I recently installed Ubuntu 11.10 – Oneiric Ocelot – on my work laptop, upgrading from Ubuntu 10.10.

I had read about how many people criticised it for making Unity the default window manager, but I had expected it otherwise to be quite a straight-forward upgrade.

It turned out to be quite a nightmare, however. Basically, it seems to be an odd mixture of annoying the power users, while allowing so many errors that ordinary users cannot use the system:

• My wireless card, which had worked flawlessly in earlier versions, didn’t work out of the box. Eventually I found some advice, namely to remove bcm43xx from blacklist.conf, and it’s now working fine again, but non-techie users would probably not have worked this out.
• The built-in webcam has stopped working, and I cannot find a way to make it work (although Ubuntu 12 beta testers report it should be working there).
• After I installed Skype and minimised it, it completely disappeared, and I had to kill it and start it up again to get the window back. It turns out Skype by default is blacklisted in the notification area. It was quite easy to fix, so long as you know how to edit notification area blacklists.
• Bash autocompletion is broken, and to fix it, you need to make a change to line 1587 in the system file /etc/bash_completion.
• Different from most flavours of Linux, Ubuntu 11 assumes the computer’s internal clock is set to local time rather than UTC. To fix that, you need to edit /etc/default/rcS.
• Most of the system preferences have disappeared, so you cannot by default change the default font size, make windows get the focus on mouse-over, or many other small details that were easy before. To get the same options as before, you now need to install either gconf-editor or gnome-tweak-tool, but if you’re not aware of these tools, you’ll be seriously annoyed for a while if you don’t like the default settings.
• Synaptic is now a separate install – by default you have to use the software centre, which means that many programs are unavailable by default.
• Also T_EX Live is completely outdated – the included version is the one from 2009, not 2011, so if you’re serious about T_EX, you need to install it separately.

I’m sorry, Ubuntu people, but this just isn’t good enough. You can’t remove all the power tools but still require users to know how to edit system files by hand.

I’m hoping Ubuntu 12 will be better, but otherwise I’ll be looking for another flavour of Linux next time.

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For the past three days I’ve been working at a French company in Champs-sur-Marne, a Parisian suburb. Every day we’ve gone for lunch at a local restaurant, and it’s been a pleasant experience every time.

Today we went to quite a special place, Chez l’ Savoyard in the historical centre of Champs-sur-Marne.

At first I thought it was just a traditional little pub and restaurant.

However, when the owner spotted me, he shouted “Il est nouveau!” and rushed over to shake my hand, saying “Mon fils s’appelle Thomas aussi.” (He quickly forgot, though, and started calling me l’anglais instead!!!)

We then sat down at a table, and one of my temporary colleagues went into the kitchen to find out what was on the menu, while one of the others fetched a bottle of white wine in the bar and grabbed a bottle of crème de cassis from another table.

There were four starters to choose from – eggs mayonnaise, herring salad, charcuterie and salad Parisienne – but there was only one main course on offer: cuisse de canard.

We didn’t have to cook the food ourselves, but the starters were served by another customer who happened to be near the kitchen at that time.

The food was lovely, though – the mayonnaise was homemade, very runny and mustardy, and the duck leg was perfectly cooked.

After each course, we carried the dirty dishes back to the kitchen ourselves.

Because it was my first time there, the owner made us a special dessert – some sort of ice cream with meringue served together with a slice of custard pie. To show that I had sussed the system, I carried our dirty plates back to the kitchen.

We paid €12.50 (£10.37) each. Funnily enough, we didn’t have to work the till ourselves.

Don’t miss Chez l’ Savoyard next time you’re in Champs-sur-Marne!

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I’m sure most people read it when it came out in the 1990s, but it somehow slipped under my radar and I only discovered it now.

It’s basically a history of mainland China from 1909 to 1978, as seen through the eyes of three women: Jung Chang, her mother and her grandmother. (The title of the book is due to the Chinese word 鸿 hóng “swan goose“, which forms part of two of their names.)

It’s a really good read, and although it’s of course not a proper, objective account of Chinese history, it nevertheless gives a very good feel for what happened there, especially during the Cultural Revolution.

The only caveat I’d add is that Chang’s father was a very highly placed Communist official before the Cultural Revolution, so I think her account of the years leading up to it is likely to be too positive compared to how ordinary Chinese people experienced those years.

It’s definitely worth reading, perhaps even more now than when it was published, given how dominant the PRC has become in the World since then.

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Johanna har i en årrække arbejdet som journalist, og bogen er da også på mange måder en journalistisk reportage blandet op med lidt fiktion.

Bogen handler om deres ungarskfødte bedsteforældres kollektive selvmord, der fandt sted i København, da hun var 20 år gammel, og om hendes forsøg på forstå, hvem bedsteforældrene var, og hvorfor de valgte at ende deres dage sammen.

Man mærker, at deres selvmord for de efterladte må have virket uforståeligt, egoistisk og ukærligt. Johanna synes dog i løbet af bogen at begynde at forstå hvorfor, og måske næsten af acceptere det.

Deres død mindede mig i øvrigt om Romeo og Julie, der i en ungdomsudgave, jeg var med til at opføre som spejder, sluttede med disse linier: “Fyld koppen op til bredfuldt mål / vi begge dør med glæde, skål!”

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It’s one of his earlier books – the first copyright is 1985. However, the setting of the book (a Human-led Federation sends out star ships to explore other planets, but the explorers have to be careful not to interfere in the natural developments there) is so close to Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) that somebody must have inspired somebody else. The main difference seems to be whether the rule is called the “Prime Directive” or “Noninterference”.

Anyway, the plot of the book is more like a crime novel and not very Star Trek-y at all. The dialogues are dreadful in typical Turtledove fashion (every time a person says something, it’s explained afterwards what it means, as if he expects the reader to be completely stupid), but it’s actually quite readable.

However, one fundamental conflict in the book is between the Survey Service (also known as Starfleet in Star Trek), who think that it’s OK to observe all planets, and the Purists, who think that planets without space travel should be left well alone.

To me, that conflict sounds too academic to be realistic. There’s no economic incentive to choose between the two groups, and money normally tends to be a factor in human power struggles.

I would have thought a more realistic conflict would have been between Colonialists (mimicking 19th-century Europeans) and Observers, but that would of course have been an entirely different book.

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That’s not to say that it isn’t in many ways a good book. There are lots of wonderful passages throughout the book, but it didn’t really come together for me.

As far as I know, Lionel Shriver is childless, and she wrote Kevin at a time when she seriously had to decide whether she wanted to be a mother (she decided against it).

The book basically strikes me as being a childless person’s collection of parental horror stories – I imagine she might have been asking everybody she knew about the worst thing they had ever experienced a child do, and then strung it all together as a book.

The result is to my mind not very believable. Every simple episode strikes me as being authentic, but I don’t believe they could all have been done by the same child.

In particular, I don’t think any teenager as clever and articulate as Kevin would find it necessary to commit a school massacre – he would have so many other ways to spread havoc without having to go to gaol for anything.

However, many people have clearly found it plausible enough to enjoy it, so do read it and judge for yourself.

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I was therefore very interested when I found a book from 1991 (“Generations” by Strauss and Howe), which claims that there are types of generations, and that these types are repeated in a cycle.

In that way, Phyllis and I are part of a generation which in many ways has more in common with the people born between 1883 and 1900 (that is, those who were hit by the Great Depression when they were between 28 and 46 and for whom WWII ended when they were between 45 and 62).

And to Phyllis and me, the following quote sounds very modern: “We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, in education, in travel, in fortune – in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety.” However, it was uttered by John Adams (1735-1826), a member of our generation, just three cycles earlier.

Of course, this generational cycle idea cannot be proven, but the fact that the book is nearly twenty years old makes it more powerful, because it sounds spookily prophetic in places.

For instance, the book discusses how different generations would handle a terror attack, and bear in mind that George W. Bush was a baby-boomer (“Boomer” in this book’s terminology):

Finally, suppose the terrorists were to strike during the upcoming Crisis constellation [...]. Boomer leaders [...] would neither hide nor ponder the rumor; instead, they would exaggerate the threat [...] and tie it to a larger sense of global crisis. Unifying the nation as a community, these leaders would define the enemy broadly and demand its total defeat – regardless of the human and economic sacrifices required. (p. 375)

This following looks pretty prophetic, too:

By the late 1990s, [...] [pay] will be increasingly market-driven [...]. Year-to-year results will be rewarded more than lifetime achievement. The stars who can win, show Ruthian bravado, and fill arenas will make fantastic sums (enhanced by international bidding).

[...]

Looking for a lightning strike at success, 13ers will dart from job to job. Their mobility will discourage employers from investing in job training – or from offering pensions to new hires.

I’m not saying the book is correct in all its predictions, but it’s definitely worth a read.

I’ve not finished reading it yet, so I might blog more about it later.

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The usual crowd seem to love the new iPad, but neutral observers seem to be distinctly unimpressed (and not just because of the sanitary name).

I tend to agree.

If it’s supposed to be Apple’s netbook, it should be running MacOS, not the single-tasking OS of the iPod Touch and iPhone that is restricted to applications from Apple’s application store, and it should have at least one USB port so that you can connect a printer, a camera or a keyboard, and a monitor socket so that you can connect it to a lightpro if you’re giving a presentation.

If it’s a hand-held web browser, it should support flash (which is needed for 90% of the web games that are Marcel and Charlotte’s main reason for using a computer).

If it’s an eReader, would most people not prefer a “real” one like the Kindle which uses electronic paper instead of a back-lit LED display, especially as the iPad is only 132 pixels per inch (ppi) compared to the Kindle’s 150/167 ppi or the iPhone’s 163 ppi?

I can also see a problem with how to hold it. You typically balance a netbook on your legs or put it on a table, and you normally hold a smartphone in one hand while you operate it with the other one. Neither seems practical for the iPad: If you balance it on your legs or put it on a table, the angle is wrong for looking at the screen (and you could easily drop it if you’re using it on public transport), and if you hold it in one hand, you only have one hand to operate it with (which is not ideal for fast typing), and it could easily be snatched out of your hand.

I therefore think that most users will buy the keyboard dock and/or the iPad case, which allows the iPad to be positioned upright or at an angle (scroll down to the bottom of the page if you follow the link), but that makes it even more expensive, and even less practical to carry around.

To conclude, I really don’t think the first-generation iPad will catch on. However, Apple could easily design a very attractive second-generation device if they added a few ports, upgraded the OS and integrated the case.

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Not only will it give you the recipes for dishes you’ve encountered in restaurants, but it will also teach you how to pre-cook the sauce and the meat, so that you can cook two curries in half an hour after work.

So when the New Curry Secret was published, I bought it immediately.

I assumed it would just contain more recipes and better illustrations (the old one was a black-and-white paperback, whereas this is a proper cookbook with colour photos), but I was pleasantly surprised!

It turns out she’s moved with the times, and whereas the old Secret would advocate ground spices and food colouring, this one cheerily tells you to put in whole cinnamon and cardamom pods and leave them in, just like in the best modern restaurants.

If you only want to own one Indian cookbook, buy this one!

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The first one was When Harry Met Sally, which is probably by now a classic. It’s basically about a man and a woman who are best friends and then fall in love and about how hard the transition from friends to lovers is.

Last night we then watched Zach and Miri Make a Porno, which I had been expecting to be something along the lines of Torremolinos 73, i.e., a comedy about a couple making a porn movie to get our of a financial black hole.

However, it turned out to be much more similar to When Harry Met Sally: Again, the real story is about how a man and a woman cope with the transition from best friends to lovers.

I guess Phyllis and I find such movies more interesting than many, simply because that’s a transition we’ve made ourselves.

By the way, all three movies are good fun, and I’d recommend them all.

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