therning.org/ magnus

I think everybody nowadays has had to deal with a help desk of some sort. I bet everyone has become somewhat frustrated with the way help desks treat their users (i.e. you and me). They don’t keep any sort of history, e.g. every time you call you’ll find yourself talking to someone who you’ve never talked to before and you have to explain your entire case/problem all over again. If they accept emails then it’s via their own web form, just to make sure you can’t quote them without copy-pasting from your email client to your web browser. Of course they do this to discourage you to press the matter any further.

Just recently I had to deal with the UPC help desk. They had made an error in the bill they sent (their billing department is infamous in the Netherlands) and I needed to make them deduct about €80. I found out that I can’t call them from the UK, probably due to the 0900 number their help desk has. After a short call to their ordering line, where I was rudely told that I had a problem and they couldn’t help me, I had no option but to use the web form. Previous experience interacting with their help desk through the web form had left me discouraged to say the least, but I had no choice. Pay €80 to much or endure the web form? Not a difficult choice! Then I came up with the Help Desk Game.

The rules are easy. You use the web form to send in a “mail” every day, until you receive your first reply. Chances are every “mail” will be answered by a different person, who doesn’t know about the other “mails” you’ve sent. This means you should receive one answer for every “mail” you send in. Then you collect all answers and keep score to see what side wins. It’s a marvellous little game that definately helps to push your help desk experience from please-let-me-die-now to a-coma-would-be-nice. You might survice the latter you know ;-).

As I mentioned I recently played the game with the UPC help desk as unknowing opponents. The outcome? The game lasted four days, hence I sent four “mails”. I came out as a clear winner, 3 to 1 in my favour (i.e. there was one help desk drone who claimed that UPC had made no error and I had to pay the full amount on my bill, despite my having cancelled the subscriptions the month before, amazing!).

I am not too fond of Gnome’s volume manager (GVM). I still use it, but for one of my sticks it doesn’t quite suffice, at least not for my current use of that stick. GVM doesn’t seem to handle USB sticks with multiple partitions that well (it mounts all partitions as well as the basic device), it doesn’t mount them with nice names (for FAT partitions it seems to take the volume name, nice, but ext2 doesn’t have a volume name). I’ve put two partitions on my USB stick, one FAT and one ext2. The first one I use for moving files between work and home, since I’m forced to use Windows at work The second one is where I put my important things, GNUPG keys, lists of passwords for different places, etc. I simply don’t trust FAT that much so the option of having one big FAT partition with a file mount on a loop device didn’t give me the same warm and fuzzy feeling as two separate partitions.

Just popping the stick in will most likely cause GVM to mount it for you. Unmount it using the right mouse button then throw up a terminal. This is what I did to find the required information on my USB stick:

$ udevinfo -q path -n /dev/sda
/block/sda
$ udevinfo -a -p /sys/block/sda | less

Look for a an entry the looks like this SYSFS{serial}="070B000514B09F0". Now you know enough to set up your udev rule. I don’t like modifying system files so I created a new one /etc/udev/rules.d/local.rules and put the following line in it:

BUS="usb", SYSFS{serial}="070B000514B09F0", KERNEL="sd*", \
  NAME="%k", SYMLINK="usbstick_priv%n"

This means that when my USB stick is inserted a few symlinks will be created, one for the device (usbstick_priv to sdX) and one for each partition (usbstick_priv1 to sdX1, etc). Pretty nice, I think, since it doesn’t matter what X is. Then I use pmount to mount the partitions using the link names:

pmount /dev/usbstick_priv1 mystick_1
pmount /dev/usbstick_priv2 mystick_2

More information can be found in the document titled Writing udev rules.

We made our first visit to Nando’s today, after seeing Episode III. The restaurant is located next to the cinema in the Cambridge Leisure Park. Besides that there seems to be no free parking it’s a reasonably good location.

The food is OK, nothing to write home about, but definately good enough for another visit. Especially when considering the price. Unless your extremely hungry–hungry enough to eat a whole chicken– you’ll find the prices to be between £5 and £7. The drinks are bottomless and you can get bottomless icecream as well

What they serve is chicken. There is one steak dish on the menu, but it’s there with a disclaimer–not all Nando’s restaurants offer it! We had chicken, Dita took the quarter grilled chicken, hot, I had the chicken pita, lemon and herb. Hot is reasonably hot, Dita could probably have handled the extreme without with too much problems. They also have hot peri-peri-based sauces for added spicyness. We spent £13.65 for us both, with drinks, no desert.

Technically speaking this probably doesn’t qualify as a quote. I heard this on one of the extras on the Cat in The Hat DVD:

What is the difference between capitalism and communism?

In capitalism men exploits men. In communism it’s quite the opposite.

Ever since I tried out a NeXT-based theme I’ve loved having both an up- and down-stepper at the bottom of every scrollbar. I’ve liked this so much that I’ve regularly discarded GTK2 themes that look awesome simply because they didn’t have this little usability feature.

The other day I took a quick look at the Lush theme, which does have the two steppers. I’ve always suspected GTK2 is brilliant and now I know. I found the following lines in the theme:

GtkScrollbar::has_backward_stepper = 1
GtkScrollbar::has_secondary_forward_stepper = 0
GtkScrollbar::has_forward_stepper = 1
GtkScrollbar::has_secondary_backward_stepper = 1

Basically it looks like the standard theme engine can handle up to four steppers, and each can be visible or not. Brilliant! Now I only need to modify my favourite theme (Simple) adding those lines to it. I don’t like modifying system files, so adding the lines to the file in /usr/share/themes/ wasn’t very appealing. After asking on the Gnome-Love mailing list I found out that one file where I could modify all themes is ~/.gtkrc-2.0. So, this is now the full contents of that file:

style "default"{
  GtkScrollbar::has_backward_stepper = 1
  GtkScrollbar::has_secondary_forward_stepper = 0
  GtkScrollbar::has_forward_stepper = 1
  GtkScrollbar::has_secondary_backward_stepper = 1
}

This works fine for the Simple theme since it doesn’t explicitly set any of those variables itself. The theme Lush however does set those variables and the theme will override the user’s own settings. Using strace on a GTK2 application it’s easy to see that the theme settings are loaded after the user’s. There also doesn’t seem to be any user-specific file loaded after the theme itself, so I’m still wondering how a user can override the settings of a theme.

A colleague was complaining about the usefulness of a piece of software and compared it to the usefulness of a chocolate teapot. Being sad IT people we immediatedly started discussing whether a chocolate teapot is as useless as the saying goes. Google saved us from debating into the night with this article. I guess we now can conclude that chocolate teapots really are useless. At least when it comes to holding tea…

After living the last five years in Holland, where EU hardly ever is questioned, I find it great to be back in a country where most peopleseem to have a healthy level of scepticism to what happens in Brussels.

The latest thing here in the UK is the attempt to remove the opt-out scheme John Major negotiated for the 48-hour working week. Besides labelling EU the “nanny super state” they do bring up some quite good arguments against removing it. The flexible labour market being the strongest, I think. Personally I find it interesting that instead of addressing the rigid local markets in France (touted the source of all evil in EU here and Germany they instead try to impose the same rules on the rest of the member countries. (According to a French colleague I have this is the strategy France has followed all along in EU.) The British are also worried about the costs of enforcement, something that the other EU countries don’t seem to mind–could it be because they don’t enforce it? (I have to admit I’ve never heard anything about enforcement of this when I was working in Sweden or Holland.)

Apparently this is introduced by unionists. They think that by removing the opt-out it will increase the health and well-being of the British. What they seem to miss is the trends you find in the EU countries. As always people will find ways around this. In all countries where it’s hard to fire people you can see an increase in consultants. It makes more economic sense to hire an expensive consultant and know for sure that he can be let go, rather than hiring someone permanently and pay through the nose when you have to bring out the axe. Talk about a decrease in job security! Forcing a 48-hour week upon the British whould probably have a similar effect, since self-employed people are exempt we would see a dramatic increase in self-employed consultants. Job security would take another hit!

Well, there is some hope since the new member states don’t seem too keen on creating a rigid labour market making it harder for them to catch upwith the older members.