This weekend was mainly time to relax. After working most of the last two weekends I decided this was my weekend. Hopefully the array with the drive that failed will last until next weekend. If not, that's what backups are for. The doing nothing quickly turned into watching movies.
The Crow was movie #1 on Saturday. It had an awesome soundtrack, and it was good technically. The plot was a little odd being was both slow and busy at the same time, but it sets the mood well. It's about death so it already had that feel to it, but then there's the fun element that the main actor was killed while making the movie to top it off.
Movie #2 for Saturday was The 6th Day. I really like how they did the transitions, with a sort of multi-column rotation/overlay. They used a similar effect of the overlay blur during the movie which was cool too (it could be said it was overused, but it fits well with the story). The plot is interesting, although I could see how some people could call is shallow. It does keep bringing up a few ideas, with a very heavy pushing a point of view (anti-cloning). The end is an interesting twist though. It definitely fits under Thriller due to that winding the plot back and forth that seems to show up in all of them. Plus it's action, and hey, I'm a guy.
Sunday morning was church at Salem. Turns out Bjorn is leaving to get ready to go to med school so won't be the worship leader anymore. He was good and the temp people never seemed to have quite the same leading, but hopefully someone good will step in. This is the first I heard of any med school stuff, and it seems odd since he majored in CS and BTS. I hear he's going to a mormon school though, so maybe he's planning on putting that BTS degree to use converting them all. Anyways, hope the best for him.
The first movie for Sunday was PCU. A funny movie, plus it has everyone wanting to kill David Spade. A good one to just laugh at.
After that finally got around to watching Requiem for a Dream. Reminded me a lot of Trainspotting but without the happy ending. He did a good job of having things appear from the point of view of the people in the story. However it is Darren Aronofsky, who seems to have a style of giving as little information as possible at the time, and you figure out how it ties together later. A good film though.
That left a few hours left on Sunday evening, so I figured since the trend seems to be to redesign websites lately, I decided to get in on it. For the most part the biggest change is the the light grey blocks with black text. Unless you're using Netscape 4 for some crazy reason, in which case you're lucky if you got this far. On the backend I converted almost everything to CSS, and eliminated most tables. There's still a few I need to convert, but I figured I'd get the basics done first. I didn't originally intend to make it look different, but it was so easy while I was in there that I did. If you're using a gecko-based browser or one that supports CSS3 (sorry Safari and IE users) you even get rounded borders and stuff. And before you comment about anti-aliasing, they're not images but CSS, so that's your browser doing that. I only tested in Firefox on OS X (and sorta Safari), but it is valid XHTML. Let me know if something looks broken though and if it's something standards compliant to fix it I may consider it.
I saw a picture of the new iPods last weekend. I think Apple released them earlier this week, but the truth is I haven't been paying attention and don't really care. It didn't take long to make me totally decide against them, and not for the fact they look bad (although white isn't my thing), but the usability. Now I know the iPod UI is always praised for being so great, but I think that's maybe more the appearance of being so simple and easy to use. It's the same thing as the one button mouse. This is not necessarily a rip on the iPod (which is likely a decent portable music player even if I'm unlikely to ever own one), but the whole trend of user interfaces.
Our society had become obsessed with making things appear simple and featureless in the name of being chic. Apple is one of the key examples in technology, but especially in the general sense, they are not alone. I will say that visually their stuff does look good. It has been said that there is one intuitive user interface and all else is learned, and that statement is very true. Our world is complex, and society demands things to do more than expected, the expected growing quickly with increasing price. The flip side is it's expected to be "simple". Show someone two devices with equal functionality with, one with 20 buttons and one with 5, and people (well, non-geeky people) will pick the one with 5 buttons. The reason will be "because it's simpler".
Lets say that device is a digital music player. Now, the one with 20 buttons you want to turn on, so you hit the power button. Now the immediate comeback is the play button probably turns on the 5 button device. That's very true, but think for a second why you immediately think that. If you have used an iPod the reason is obvious. Lets say you were the first person to see the iPod - still sorta seems to make intuitive sense, right? Have you maybe used a portable CD player or VCR before though? In fact, you've probably grown up with them most you your life, and don't remember trying to figure them out for the first time. That can be pushed further to say how did you identify the play (or power for that matter) button? Insert something about standards and people learning and knowing them here... We'll throw out the thoughts about what if you don't want the music to start right away and things along that line for now.
At this point you're probably thinking I'm a ranting nutcase I won't argue that here, but will say the above has become a reasonable shortcut for the average target of most any music product due to people getting used to it. Lets say however that you want to adjust the volume on these same two devices. The 20 button one you hit the volume up or down button. The 5 button this function is on a "soft key" that changes it's function to be context sensitive. At this stage it's simple to figure out for your target audience (on the iPod it works like the volume knob on your previously used devices). Pretty simple and it wouldn't be bad if this was the device's only function.
We're talking digital music players in this example though, so it's likely you'll want to select a song. The player of your choice has a menu. You can go navigate the menu using either a joystick or direction pad or the soft buttons/wheel. Now lets say you're in the middle of browsing through the list and the song you have playing finishes up and the next song starts, which just happens to be very loud. Now you can go on about volume normalization and stuff, but lets say you just want to turn down the volume. On they 20 button device you push the volume down button. How many key presses does it take on the 5 button device? Can you do it without loosing your place in the playlist you were browsing? People adapt, and things like the iPod have a very well engineered interface to make the above as non-intrusive as possible. However this goes along the same lines as why your computer/OS is almost always more stable than the alternatives - humans change to suit available resources and needs without even realizing it.
These interfaces can have an advantage - they allow gradual learning (more complex functions are more advanced things, easy escape back to known space if you get lost) and tend to stick. For a personal device (at least semi-known state) and one used routinely it actually sorta makes sense. For casual or one time use though, it can be a hassle. Those that have been over to my place know my setup for movies and music. While I know what every knob and button does, it's unlikely that anyone else does or even cares. Unless you're planning on pulling out the SPL meter and test disc and tweaking the system you probably don't care either. However people look at it and think "complex" and "I could never figure that out". Other people do use it though, and without my help too. Lets say you want to listen to a CD. The process is push CD, and push play. Not too impressive as other systems have that too.
Now lets say you want to watch a DVD. Go through the process of putting the DVD in as you would in any other player. Press DVD, push the power on the projector, and press play. For the average home setup these days, this process after putting in the DVD involves pushing power on the TV, pushing the input button repeatedly until the DVD input is selected, and doing the same with the source button on the home theater in a box receiver until the DVD sound is selected. While most people manage to figure out their own system, I always find it interesting when a non-techie goes to another person's place, or then the owner of the place calls complaining that someone was just visiting and they need help getting it back to the consistent state after the person managed to push every button a random number of times thus resulting needing to understand the system to reset it. I'll admit the single button "go to the next thing" makes it look cooler (and is usable on fully integrated installed systems - again overall UI design), but it's not as usable until you get used to it.
I've started noticing it more lately since I've been jumping around to so many diverse systems (in computers alone, my average day now involves using 3 different operating systems over a wide range of computer speeds and connection latencies and with completely different interface and usage styles). I think it's more noticeable watching others who are new to an interface try something though. I say start watching for it though. Especially those who work at a Help Desk - watch how people who are using something new to them interact with it. Then realize how bad most user interfaces are until you're used to them. Be glad you already have figured out how to use technology, probably through a good chunk of your life. And think twice about it next time you see an older person using a computer. While people who really try can almost always pick it up without a problem, think of what kind of crap they're dealing with when it comes to computer UIs.
Today was another work from the couch day. Although that was preceeded by work from the hard wooden benches since the little kids invaded the couches. Oh well, was still a lot nicer than the office, as it was a reasonable temperature. It got hot out today. I don't like when it hits the 90s in MN, as it's just too humid. A few months ago down south I would go spend all day outside in 90+ degree weather, but unfortunately we get humidity here. I did finally totally eliminate BETHEL_DOM today. Hopefully that'll cause less confusion, and creates a more stable and reliable architecture. I'm just glad our new architecture allows us to create central authorities better, as all the server renames mean people try to impersonate old ones (or name their computers things close like aval0n). Hopefully I can test and eliminate even more broadcast traffic by the time school starts. Other things today included finally cleaning up orphaned home directories after two account creations failed within a couple hours due to unknown home directories already existing. And this is the slow time, with only a few new accounts a day...
After work was movie night. As Dave mentioned we were geeking it up ahead of time, with even Ross joining in on keeping his nose in the laptop. The movie was So I Married an Axe Murderer. Good movie, if you thought you were too good to join us you missed a good time.
After the movie I started poking around with StumbleUpon as mentioned on Dave's site. It's an interesting idea, although it quickly served to point out how many web sites there are that just suck. That toolbar is huge too. Being bugged by the toolbar pushed me to start tweaking my desktop environment a bit. I started tweaking the dock a bit, and figured out how to get it smaller than the GUI will let you. I don't see why they limit the minimum icon size to 16 pixels (I'm used to my entire menu bar being 16 pixels high on a much higher res screen). No luck on changing the hide delay speed, so it'll have to stay visible rather than autohide for my sanity. No luck changing the menu bar or window title bar height either. Any thoughts there? I'd like them about half their default height... I did start setting up keyboard shortcuts, we'll see what that does. Started changing what appears in the finder windows and things. I noticed an interesting tendency to have options dupicated and some not really do what's intended. I also am not sure I like the duplicated roles regarding window management. It's sorta weird to be able to switch windows without quartz-wm running. Also killing the window manager really shouldn't make you log out, but whatever. I did poke around with delays on the backlight sensing to increase the delay (preventing screen activity from fooling it). Also finally got around to going and turning off that crazy backlight. It's a cool novelty thing, but sorta an annoying distraction to be able to see your keyboard when working in a darker environment. Ah whatever, I'm starting to get closer to the fence on whether it's worth trying to tweak OS X or just switch to linux where I can make my desktop responsive...
It's sorta nice that all the big "gotta do during an outage at time i" stuff is done for the summer. It leaves a little bit of an annoyance though, as now I have all these things that are "gotta do anytime between times o an k", and times o and k are widely separated. I need to just sit down and plan them out, but between just being glad the other stuff is done, being tired of working on that, and wanting to do mindless stuff for a bit, yea...
The last couple days I've been just trying to catch up on all sorts of little things, in between telling people to go read other things and that other things are not really broken and to try the correct way. I get that after every upgrade, it's a balance between not telling people too much so they blame everything on it and trying to pass it off as a minor upgrade, and making it sound important enough that people read everything. Unfortunately we tend to have to make enough last minute changes due to outside input (like we could have used those dates on the schedule you gave us two months ago), combined with the fact that everybody's dates conflict and we can't announce dates in advance or people will manage to convince someone that we really need to reschedule to some other point which will inconvenience more people (but ones who haven't complained to a lot of people yet since they got blindsided by the change). Oh well, such is academia. At this point I'm taking the approach of " need sleep, send me an Incident and I might look at it tomorrow."
Today was hot. Very hot. And apparently the HVAC was broken in the CC building. So almost the entire server team relocated to another building for half the day. And they wonder why we all asked for laptops and wireless access points all over campus. :) But yea, chalk up one more reason why we prefer email and Incidents to the phone. Laying back on a cool leather couch is very preferable to sitting in an average office chair in a hot and humid office. It's supposed to be warmer tomorrow. I doubt they fixed anything since it probably just wasn't keeping up (it does this ever summer, hence the prior planning with laptops), so I wonder what I'll have for an office tomorrow.
The weekend was too short and too long at the same time. Too long because I was working most of it, and tired the rest. Too short as I didn't get to fix the second problem listed above. I think things went reasonably well despite a few crashes and replanning half of the things that happened. And those numbers that don't seem to match up... While I spent a night rebuilding my dad's machine, which i think I'm finally done with for a while. I actually had time to watch some movies too. One of those too tired to do anything involving thinking, but sleeping would just mess me up further things.
Dreamcatcher (the 2003/Stephen King version) is a decent flick. It does get a little crazy towards the end, although I hear the book is much better so I may have to read that. Whoever recommended that to me did a decent job. As opposed to Serendipity - whoever recommended that one should be glad it's been long enough that I don't remember who it was. Cinematography was decent, with some interesting effects in places. The plot on the other hand had me pretty bored the whole way through - another one where I was checking how much time was left on the DVD a couple times (and glad it was only 90 minutes). If you like the same kind of movies I like, this is one to avoid.
"Apparently can't trust Windows Server 2003 farther than I can throw it. And it's bolted into a rack."
That's what I typed into the windows downtime manager when it asked me why it was unexpectedly shut down earlier tonight - because it locked up. It pretty well describes how I'm feeling about it right now. For some reason one of the domain controllers doesn't seem to want to quite authenticate with the other and sync because the load is high. The load is high because of the migration tool, which was running on both. In defense of 2003, I think some of it may be caused by the domain which is going away, which was acting a little goofy today. I had to demote a domain controller to even connect in a mode where I could transfer accounts off of it. Now that the one migration is running, I apparently need to wait until it's finished to do the others. Oh well, should take long enough I can sleep without worrying about it finishing too early. I also get to run some other processes on the accounts while waiting for the roaming profiles to transfer (the accounts themselves finished long ago).
At the rate it's going, I just hope it finishes by late evening on Saturday, otherwise it's gonna be interesting as I'll have to move schedules around. I think I have some classifications of users I can stage groups on though (given we have a bunch of "likely-not-eligible-but-we-don't-want-to-track-them-down-right-now" accounts, those can be last on the list). At least the systems seem to be responding reasonably well the one is up and stable.
OK, so I've been busy and tired. You probably had enough to read here anyways. Been more of the same since, getting ready for the weekend. Moved 150 accounts tonight since they needed to be up and running for the weekend. That brings the count for the weekend down to something like 6853, so not much of a dent. Hopefully it'll be set and forget though, and I won't have to watch it much. I'll be glad when the Windows stuff is just done. I've been moving and updating polices and working with Ross and stuff. I had forgotten how many different policies we have set just so that things stay consistent and we don't have to worry about people accidentally forgetting or breaking things. I guess that's sorta the intent of them though.
I stumbled across this picture/article tonight.
OK, so I'm not that obstinate about it. Besides, it gave me a chance to exercise my web skills. This one may be a long one, so I'll be nice to you on it.
This was big summer migration weekend #2, also known as Usonia2 and FS go away. Yea, it wasn't fun. Next weekend is actually more accounts (we have over 7000 student accounts now, as opposed to like 500 faculty accounts). Yea, the last time I did an audit of students was a couple years ago. Cleaning up account in the past was work (not it's quite simple), but I figure unless I have a reason (like someone being an idiot with their access), and if it's not a drain on the system (last cleanup was an emergency disk full situation), they "paid $20,000 to go here" and I'll be nice even if they technically aren't eligible. Or maybe I'm just lazy... Anyways, this weekend resulted in many annoyances, and some cool things. Read on.
Rants
Cool Stuff
I think it's time to wrap it up. I think I may have beat Austin. And it was only partially a "what I did" entry. And if you check this out I even did it nicely (I messed up the main page a few days ago with a different entry). I do need sleep though...
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
