’s because, after successfully executing the script (which, by virtue of RH ifup, resets the ESSID to theRealESSID), waproamd goes ahead and sets the ESSID and AP again. Five seconds after that, the iwconfig fires, and waproamd says “oh, I need to reassociate” and basically does ifdown/ifup again. Sub-ideal, but it works. And wpa_supplicant doesn’t seem to have the ability to run scripts.

Now, this is actually a bad example, since I think wpa_supplicant specifically handles the case where you identify an AP by MAC and say “force the ESSID to this value.” However, I think its configuration lacks the ability to list a series of AP MACs (BSSIDs? I’m not sure what I should call them) and apply a single configuration block to all of them. In fact, if I recall correctly, the ESSID is actually used to identify a configuration block.

More stuff that was broken with FC4 upgrade:

• The haldaemon user (I think that was it) wasn’t properly created by… some damn %post script. I don’t think it was the hal package-if such a thing even exists. Anyway, I think it was because an /etc/passwd.lock or /etc/shadow.lock file was hanging around. Removed it, ran the script manually, service no longer bitched at startup.
• PCMCIA’s init spews some garbage I think it shouldn’t. waproamd and another service or two did this too. waproamd is not FC’s, so I can understand some differences, but PCMCIA’s is. Anyway, I’m not too concerned. It’s cosmetic, and I think I read they’re going to be changing it all around anyway.
• My slmodem package fails to start cleanly in FC4. I’m not positive it was starting correctly with FC2, but now it doesn’t start cleanly at boot for sure. However, I can start it afterwards just fine. I rarely use it, so I just chkconfig slmodemd off or whatever. I’ll start it when I need it.

All in all, pretty clean upgrade. It was annoying to find repositories to use with Yum before FC4 was released, though obviously that was only a temporary hardship. I did go through ~root/upgrade.log, cleaned out /var/yum/cache, and looked around for things with stuff like find /etc /var -name '*.rpmsave' -o '*.rpmnew' and locate -i fc2. There were some files in /etc that I needed to move around by hand, but no big deal.

Still no software suspend in FC4. Also, FC apparently will not ship xorgcfg which might have gotten my mouse back today. I don’t think the system-config-* tools replace the ability to do things like change your mouse type at runtime. Not cool, and kind of silly if you ask me. Do we need an xorg-x11-unsupported package (a la kernel-unsupported)?

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I’ve been using Life Balance for a month or so now to implement a GTD-like system. For more information on what I’ve got set up where, read a couple posts on the Llamagraphics forums:

• Beginners GTD Guide, mainly for the places setup. If you read through this post a bit, you’ll find that ratz has posted a completed version later on than the first post.
• Balance all around, also by ratz.

That second post was kind of my starting point. The Life Balance manual is also useful. GTD itself was a very quick read.

I actually bought Life Balance today. I’ve only bought two Palm programs ever; the other was BackupBuddy, for my Palm Vx. (I got real tired of reloading software every time it crashed, which was often enough, especially with my OmniSky modem and early AvantGo.) I don’t necessarily like paying for Life Balance, and not just in the normal cheapskate kind of way. First of all, at $80 for the bundle with Palm and Windows versions, it’s pricey. Second, it sure looks like updates are infrequent. Most of the more recent updates and activity by “the Llamas” (as I believe they are called on their forums) seems to be directed towards getting LB to work on the new Palm devices, such as the T5 and the Treo 650. The desktop software is OK: it requires the .Net framework, and it’s only locked up a few times during Hotsync.

Most importantly, I just don’t find the software flexible enough. I think these guys have been taking hints from the Gnome developers on UI design. One of the first annoyances you’re likely to hit is that there is no way to precisely define your balance slices. Instead, you have to grab parts of a pie chart and drag them to the value you want. On Windows, at least, you sometimes have to watch where you “drop” the line, as it’ll end up snapping +/- 1%. As an added bonus to really piss you off, when you adjust a piece of pie, LB automatically adjusts other slices to make sure they all add up to 100%. There is no way to specify a slice as 0% of your time, like you’d like to do for TLIs (top level items, referring to your outline) such as “Inbox” and “Linked Datebook Items.” The process of setting up balance drove me nuts. Don’t bother trying to get it “perfect.” (You’ll just want to change it, anyway.)

I kind of wish there were a way to enter an effort. I find myself coordinating slider positions in Windows directly to hours spend: each position is 3 minutes spent on a task. LB on the Palm is missing “auto-update” for the to-do list.

A common gripe about Life Balance is that tasks that need to get done don’t necessarily filter to the top. I think this is most true if you actually have LB “balance” things; you can tell it to balance “not at all” in the preferences. (By the way, I think this is one of only two or three preferences on Palm, and quite possibly the only preference on Windows. Seriously, maybe these guys are gnome developers.) Regardless, sometimes you really want a dated item to go to the top. (“Hard landscape” in GTD terms.)

I wish there were a way to assign more than one “place” to an item. I’ve got weird places like “@Laptop” for actions that I can do with my laptop; “@Internet” for actions that I can do wherever (presumably) I have Internet access. Occasionally I need both my laptop and Internet access. Since the ability to include a place doesn’t descend past the immediate children (if place A includes place B, and place B includes place C, place A does not include place C) you can’t hack it up this way. What I think I’d really like to do is, for each item, check off a series of “resources” I need to complete that item. Then define places as groups of resources.

This brings me to LB’s competition. In short, for Palm and Windows, there really isn’t one. Shadow Plan and Bonsai have the concept of “tags” which can be made to operate like the “resources” I’m describing above. You could make a “tag” for each resource, then define filters for your different places. I know Shadow Plan lets you save these filters, and define them using “and” and “or” logical operators; I suspect Bonsai also lets you save filters in a similar manner. I suspect both Shadow Plan and Bonsai do as good, if not a better job, of making sure “hard landscape” items filter to the top of your to-do list.

However… both of these programs are lacking in their desktop versions, and I’ve grown quite accustomed to using LB’s desktop version. In Shadow Plan 4.1 desktop for Windows, you can’t link to items on the Palm calendar (Datebook, whatever). What’s worse, Shadow Plan won’t let you edit the tag list or assign tags to an item from the desktop; you can only do that on the Palm. (I understand they are testing the feature to at least assign tags, though not edit them.) That makes the feature pretty useless if you want to depend heavily on the desktop version. Bonsai does let you both edit and assign tags, as I recall. I have read that Bonsai’s desktop version is generally more advanced than Shadow Plan’s. However, Bonsai also lacks the ability to link to a Datebook item from the desktop version. LB has this feature, and I use it all the time. (I just wish the Datebook items would immediately pop up in the Agendus desktop. As it stands, I don’t think they pop up until the next Hotsync.)

Another key feature missing in Shadow Plan and Bonsai: repeating items. If they’re there, I certainly couldn’t find them. The Shadow Plan FAQ has some disgusting workaround for this. I found some in their forums too. I make heavy use of repeating items.

On the other hand, Bonsai and Shadow Plan are a lot cheaper than Life Balance. Shadow Plan even offers free upgrades forever. Life Balance people have been giving those out, apparently, but when major changes come up you need to shell out money for the new version. Shadow Plan is also reputed to have more frequent releases and more active development than LB. LB does appear to move at a glacial pace when it comes to new features, from reading their forums and some past experience.

If not for the lacking desktop versions and the absence of repeating items, I suspect I would have gone for one of these other programs. I already use Bonsai to keep other random lists, and I like it. But I put my data in LB, got used to using it, and decided that while I was really not sure if it was worth $80, I had the money to spend and no where else to go. Now that they’ve got my money, I hope to see some exciting new features. Instead I have the feeling I’ll just see support for exciting new devices that I don’t own.

There is one competitor to LB that might be worth keeping an eye on: MyLife Organized. Generally I fear for the future of the Palm platform. Their devices certainly aren’t flashy. I think I can get an equivalent, if not even faster (I emulate a lot) processor in a Dell Axim or other PocketPC handheld. I understand the built-in PIM applications for PocketPC are not completely atrocious. They also have cooler features, like combined Bluetooth and 802.11b, SD and CF slots in the same unit. The new Palm “LifeDrive Mobile Manager” makes me say, “so… you just put a hard disk in it? Big fucking deal.” I’ve already got SD and CF cards, big and plentiful… and probably less power and heat. I guess PalmOS is nice, but MemoPad is about the only built-in Palm application I use. (ZLauncher, Agendus, Power48, on and on with the third-party applications.) I want to know which platform is easier to develop on. Something tells me that it’s easier to make a program for both Windows and Windows CE than it is to make one for Windows and PalmOS. I’m just imagining all these poor people still writing whole applications in C.

General summary: I’m a paying Life Balance user, but I’m not yet really happy about it.