Obviously, I think this is a good move. To recap switching to Yahoo for search would have alienated users because it’s a worse search engine, but more important would have overwritten people’s existing experience on upgrade.

In an email to the ubuntu-devel mailing list titled “Follow up to Default Search Provider Changes for 10.04” Rick Spencer writes:

Each release we determine the best default web browser and the best default search engine for Ubuntu. When choosing the best default search provider, we consider factors such as user experience, user preferences, and costs and benefits for Ubuntu and the browsers and other projects that make up Ubuntu. Up until Ubuntu 9.10 these defaults have always been Firefox and Google. Earlier in the 10.04 cycle I announced that we would be changing the default search provider to Yahoo!, and we implemented that change for several milestones.

However, for the final release, we will use Google as the default provider. I have asked the Ubuntu Desktop team to change the default back to Google as soon as reasonably possible, but certainly by final freeze on April 15th.

It was not our intention to “flap” between providers, but the underlying circumstances can change unpredictably. In this case, choosing Google will be familiar to everybody upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 and the change will only be visible to those who have been part of the development cycle for 10.04.

All thanks the Ubuntu Masters!

Don’t Downgrade the Experience

He quotes Rick Spencer, Canonical:

No, this will effect [sic] upgrades if the computer is currently set to Google. This is not because of anything special for this particular change. This is because Ubuntu always changes to new defaults for users who are on old defaults.

Once I’ve installed software, it’s no longer “defaults”, it’s my experience. Any change to the experience better be to improve the experience, otherwise you jeopardize alienating me and your other customers.

It Can’t be About Money

The search engine in Firefox is Google because it’s the best (of the infants).

In my co-worker Noël Jackon’s post today “Art First”

I respect Jay-Z for his music, but love the man for his words.

via YouTube - “NY-Z” – An ABSOLUT Collaboration with Jay-Z.

At the Jay-Z saysat the 11:30 mark “it can’t be about money. There has to be something in there that is true to both sides. … when the align … At the end of the day no one loses when it’s like that.”

Stay true to yourself, and true to your customers.

I’m Staying Hopeful

Ubuntu has hugely help make Linux and open source flavors many more people can enjoy.

I’m staying hopeful that Ubuntu will stay focus on their customers’ experience!

In the meantime, I’m also staying pragmatic and swallowing bitter proprietary medicine everyday.

Having Fun

My co-worker Alex “Viper” today shared this parody of Jay-Z “Empire State of Mind” titled “Galactic Empire State of Mind” by College Humor:

Customers’ care about one thing, a good experience.

April 8th Update: Yahoo will not be the default search engine in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Related article “Ubuntu Linux Still Searching Google“

I’ll likely never start up Windows again, but I’d like to have it available just in case my need becomes great in this Windoze world. Re-partitioning later could destroy your Mac OS X installation and all your precious data that you have on. Better to get it out of the way right away.

I do a similar thing if setting up a non-Mac desktop or laptop, but there I install Linux Ubuntu, and Windows.

I like to imagine Apple adding to the end of their beautiful Mac setup guide a suggestion to delay playing with your new tool and to install Windows right away. Now that would be awkward.

Or I imagine being able to order from Apple with Windows pre-installed. Makes me laugh, partially because it makes too much sense.

They allow us to do stupid things, mostly in error, but sometimes because we are too smart for our own good. There is no good reason for their (continued) existence.

I imagine that in the ancient days of computing it came about something like:

“Long file names will take up too much space”

“I know, we can make the file system case sensitive.”

“Great, now instead of ‘work-notes.txt’ and ‘notes-about-homebuilding.txt’, I’ll just name the files ‘notes’ and ‘Notes”.

Software developers are known for our passion for backward compatibility, and so today the popular file systems of Linux and Unix (except Mac) are still case sensitive.

Gross!

What has gotten me worked up about this (again)?

The cause this time is a customer checked into subversion two copies of a file just with different case. From the commit log, it seems likely that they meant to rename the file.

When I tried to update (or check out) the repository on Mac OS X (10.5.6), a case preserving, but case-insensitive file system (doing the right thing), it fails with a cryptic message:

svn: In directory 'images/author_header'
svn: Can't copy 'images/author_header/.svn/tmp/text-base/belief.jpg.svn-base' to 'images/author_header/.svn/tmp/belief.jpg.tmp.tmp': No such file or directory

using the pre-packaged svn 1.4.4 (r25188 – built Nov 25 2007). Out of interest, I used macports to upgrade to 1.5.5 (r34862) and the error is different but equally cryptic:

svn: In directory 'images/author_header'
svn: Can't open file 'images/author_header/.svn/tmp/text-base/belief.jpg.svn-base': No such file or directory


At this point, I had not identified the cause of the problem, so I was quite frustrated. Thankfully, I had a Linux box to check out the repository on and from there the issue looked obvious.

Solutions?

Save us from our selves.

When working on developing the next great file system, make it so amazing that you can slip in case preserving, case insensitivity like Mac OS X’s HFS+ (Mac OS Extended).

When developing tools like the next great revision control system don’t allow files of the same name but different case — the default configuration anyway.  Failing that, have good error messages. 

It’s not too late for Subversion either to fix the long rotten issue 667: handle file name case sensitivity edge cases (issue 2010: case sensitivity problem with checkout )

Update April 2, 2011: two years later, newer version of Mac OS X, and SVN, and I encounter the same problem:

$ svn up
svn: In directory 'macleans3/images/maps'
svn: Can't open file 'macleans3/images/maps/.svn/tmp/textbase/BQ_old.png.svn-base': No such file or directory

Again, after looking around for easy solutions on the Mac, I just logged into a Linux box, and checked out there, removed the duplicate file names, and committed.

Cameron Field twittered “Anyone know how to install WordPress on a Microsoft Office Live hosted site/domain?”

Intrigued by what “Microsoft Office Live” is, I google it and go to smallbusiness.officelive.com, but instead of finding out what it is, I was rudely redirected to http://home.officelive.com/Misc/CompatibleShell.aspx?linkId=UnsupportedBrowser and greeted with

To use Microsoft Office Live, your computer must meet one of the following requirements:

* Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or 7, running on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Vista. You can download Internet Explorer from the Windows Internet Explorer page.

* Firefox 2.0, running on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Mac OS X 10.2.x and later. You can download Firefox 2.0 from the Firefox download page.

So, not only is the site checking what browser I’m running, but what operating system I’m running the browser on. Maybe there is a legitimate technical reason why this site doesn’t work for Firefox running on Ubuntu, but that would surprise me as I can’t imagine why integration with Mac OS X could work without any easy solution also for Linux.

Assuming there is a technical reason, the saddest part is the missed opportunity of at least giving me information about the site.

I’m filing this one Optimized Under.