Marcus Vorwaller

Last night, after several months of not having a Linux box, I decided to get one back up and running. I’ve been following some of the new developments with Gnome and Mono and have been impressed with how clean and usable some of the apps that have come out recently are looking. I’ve also read quite a bit about Ubuntu, a Debian (my favorite flavor of Linux) based distro that is designed for usability and runs Gnome 2.8.

I downloaded Ubuntu last night (in 17 minutes at 502 Kbps!, thank you Cox) and installed it fairly painlessly on my old Pentium II 450mhz Gateway computer. It installed quickly and ran well, even fast on such an old machine. It also looks great. The default theme is very earthy, which fits nicely with the Ubuntu philosophy.

That’s about where the pleasant experience ended. Like I mentioned before, I wanted to install some applications I’ve read about, specifically:

• Muine – simple music player
• Tomboy – desktop wiki
• Beagle – powerful search tool
• Blam! – simple rss feed reader

I started and almost immediately found myself stuck. The nice thing about Debian is that you can use apt-get (or aptitude, as I prefer) to download and automatically install many applications. I started with Blam!. Perfect, it installed great, ran great and is an impressive application.

I moved on to Beagle. It wasn’t in the apt repository so I decided to build it from source. Oh… wait, Ubuntu doesn’t come with a C compiler. I installed one. Hmm. It doesn’t come with Mono. I installed it. It doesn’t come with Evolution-sharp 0.3. Not in apt either. I got it from source and tried to configure it. It was missing a bunch of *-sharp applications. Most were not in apt. Forget it.

Next was Tomboy. Not in apt. Again, I downloaded it and started to install it from source. It needed a Perl module, XML::Parse. I tried to install it using CPAN, but it turned out CPAN needed updating. I let that go for about 20 minutes and came back to it. Tried to install it again, it kept failing. I searched and found it needed some other application (I can’t remember the name) that was in apt, I installed it, XML::Parse installed fine and went back to configure Tomboy. No dice. Missing more packages, again, not in apt and when I started compiling them from source I fell into the same dependency nightmares.

Muine was a similar story, I didn’t spend as much time on it, but was not able to get it running.

I know this is nothing new, but it really is indicative of the difference between Linux and OS X. If people are going to adopt Linux and use it successfully, installing applications really needs to be much simpler, even if that means including libraries and increasing the size of the binaries, whatever it takes, it has to be done.

[update]

When I wrote this, I didn’t realized I wrote about a similar Linux experience just a couple entries ago. It’s been a few days. Just to clarify, when I said I haven’t had a Linux box for a few months, I meant at home. I’ve had a dedicated Linux server for a couple years now.

Also: I have decided on a Wiki. More to come on that soon…

First I need to say that I’m writing this all for the second time. Ecto (which I generally love) crashed after I tried to insert a link and I lost about 500 words. Nice.

In continuing with my previously mentioned desire to research wiki’s I came across and started to install Twiki, the Wiki I found to be the best tool for my needs and in my opinion, the most powerful wiki currently available. The install took two evenings–much longer than the MediaWiki install took, but that’s pretty typical for perl applications, they’re often more powerful and almost always more difficult than their PHP counterparts to install.

Everything went fairly well with the install and I was happy with it until I tried to edit an entry. I discovered that anything over about 500 characters was truncated when I saved the entry. After much searching, I found this page which suggests it’s a mod_perl problem. “Fine, I’ll just upgrade mod_perl” I said to myself. After a quick search I found an RPM for mod_perl-1.99_11-0. Attempting to install it returned three dependency errors. Not totally unexpected, but in order to lessen the amount of dependencies, I looked for and found an older version (mod_perl-1.99_09-10) which pleasantly surprised me by only returning one dependency error:

error: Failed dependencies:

httpd-mmn = 20020903 is needed by mod_perl-1.99_09-10

httpd-mmn didn’t look or sound familiar to me. A bit of Googling revealed that it has something to do with the version of Apache that’s installed. Great. I checked my version and found I’m using Apache 2.0.40. Upgrading Apache isn’t simple, especially running Plesk which requires a Plesk friendly Apache RPM. Usually that’s not a problem since they can be found on AtomicRocketTurtle’s site. I tried to do a YUM upgrade using his repository only to find he’s blocked EV1servers because he doesn’t like the way they handled the SCO / Linux issues. Great, another minor setback, but I decided to just download his RPM’s directly using wget (even though he recommends against this) and go from there. So, 20 minutes later I had downloaded enough RPM’s to upgrade Plesk and hopefully Apache with it. All went well, the usually less-than-simple task of upgrading Plesk succeeded with only minor hitches. I went back to the folder with the mod_perl rpm and tried it. It failed. Same dependency. Sigh. From here I really don’t know what to do.

This is why Linux is sometimes very frustrating to me. I’ve spent two evenings trying to install Twiki and another trying to make it work. Now I’m up at 1 in the morning at a dead end.

I’ve heard the word “Wiki” enough times to make me wonder… Now, the research has begun. I’ve started by exploring what’s out there. Here is my del.icio.us bookmark page with Wiki links. Oddly enough, there isn’t much on del.icio.us about Wiki’s yet. In fact, the links I added tonight more than doubled the links available.

I also took a few minutes tonight to install a Wiki for the first time to give me somewhere to experiment. I used the same software that powers Wikipedia. I was surprised at how easy it was to set up it took me five minutes … unlike some other software that powers a certain other huge website.

More to come on Wiki’s.

Why I stick with Firefox over Safari:

Tonight I spent a few minutes creating an IceRocket Firefox Search Plug-in. Four of them actually, for searching the web, images, moblogs (photos taken on cell phones) and blogs. If you haven’t seen IceRocket yet, it’s a search engine worth checking out. I mentioned it here previously.

To install the plugins, use these links:

IceRocket Web Search

IceRocket Blogs Search

IceRocket Moblogs Search

IceRocket Images Search

Once you have it working, it will look like this:

I found a few useful links while I was working on it:

Creating Search Plugins

Search Plugin Directory (includes documentation on creating them as well)

Google Preview – add thumbnails to normal Google searches.

A blog entry by a guy who works for IceRocket

Enjoy the plugins.

I’ve been searching for a good invoicing application for OS X. There are programs out there but I’ve had a hard time finding one with a native (preferably Cocoa) interface that is simple, intuitive and nice looking. Here are the results of my search.

First, what to avoid

CG Invoicer – I’m sure this is a powerful program but the interface isn’t simple, isn’t native Mac though it tries to be–which is almost worse than not trying at all if you ask me.

TimeNet – This one comes close, but the interface is still not simple enough and it takes 3 small windows to accomplish basically one task. I prefer one main window and maybe one editing window.

Blue Box Invoices – Again, this is probably powerful software, but I just can’t bring myself to use something created entirely in FileMaker Pro. I’m not against FileMaker, but I just don’t think it’s the best tool for the job in this case.

Activity and Expense Tracker – Ahhh… big blue buttons. Enough said.

Acro Invoice – Another not-quite-native OS X invoice program. It just doesn’t look professional to me. Again, I’m not knocking the functionality of any of these programs, but I want good looks along with my smarts.

Invoice Biz – Woah. This looks like it could be the interface to a sweet early 90’s game.

SoftBooks – This is another close call, and would probably be fine for my needs. My only complaints here are that it’s pretty boring (I guess this is invoicing we’re talking about here) and I just have a gut feeling that it could be done better.

StudioEase – Again, strange custom interface.

TimeEqualsMoney – Appears to have a native OS X interface but way too crowded and the functionality seems limited.

Workbook – Decent looking, but it’s aimed squarely at the software developer. Too specific for my needs.

Studioboss – More to come on this. I’m still not ruling it out.

Second, what I created

So… after much searching I finally decided I’d have to design it myself (and have someone else program it of course). I spent a bit of time doing just that, and I think I came up with some decent Ideas – here are my sketches (click to enlarge):

After sketching on paper, I even made it as far as to open Interface Builder and dabble a bit with creating the interface. This didn’t last long, but here are the results (click to enlarge):

Finally, the fruits of my labor



After searching, designing and playing with Interface Builder, I finally came back to a program I’d seen quite awhile back but completely forgotten about. Studiometry. Basically it fits the bill. It looks great, is simple and effective and appears to be in active development. It also even looks a bit like what I was trying to get at in my designs, in a roundabout way.

After learning more about what’s available for invoicing on the Mac than I ever thought possible, I’m sold on Studiometry.

A few useful sites and tips I’ve recently found:

Better Spelling Quicker [From:What Do I Know] : Press F5 or Option+Esc to bring up an inline menu of spelling suggestions while typing in OS X Cocoa apps. Many other OS X shortcuts here [Apple.com]. Even more here [Rixstep.com].

An Alternative Search Engine with Potential [From:Doc Searls] – I’ve tried every search engine I’ve seen and so far none have come close to Google. IceRocket may just come close if you’re comparing search results alone. The thumbnails and blog search are great, useful features and with everything else on their site designed so close to Google you can hardly tell them apart, it’s a pretty good engine.

New Design Playgrounds – In addition to CSSVault, there are now CSSBeauty and Stylegala. For Flash I use Favourite Website Awards and Internet Tiny Awards.

[update 10/20/04 – added a link to additional OS X shortcuts]