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X11: Blessing or Curse?

(For those of you unfamiliar with what X11 is, it’s essentially the protocol Unix/Linux systems use to control their interfaces. For more information, as always, Wikipedia is your friend.)

As you may or may not know, Mac OS X includes an X11 server, no doubt in deference to its Unix roots. This is perceived by many to be a Good Thing™, as one can run all of one’s favourite graphical Unix applications on a Mac with the minimum of reprogramming required. The bevy of developers writing open source applications (free in whatever sense of the word you like) for the various Unices can produce Mac versions and we, the Mac users, can download and use them. The GIMP on your Mac: check. OpenOffice on your Mac: check. All through the beauty of the X11 server. You get all the fruits of open source software development right there on your Mac.

Unfortunately, you also get all the fruits of Unix open source interface designers right there on your Mac.

It is a well-documented phenomenon that interface design and usability in general of open-source software tends to be bad. Like really bad. Similarly unfortunate, albeit in a slightly different way, its conventions are very different to those of a Mac. On a Mac, you press ⌘+W to close a window: when running an X11 application, this tries to shut down the X11 server. While this does at least prompt you when you have applications using the server, it’s not overly pleasant.

So what’s my point with all of this? I suppose my point is that, while having an X11 server included with OS X is probably a good thing overall in that it allows me to get hold of decent (and free) image processing and office applications, it’s also something of a problem in that it makes it too easy for open source developers to produce lazy ports of their applications, leaving us with clunky apps which just don’t feel “Maccy” (both of the applications I’ve mentioned previously, plus many others). So my message to all the thousands of developers of high-profile Unix software (ahem) my message is this: if you’re going to produce an OS X port of your application, please take the effort to make it a good one, make it fit in with the OS X conventions and themes (look, Apple have produced reams and reams of documentation about this) and make it really feel like a Mac application. Do this and I will love you forever.

Likes and dislikes

I currently like:

I currently dislike:

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Linux gaming

This is Tux. With a railgunI made a discovery today: Linux isn’t inherently bad for gaming. Two things have helped me realise this: the first is Darwinia, the second is Doom 3.

First off, Darwinia. You might have heard of it, you might not: it’s certainly not the huge headline-grabber that titles like Grand Theft Auto 3 are (seeing as the game came out in 2001 and is still courting controversy, even if it is just a cheap play for votes), but it’s an interesting game that’s managed to sneak in under the radar. If you’re into RTS games, download the demo and have a play: if you’re not, just take my word for it that it’s very original and worryingly entertaining. Even more impressive, it has a Linux demo. Assuming you’ve got 3D hardware acceleration enabled (which I achieved fairly speedily with the help of this guide) it installs and runs very happily and doesn’t require you to log in as the root account (he says, aiming a glare at Windows software).

Having thus introduced myself to Linux gaming, I remembered that a Linux binary for Doom 3 had been released (comprehensive documentation and everything) so I decided to have a pop at it. I downloaded the binary, executed it, created a few symlinks (that’s “shortcuts” to you Windows types) to the game data files in my Windows installation and set ‘er rolling. The game ran like a charm, even placing my savegames into a .doom3 subdirectory in my home directory in true Linux style.

What really impressed me was that the performance was on a par with (if not better than) the performance I was getting under Windows. I’m not fully sure why I was expecting poor performance: perhaps I was implicitly assuming that a more modular system would necessarily be a slower system: seems I was wrong. Sadly, however, the vast majority of PC games these days are written using Microsoft’s DirectX libraries rather than the OpenGL libraries, thus restricting the portability of those games: id and Epic are the only major companies who pay any great attention to Linux as a gaming platform. This is a great shame.

On the plus side, once this PC is no longer adequate for games I’ll probably replace it with either a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 2 – depending on which is better – and not have to worry about it any more. My work needs will, of course, be served by the PowerBook that I haven’t got yet.

More adventures in networking

I shall try not to make this too ranty, but in my further experiments with wireless networking I’ve found some issues. Will attempt not to dwell on them, but forgive me if I get a little tetchy.

So, I already had a wireless setup something akin to this diagram (which I quickly knocked up in Visio after discovering that attempting to explain networks to people in words is kinda tricky), where the wireless link connected the computers downstairs (including our cable modem and SmoothWall router) to my box upstairs. All well and good, you say. However, there are a couple of problems with this:

So, the plan was to arrange the network more like this diagram here, which should be reasonably transparent as a couple of standard wired networks connected by a wireless link. This has the advantages that:

I did encounter (as one always does with these computer things) some problems. The first one was that WPA doesn’t work when bridging (connecting one access point to another). I’m afraid I haven’t brushed up on my cryptography recently, but this strikes me as a spectacularly dumb effect. I am therefore forced to use WEP, which has been known to be broken for some time now. This problem was easily circumvented with the knowledge that at least two of my neighbours use unencrypted wireless networks, hence I only have to outrun the halfling. It’s harsh, it’s bordering on evil, but hey…

The other problem is an interesting one: at around 3 o’clock today, after a certain amount of tweaking the access points to improve security (telling them not to accept connections from wireless clients, that kind of thing) I suddenly lost connectivity. Assuming I’d broken the configuration somehow, I spent the next few hours fiddling with setting after setting to try and fix it, all to no avail. Later, with some help from my father and a lot of wires trailing around the house, we discovered that the problem was to do with a laser printer. It turns out that, when turned on, a laser printer makes a remarkably effective wireless jamming device (NSA take note). This is quite possibly the most random technical problem I’ve ever had the misfortune to have to fix. It’s fixed now, however, and I submit this epic blog post as proof.

Thank you.

Addendum: bouncing grannies!

Experiments in Linux

Tux, the Linux penguinHello everyone. My name’s David, and I’m a Linux user.

Yes, it’s true. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been spending the majority of time with The Other Operating System, only dipping my toes into the Teletubby-blue waters of Windows for an occasional play of Full Spectrum Warrior (the only game I know to be able to include the line “Charlie thirty-two, this is Charlie niner-zero, please confirm objective, over” and not sound silly). A significant chunk of the apps that I use regularly are cross-platform anyway (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice…) and the rest have reasonable substitutes under Linux (AMSN for my instant messaging needs, vi for my text editing, etc). I may also have a shot at using Eclipse for PHP development, courtesy of Ben saying it’s rather shiny.

There is, however, one gaping hole in my Linux application portfolio. That’s a really good media player.

Maybe I’ve been spoiled a little under Windows - I’ve got Winamp and iTunes, both of which support nice things like a persistent music library with ratings, play statistics and, importantly, dynamic playlist generation. iTunes will stream music over the local network (astoundingly useful when at college) and Winamp has insane levels of customisability.

Linux has xmms. This is a media player which does what it does perfectly well - sadly, what it does is roughly comparable with what Winamp 2.8 did. This isn’t a good thing, especially when one has a 6 gigabyte MP3 collection and wants to play only a selection of it (say, anything less than 6 months old which I gave a 3-star or higher rating). Not easy to do.

I have, as a result, revived a past liaison with Last.FM. It’s rather shiny - in essence, it’s an Internet radio station which streams music to you. This much isn’t so special, as there are many other Internet radio stations. However, as you rate the songs it plays for you, it learns your tastes. This means that, while it will occasionally do something silly like play Macy Gray at you, it eventually ends up playing music which is attuned pretty damn well to your tastes. I shall keep listening to it until I get back to college, whereupon I will no doubt defect back to Windows for the purposes of listening to a selection of 30-odd iTunes network shares. I’m shallow like that.