The Ringtail

While I’m in a blog editor – tasksapp has now registered users in double figures! I’m still waiting for feedback to come in for the most part (although thanks to a couple of folks who’ve already given me some ideas), but it’s exciting that people are interested enough to ask for a log-in at this stage. The interesting thing I’ve found is that most of the suggestions made so far are ones that I will definitely implement, but that I don’t think I’d ever have thought of. It’s interesting how different my perception of the software is from other people, and I’m sure there will be lots more changes to make as I’m exposed to new and better ways of approaching how it works.

I know the world and his dog have been writing about Google+ in the last few weeks, so forgive me for adding to the pot. I can see a lot of pluses and minuses, and my jury is honestly out on whether I will ever really be a ‘user’ of Google+, but one thing becomes abundantly clear: there are now way too many of these types of services.

Don’t get me wrong, choice can be a great thing, but the problem with social services is that everyone has to use the same one for it to be truly valuable – Google+, Facebook or Twitter would be utterly pointless without any connections to share with. In this world, choice is bad because the best service will be the one that most of your friends are on. You may think Zuckerberg is evil, or that Twitter is too full of celebs, but while you have friends that you value online interaction with on those services, you can’t leave.

There have been attempts to get round this. TweetDeck (and some others) allows you to write one message and send it to many services at once, and will also aggregate messages from your friends on other services in one window. Sign up to them all and then let the client software do the work to keep you in touch with everyone. But this is only a hack; as anyone who follows more than a handful of people one all services will know, there’s nothing worse than getting multiple copies of someone’s messages as they are now telling all their social networks what they had for breakfast in one go. There is a special place reserved in hell for those who are actually copying and pasting messages to all services – really, you are not that important.

The problem is not really with any one service – despite what Facebook’s detractors may have you believe – it’s that none of them allow you to venture outside their closed garden and engage with others.

Google+ is making steps in the right direction. Circles are a great way to manage lots of people and only send messages to those you want to see them. Leaving aside the fact that the service still relies on everyone moving in before its truly useful there are other issues to be resolved – what if you send a message slagging off your boss to only a close group of friends, but one of them shares that with a circle that includes your boss? Caveat Emptor in spades.

StatusNet is looking even more promising in that it provides a framework for people to create networks for small groups of people, but then allows you to cross-subscribe. If I use identi.ca and someone else uses another service we can still subscribe to each other. It does rely on everyone using the same underlying framework, but then so do the web, email, SMS, et al. If all the social networks could decide on a standardised message and subscription format then everyone would be free to use the service they prefer, but also to communicate and share with users in other services. We do it with email and texting – everyone has a unique identifier (email address or mobile number) and anyone who knows it can send them a message. While social networking services merely aim to ring-fence and divide users we can safely assume that the battle is for eyeballs to monetize rather than a genuine desire to allow people to socialise. And that’s a shame.

I have decided to go for putting all notes in the new app into a database format. While I love the idea of working directly from the file system, I have a suite of reusable classes that I can use to create nice URLs and route them to show notes from a database query. I have now set this up and got a couple of test notes in place and working. Part of the rewrite plan is that I will be able to set up a RESTful interface to the database and then wire that into a PyGTK interface for a desktop client as well. Small steps though… Next steps are to write a set of routines to take a folder of text files and import them to the database. 

Had a good 3 or 4 hours on the new app last night and have now got it set up so that I can log in and out, can read a folder of text files and show the nested hierarchy, and click on filenames to load them in to view. I’ve opted to use the filesystem to store the files, but it feels a little clunky now that I’ve set it up so I may refactor to use a database and a prettier URL scheme. As long as I have an import/export function from the start that should work.

Most of my files are in Markdown format so I’ve used a Markdown PHP script to convert files for display. This gets round the need to have any kind of rich-text editing ands storing to implement basic formatting, which appeals to me.

Next steps:

- implement edit function to be able to edit the current file
- use JQuery to make the file structure hierarchy collapsable
- write an import function to take a folder of text files into the database
- write an export function to get them back out

I have had a perennial issue with printing to work printers through my linux laptop. I have been printing to our work printer just fine for a couple of months, but a recent move to Ubuntu left me unable to connect again. I have had mixed results with this over the years, and the problem seems to affect some distros and not others – the problem is:

- open the ‘Printers’ config app
- use the ‘browse for SAMBA share’ option
- find the printer
- enter my credentials and click to verify them
- dialog comes up to say “This print share is not accessible”

Now, a search on Google turns up many, many results, most of which relate to getting a home Windows printer visible to Linux, and none of which will solve my particular problem. Linux Mint used to be great in that it would always connect even when Ubuntu or Debian wouldn’t, but even Mint failed this time. I resolved to fix this once and for all this week.

When I browse to the printer using the printer admin UI, I can see the printer, but the name it is populating into the name field is wrong. Say the share is called “my printer share” – the name that is brought over to the config window is “my20printer20share”. It’s trying to put a “%20″ in place of the space, but “%” is a disallowed character so it doesn’t come across. And “my20printer20share” is not validating as it is the wrong name. Root of the problem found, but no way to fix as I can’t enter the space characters using the printer admin tool.

The solution is to use the CUPS web interface. Here are the steps I took to get things working:

- Work through the process of adding a printer using the printer admin GUI, then copy out the name that is populated from browsing for the printer
- cloce the admin gui and open a web browser
- go to http://localhost:631 to see the CUPS admin interface
- select the ‘administration’ tab
- click the ‘add printer’ button
- select ‘Windows Printer via SAMBA’ then click ‘continue’
- paste the address you copied in step 1, but add a “%” in front of each “20″ – all spaces are then encoded correctly as “%20″ (in the example above – “smb://my%20printer%20share”)
- go through the rest of the steps and you should have a fully working printer

I hope this helps someone else get things working – this has been bugging me for ages on and off but I’m sure that this has been the root cause of it all along.