Unorthodox Love

The Other Side of You

Fedora 11, you say? Hmm...

Whereas Fedora 11 is about to be released, I still can't come around after a shock caused by degradation of usability from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10 (for me, that is). Pet peeves (just a few) -

• Convoluted sound configuration that keeps Amarok, Firefox and everybody else race for the sound engine, making it unusable for some applications - and good luck figuring out which app causes what to happen;
• Brain-dead Amarok 2.0 - yeah, I can appreciate the developers' desire to "go clean", but in the process they managed to kill practically all the functionality I cared about.

Sheesh, if F11 turns out even worse, I'm going back to F9.

Android: Hands-Free Wish Coming True?

Hands-free operation was a long standing item in G2 Wishlist. Apparently, there is sufficient momentum behind it, as Google announced the creation of Eyes-Free project - while not specifically for that purpose, but close enough to be practically usable.

Let's hope it wasn't an April 1st joke.

Two Androids, Five Months: Pain Points

Overall, the phone is decent enough. But there are a few things that drive us all up the wall:

• Missed calls. You may call the phone that is next to you on the table, hear the rings, and then the voicemail prompt, and watch the phone do absolutely nothing. Missed call is not registered in the log, either. Never had this with any phone before, including two Blackberries.
• Late IMs. Sometimes, it takes up and beyond 30 minutes to deliver an instant message.
• Dropped IM Sessions. For no reason, without movement, the IM session gets terminated with "Lost connection to the server", no matter whether it is a WiFi or a Edge connection. Google, take a note - if I opened the IM session, I expect it to stay open no matter what happens to the rest of the world.
  
• Spontaneous Reboots. Sometimes triggered by ToggleWifi and Toggle Settings on turning WiFi off, but I don't blame the apps - there must be a race condition in the Android API that is not quite covered - even the stock settings changer can reboot the phone. Sometimes the reboot is truly spontaneous - arbitrary actions cause it.
• Ignored Custom Ring Tones. The correct ring tone will be used in about 50% of calls received. There is no statistically significant correlation with anything that may make the phone ignore the custom ringtone and use the default.
• Dying Background Applications. Applications like Missed Call, while being very useful, cannot be relied upon - they die for no apparent reason (don't explain the intricacies of memory management to me, I know them and don't give a damn, fix the realtime scheduler).
• Lack of Real Time Response. A phone is not a laptop, it must be instantaneous. Make it real time.

UPDATE: Corrected information about spontaneous reboots.