Our relationship is fairly love-hate.

The app doesn't actually completely do what it is supposed to yet, but it runs a server (which I can send messages to from the terminal), saves settings, and most importantly syncs all of my contacts with Google. Yay!

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5th Feb 2012 Update — Android application receiving messages and sending notifications to computer

As a computer science student living on campus at the halls of residence, one often runs out of things to do while the less fortunate majority are busy writing essays or crunching numbers. Also part of my course, my friend Richard introduced me to the world of Android programming when he thought he'd take a crack at creating an application that would automate the connection via captive portal to the campus ISP, Lightwire (since there is no wireless PPPoE alternative), and to me, it has been an essential application ever since.

I figured I had nothing better to do, and if he could do it, it was worth a try. I setup my own Android development environment and created myself a password protected (basic HTTP authentication) remote control for gmusicbrowser on Linux. Niche, you say? Well that's where you're.. well yes, it is pretty useless to anyone besides myself. But no one had done it before, okay?!

And let's face it. When you've been locked out of your own room, it's pretty cool to be able to tell your cellphone to remotely lock your computer to prevent yourself from being violently Facebook-raped.

That's really what Macs are all about, crafted by developers who realise that perfection is paramount. Mac developers entertain the idea that anyone can make something work after enough trial and error, but there is a grand difference between it working and working well. In the artistic world, design doesn't have to be perfect, and on the contrary, imperfection often creates the most magnificent works. Truly inspired art is almost never the result of hard slavery over elaborate details, because it doesn't have to be; if you are on to a winning idea, the details are insignificant.

This is where I suck at designing: I'm not a particularly creative person. More creative than some, perhaps, but I would argue only because I have been surrounded by so many more vibrant people for several years. In my last few years (the senior ones) of high school, I spent the vast majority of my lunch breaks in the Art block. At my school, 'Design' as a subject was only open to those who had done Painting (in fact the generically titled 'Art' course) in the first senior year (and why painting was in any way connected with design, I still do not understand). Design was my thing, so Painting had to be done. And a year of it was brutal torture. I never really wanted to paint and had no idea what signing up for the generically titled 'Art' course meant getting myself into. I'd hand it to myself that I was determined.

But come Design, and then another year of Design, things never really changed. I found that it demanded marginally the same from me as Painting, except that I would more often be within my (computer) comfort zone. I worked at a local printing firm as a Designer intermittently for three years during high school, and I think I feel comfortable in saying that designing no longer excites me.

Around the same time, much in the same way, it was really hitting me how much I disliked English, even though I did well at it. English is extremely mentally demanding for anyone, no less myself, and while I can have the capacity to masterfully string sentences together, I realised that I could rarely enjoy doing so. I am a great believer in the journey being more important than the destination, and as such, I surely had to be going down the wrong path.

On the other hand, that does not hold true all the time. I am writing a blog post now for naught but my own satisfaction, and whether I am finding the journey enjoyable is questionable but not altogether condemning. I started using Photoshop when I was roughly ten years old and for years I loved it, as I was doing what I wanted to be doing and, at that stage, exploring for myself. I am familiar with and have an interest in the topic I am writing about, and I had an idea that caused me to want to write this. The style I am writing in is my own, and not a forced formal format. In the past, I went out of my way to experiment with design: the idea was not so much about reaching a specific aesthetic goal but rather finding goals that were possible to reach. In English, I love playing with semantics and syntax. I relatively naturally pick up French because I understand most of the syntax that most others would not immediately grasp, and only need to learn the vocabulary.

Code. I love code because it is all about solving problems using syntax and function familiarisation. Code vocabulary.

Each of these interests are precision-related. But I was never a big fan of math -- surely the most precise of precision-related interests. Can there not only ever be one answer (or set of answers)?

I think I found where I went wrong with math. For years. And even the teachers probably had a fairly equal share in said wrongdoing. It took my Trigonometry teacher in my final year of high school to convey that at that level, Math is almost never relevant to the real world -- "but that's okay, because we're geeks". There may have been some irony in that the class was mostly made up of people who were only there to fill a slot, and that this was part of the reason the teacher would say it, yet it was true. A lot of the things we learn about code optimisation are theoretical enough to be irrelevant in the real world, but aren't they fascinating?

I might go as far as saying that I like math, even if I am not as much of a natural at it. I love code.

Yesterday I opened Indesign, Photoshop and Illustrator again all at once, for the first time in months, to create a few quick posters for my Dad. I had an idea, and I implemented that idea right away, which meant that the majority of time was spent tweaking what I had already done. But those applications are tools that I am good at using (and like using, when I have an idea that they cooperate with); it is imperative to recognise that designers are good at designing regardless of what is available to them, and they will succeed after they have learnt to use appropriate tools to effect their ideas.

Me? I'm just good with my instruments, and am truly terrible at coming up with ideas. I can't stay away from design forever, but it's not my thing either. So I write code, because I don't need ideas, it requires a great degree of precision, and somehow it still comes out looking like poetry (if you write it like the Wordpress people do...).

(Which is maybe not true, hence you're not reading a Wordpress blog ... ... ... hmm, bad analogy.)

And often I think I would make a formidable GUI designer.

Hi, my name is Brad Christensen, and let's be honest: this is going to take forever. Part of my job is to try to make the process as painless as possible.

I'm all about radical new ideas and deliberately doing things differently, as you can see. And I'm also all about pulling weird blogging topics out of the blue as I am walking to my Psychology lectures with little else on my mind. How fascinating a life I must live. If I remembered the password for my FTP account by heart I would fix my "about me" description while I have just thought of it. But, yeah. Maybe later.

I was reading a post the other day by my good friend Mister Aaron Pearce about his experience having totally switched from Windows to OS X as a primary development environment. I've already written a guest article for the RSBANDBInformer! about the variety among operating systems which somewhat highlights the degree to which Linux is ignored by application developers, and indeed no less the general user base of operating systems anyway, but I figured I might explain how my system works.

It was, after all, only as of September that I began to use Ubuntu exclusively. I'm just a regular person too, when it comes to adapting to change; Windows always did everything that I needed it to do. Why switch -- it would clearly only create more hassle as it is no secret that several applications I frequently use and require access to in order to retain sanity are not Linux-compatible?

But if you're like me -- a massive, massive geek -- you'll understand the magnet effect: there's just something about Linux that keeps you going back; you can never stay away for too long, no matter how satisfying Windows feels. Partly it's the environment, but as a whole it is the degree of freedom -- and the environment itself is compelling because it is free. Not only is it free as in free beer (words ingrained in the back of my mind, thank you Mister Stallman) but it is also free as in freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of individuality. You can literally do anything to it, with it, if you know how to. More often than not, that 'how' is not apparent, but it doesn't matter because the environment just leaks an overpowering aroma of possibility.

Which is why after a life as a Windows user bar the occasional obligatory new-Ubuntu-distro-tinker and being forced to use an iMac at work, suddenly one day, Windows simply felt... unfamiliar.

It has been about four months now that I have used Ubuntu such that I could count on my fingers the number of times I have booted into Windows. I am familiar and comfortable with all of my software (except Open/LibreOffice -- first thing I intend to do with my degree is usurp that bastardised suite) and rarely feel that I am lacking anything except in the cases of niche requirements. Nowadays I consider myself more a casual user than anything else (despite, of course, being a massive massive geek); I need a lightning fast browser to make up for New Zealand's generally poor bandwidth management, a messenger client and a music player. I juggle my emails through Gmail in the browser, along with using several other online applications regularly, so admittedly the internet is a major factor (I expect Chrome OS should be respectably successful). Let us not forget then that we'll need a torrent client, and an RSS reader to grab the latest TV shows! On top of my regular-user applications, as a weekly podcast co-host, Skype is fairly essential; I'm also very keen on web development, and a frequent Photoshop user for a variety of purposes.

Now believe it or not, Linux has got me covered on all of these bases. There are some applications I use that need improvement, certainly, but that's what Linux is all about -- and it's one of the things I love: the updates are often so much more frequent than those for Windows applications, and it is amazing to watch the programs you use on a daily basis evolve.

To begin with, I use Firefox as my web browser. And it is amazing how much flack I receive for this, given that it was the most respectable browser a few years back. Don't get me wrong, I know what you mean; Firefox is a bloated, operating-system-standards-disrespectful browser and for that, I abhor it, but from the perspective of a developer, the Gecko engine is leaps and bounds ahead of Webkit. I'm not concerned with whether Webkit is faster or boasts marginally higher standards support; it is unpleasant to use. Completely on the other hand, however, I don't recommend that anyone use Firefox any more if they can avoid it. For the majority of people, Chrome is faster, more elegant, has a much smaller footprint, and for the most part is significantly more native. I also require Firefox's addons -- for example I cannot get by without Firebug, even when I'm not developing anything; ironically, it can just be amusing if not helpful to inspect other people's code!

For a messenger client, Pidgin is my preference. This is another 'don't-get-me-wrong' case; I would love to use the more native Empathy but it is lacking in various departments... and I have become accustomed to Pidgin, so. Pidgin aggregates my MSN and Gmail accounts (although I have recently abandoned MSN in favour of the more modern GTalk protocol) so it also lets me know when emails arrive.

As far as music goes, the variety of players in Linux is incredible. It initially took me some time trawling through the possibilities, but I settled on a little-known player called Gmusicbrowser. Designed to support gigantic libraries with an optimised footprint and incorporating an entirely customisable layout system (where the user can edit, remove and add any/all aspects) this was just what I needed as none of the other players I had used had just the right layout for me. Gmusicbrowser has a few shortcomings too, but it is simultaneously the most feature-rich and yet modest-looking music player I have ever seen.

I had a rocky relationship with Linux torrent clients. uTorrent on Windows always seemed to sustain higher speeds, and I never worked out why this was, or whether I was just imagining it. To begin with, I used the default Transmission, but soon switched to the uTorrent-like Deluge, before totally changing my mind and using uTorrent through WINE. I've now again dismissed that and have returned to the simplicity of Transmission, but I have this running on a server downstairs using Dropbox to automatically sync/add torrent files. With all torrent clients running on my own computer I encountered conflicts with my Apache setup and needed to manually remove any obsolete trackers attached to torrent files (as they would bounce back to 127.0.0.1 and thus stall my server). I switched to a dedicated server (or rather, spare laptop ;D) for this not entirely for that reason although it did resolve it, but mainly because it allowed me to run the torrents during my off-peak time overnight. It seems to be doing the job, so I've not needed to investigate other clients at this stage. Transmission can be surprisingly useful in spite of its limited feature set; it's more polished than other clients.

Speaking of servers, that brings me to my LAMP setup for web development (LAMP = Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP). XAMPP for Linux (formerly but still to the system known as LAMPP.. who knows) is a shockingly simple way of accomplishing this. Aaron and I both used XAMPP for Windows and so it was the natural progression for me. Another benefit of running Linux is that I also have a secondary PHP install which is useful for executing command-line scripts. As far as applications go, I had trouble picking the perfect text editor, and similar to my experience with torrent clients, suffice to say I eventually went full circle back to the default Gedit. It isn't perfect either and is lacking many features I miss from Dreamweaver (you can call that silly, but the bottom line is that I do miss them), however again it is just something that I've got used to. I think that Geany came in as the next best editor (and probably better in many cases) but it lacked an essential 'flexibility' which is difficult to describe and forced me back to the 'it-just-works' Gedit. Aside from this, I also use FileZilla for FTP -- another fortunately native application I could carry over from Windows.

Photoshop is not so much of a frustration as it once was. I continue to use Photoshop CS through WINE for casual photo touch-ups and web development mockups, but for anything intensive I need to reboot into Windows in order to use CS5. If CS5 (or CS4/3) did actually work in WINE this might be a different story (and it might even look better, given that the CS5 interface is not even native to Windows to begin with...) as the current shortcomings are mostly given a lack of features and therefore somewhat limited productivity.

Linux is consistently improving upon its current limitations. PulseAudio plagues me less than it used to, but more because I have figured out how to fix its obscure behaviour when it does arrive; there is still a lot of work to be done towards simplicity and enhanced usability. The current sound preferences dialogue is only a frontend for a more complicated backend, and it oversimplifies the backend such that if you do need to change any of the underlying options, it's difficult to do so (and then they can be later unexpectedly overridden.. etc). In other cases, PulseAudio can be pretty cool; I have Ubuntu installed on the laptop downstairs now acting as my media server, and I can stream my computer's audio output directly to the PulseAudio server running on the laptop through the local network. Relatively painlessly.

But that's the paradox of Linux and it's one that you need to be willing to put up with if you intend to use it full time: aspects of Linux are so perfect, yet others are so inadequate. If you have the time to spare for tinkering (and particularly if you enjoy tinkering and are not easily frustrated), then Linux will be an enjoyable experience. It took a while to setup for myself initially, but since, I've only needed to tinker as much as I might to get Windows working how I want it to.

Linux is nothing to be afraid of. It's just different.