I requested and got access to the new google maps. I would imagine they are rolling it out pretty quickly.

It's pretty nice. I think the search interface is much better. It's easier to look at the results as they are shown on the map. It's pretty spotty for where I live. I did a search for tire places and some showed up but lots of them around me did not. I'm not sure how they get on there - if it is something the businesses need to do themselves or there is a missing link in the chain somewhere else. I still saw more than I expected to find. I needed to search in Hungarian but that makes sense.

A search for restaurants by where I live was really lacking. This makes me wonder how useful maps will be for travel.

The cards that come up for search results are really nice. I like that interface quite a bit. I like how it fits in with the way that Google Now presents information. The only issue I've had with Google Now so far is that it tries to anticipate what you want and can give you information you don't want. To be specific, when the Penguins were playing the Islanders in the first round - I googled the Islanders following one of the games to look at the team roster. A day or two later, google now gave me a card showing the results of the previous nights game - that I hadn't watched yet. I removed the card and the alerts stopped. I'm glad I hadn't googled the Penguins or maybe I'd have kept getting updates.

This is also a reminder that everything I search or do logged in with my google account is being recorded and acted upon in one way or another. I know this wont sit well at all with some people.

Finally - I can't see all the features of the new google maps. It tells me I'm running in "Lite Mode" because I'm on Linux. You only get the full experience on Mac, Windows or Chrome.

Haven't been posting much - life has been keeping me busy. What are the latest haps in the pigeon roost?

Welllll - let's see. My wife is going to the US in June and my girls are going to a summer camp while she is gone. That means the boy and I get a week to kick it together. I'm really looking forward to that. He's 10 now and we have hit a point where we can have a lot of fun together. I help coach his baseball team, we have a little running foosball competition and we've had a blast watching ice hockey together this year - Go Pens! So I'm really looking forward to that.

In July the whole family will be spending about a week in VlorÃ, Albania. It's an old city - so old I'm really having a hard time getting my head around it. We'll be helping to staff an English camp there. After we will try to take a little holiday - maybe to Greece or Italy. Depends on the budget and time considerations.

Around all that I'll be working on building a contact management system for our campus team in Lviv, Ukraine. I'm not sure just what I am going to do - I'm a bit resource constrained. Right now I'm looking at building something using CiviCRM as a base. It's just me and no money - so I need a platform that will do most of the work for me right out of the box. We'll see. If it goes well I think I'll be able to bring some dollars to the process and get someone to build something beefier.

I've got some mobile dev work I want to start planning out as well. Which will also probably end up being contracted out. I sort of wish I could still spend day to day time writing code but it isn't in the cards. When I do have time I'm just too stinking slow and what I write probably has immense issues I don't even see. Got to leave that for the hobby stuff on my own time.

Weather is really nice right now here in the Budapest area. I need to get down town more. I was thinking about that today. Need to start taking some long lunches downtown. Bring my tablet and do some work from a cafe or something. I don't want to end up reaching the end of our time here and realizing I didn't take advantage of the location enough.

Announced at the google thing - Android Studio. It's an Android IDE built on the community version of the IntelliJ IDE by JetBrains. Here is a video of the demo. It jumps about half an hour into a much longer video and runs a couple minutes or so - then they move on to other stuff I didn't watch.

I own a couple JetBrain products - the pro version of IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm. I probably posted about it when I bought them - I like the tools but the fonts are just a wreck on my 64 bit Fedora box. So much so that I just don't use it. With the Python plugin and php support on KDevelop I haven't thought about them much. (On an unrelated note - another editor I really like Komodo Edit - since it is built on Firefox tech it has the opengl issues I've mentioned here before.) Anyway I downloaded Android Studio to see - as all it cost me was a few minutes of time and some hard drive space.

I fired it up and created a little fake project. The fonts look good. This made me curious. I fired up IntelliJ, saw that there was a new version, installed that - and it looks good too. This is so sweet. And I don't know if this is because something is now better in Java, IntelliJ or Fedora - and I don't care.

Does anything around here work anymore? I go to the zoo.pl page (uid changed to mine to protect the guilty) to try to change friend/foe/neutral status, and I get:

OK

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, admin@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at slashdot.org Port 80

I have to click in three different places to find the right link to let me do a JE.
I was gonna give a laundry list, but fuck it, it's just pissing in the wind. I figure Dice was able to buy it for, what, the price of one week of coffee at Starbucks?

If you use KDE like I do - you may be interested in this article I found linked on Reddit - Volume Change Percentages in KDE. The idea there is that by default Kmix will increment volume changes by 4% when you use your keyboard - but it's possible to change that value. You just need to make a change to kmixrc. But you can go read it if you are interested.

So over at Reddit there were some comments like "Thanks for pointing this out." and one question "Any way to do the same with veromix?"

Let me confess that my first thought was - "This is about kmix stupid." But then I thought more about it and realized that it may not be stupid and so I started to dig. I got the source for veromix and it took me a little while to find it - but I did find the file and line where the value is set that drives this behavior. I was able to change it in my system and now I have a 2% increment (veromix is set to 5%) and that makes me pretty stinking happy.

I've emailed the veromix author because I think it wouldn't be too hard to add this value as one of the setting options. I think I've got most of the work done for it. I don't have time today to try it but I will soon. I think that would be pretty sweet.

Open Source - this is an example of why I love it so much.

I think I've got it nailed down a bit. When I run the nVidia drivers it is not using OpenGL. The Google Talk plugin needs OpenGL to work. I can force OpenGL to run. The the talk plugin works but Firefox will not run. If I switch to the Nouveau drivers then OpenGL will work fine without any messing about but again Firefox is unhappy.

So for right now - with my GeForce card my choice is Google Hangouts or Firefox.

I don't do the Hangouts that often. I may try just switching over if I need to. I usually have my little Windows laptop at my desk. I don't use it unless I need to go to a meeting but I could hop over to it for video chats if I don't have time to switch my graphics over on the Linux box.

It's not the greatest situation but I do feel better now that I feel like I have a grasp of the situation at least.

What happens if I open Firefox on my Fedora 18 box and visit the Google Sites page that Sophie Schmidt made about her visit to North Korea? This happens. That's a screen shot of both my monitors. On the left is Firefox and on the right is Chrome which was open to the Journal Entry writing page here. And it got much worse once I closed Firefox. Plasma pretty much took a dump at that point and I had to log out/log in to get back to a usable desktop.
 
If I run with the nVidia drivers I don't have this issue with Firefox. And even if I don't run Firefox - little artifacts like those in the screen shot will build up over time with the Nouveau drivers. Pretty much immediately if I have any desktop effects enabled. So why don't I just use the nVidia drivers all the time? Well - because I figured out today that under the nVidia drivers using Google Hangouts crashes KDE completely. As in kicking me out and forcing me to log back in. And I need Hangouts for work.
 
Very frustrating. So I'm stuck back on the Nouveau drivers and playing around looking for some magical set of options that will bring some stability and maybe even the ability to use my beloved Firefox again. The only up side right now is that abrt wont be giving me crap about having a tainted kernel any more. I hate software that has to exhibit moral superiority.
 
On a side note - I guess I can't add tags to journal entries any more. I guess I never paid attention to them anyway. They don't show up in the je list and I just used titles to find stuff anyway.

Galaxy Tab 2 is the poster child of Android tablets out there, right? Well, let's just say that I ain't impressed. Boyfriend of MiL got one, to read his newspaper. Well, we didn't manage to do that, partially, I think due to wort.lu screwing up. Partially, because the default browser just says "downloading" and that's it. What exactly happens after that is unclear and unless you know that a tiny download icon shows the download, and if you swiped away that, where to find the PDF... you ain't gonna go far. Apart from boyfriend of MiL not (wanting) to understand the difference between an app, a website and a PDF, it ended up being an exercise in frustration.

Unable to help on that front, he asked if he could read his email. Naively, I said, of course you can! So, I set up his (national, very standard) ISP email address. Well, I followed the wizard. Big mistake, I ended up on POP3, which of course is a standard that should have been banned years ago. Damn, I hope you didn't have important emails. I set it up again as IMAP. Works fine, really... Except it doesn't show any email. None... I specifically sent email to him. Shows nothing... I assure you, the settings are correct. I used the same as those, I used on his iPhone. Besides, they do show on his iPhone
No way to make it work. On a related note: the POP3 did not delete his email from server. At least that was good.

Then, I want to show him to install apps (Despite me hating the word). Choice between the Samsung App Store, which most likely works but you want the Google store. So, Google Play. Okay, do you have a Google account? No... Ah, no problem, let's set one up. I follow the wizard, up until it asks for a secondary email for "lost password" situations. I could type in whatever I wanted, but the "Next" button never got enabled, stopping me right in the track to create the account.
Yes, I know, I could just go to a computer, create him a Google account and be done with it. Still, isn't this simply a scandalous bug?

So, I try to help and end up having I to explain that tablet browsers are second-class internet citizens (a site he uses failed to work. How do you explain that to a non tech, eh? Nothing I did worked as expected and I'm supposed to know what I do.

Okay, I might simply have become obsolete and have become unable to troubleshoot modern devices. Perhaps it's a hint I should stay in my basement with my servers and "real" computers. I don't know... It must be me. Everyone loves their Android tablets....

Dawn Kawamoto is a "Dice news" employee who "submits" articles that are accepted by Slashdot editors because she works for their parent company.

• H-1B Cap Reached Today; Didn't Get In? Too Bad 4/5/13
• LucasArts Employees Hold Wake & Eulogy; Vader Still Roams 4/7/13

I'll be keeping track of how long Dice keeps posting stories by its own employees.

The title has nothing to do with what I'll talk about - I just heard Perfect Strangers on the radio this morning and it got stuck in my head.

While it was playing I was thinking about something that happened a couple weeks ago when I was in Thailand.

I've been to Thailand quite a few times. My first visit was in the late 80's as a sailor and then I've been at least once a year or more in the last 4 - 5 years. I've been enough times that it's become quite routine. I know my way around the airport. I have a rough idea of what the markets will be like in whatever city I visit, etc. This time I flew into Bangkok and then had a 2.5 or 3 hour drive to where I was staying.

During the drive I was fighting to stay awake - but what kept jumping out at me over and over was, "Wow - there are so many pickup trucks here!"

I'm willing to bet that the number of pickup trucks hasn't recently surged in Thailand. My guess is that the reason I noticed it so much this time is that it was my fist visit after living in Hungary for a while. Going from the US to Thailand, the number of trucks I see on the road would not be noticeable. But compared to here - it was on my mind for the whole visit. And I realized something for the first time. I love stuff like that. I think it may be the biggest reason I love to travel. I quickly become used to the environment that I'm in and start to filter stuff out. I don't consciously notice a lot of things around me after a while. I don't know what the proper term is for this - I'm sure some of you do. It's that whole idea that fish are unaware of water. I use to have a snippet of a poem I kept taped to my desk,

I long for experiences that knock me out of this numbness to my surroundings. I love seeing cool and exceptional things too - but even moreso I think - I love to just get an awareness of what I take for granted. I'm the same way with people. I love to have friends and conversations that force me to look at things differently. I don't like for everything to feel obvious. There is of course a limit. I have a co-worker who thinks very differently from me. Enough so that dealing with him can be a real chore. The chasm is too much to cross. He's another American - which is kind of funny. Most of my friends and the people I hang out with here are not. Same idea - I like what my Hungarian, Romanian, Albanian, and so on, friends bring to the mix.

At some point I expect I'll end up living in the US again. Honestly I'm not too crazy about the idea. I've really taken to Europe, and this part of it in particular. If I had my druthers I'd retire to Slovenia. Maybe somewhere not far from the farm where my great grandmother was born. But at some point my kids will head home to go to university and I'll head back. Maybe it will be more interesting as I'll have been gone long enough to make America new.

My last visit back I'd only been here a little over a year. So it wasn't such a big deal going back. It was a little annoying but not so much more than it was before I left. The in your face over indulgence that permeates so much of everything in the USA gets to me sometimes. But it's not like it wasn't that way before I left. It's just that much more obvious now that I've had a bit of a break from it. The insulation from the rest of the world is also difficult - but again - I was already aware of that before I moved. It's just now I get to be around more people who live lives that are connected and aware of others outside their own single context. (And that part isn't a critique of the USA alone. I've met Hungarians who are largely the same in that regard. They are not really aware of a whole lot outside Hungary and even moreso outside Europe. And they aren't interested.)

So I'm a bit of a junkie for these new experiences/view points. Probably part of why I enjoy the books I do as well.

Well - nothing deep and I'm sure nothing new. Just a glimpse in my head from my morning commute. The one Google Now told me about before I left my house. That deserves its own JE.

I bought by Galaxy S3 from T-Mobile, in the US last year. So it is the SGH-T999 model. I've been very happy with it. I've stuck to running it as stock for a couple reasons. The biggest is that I just didn't want to hassle with learning how to change the underlying software. Secondly, because I wanted to keep everything cool in terms of the warranty and what not. I even jumped through all their hoops to get my unlock code from them.

But I ran into an issue the other week that finally used up all my good will towards t-mobile. I went to use the phone as a hot spot and couldn't. It wanted me to pay for their tethering plan - which doesn't exist where I live.

I didn't have time right then to do anything but this week-end I did a little reading and today I installed Cyanagenmod on it. So far everything seems to be going very well. And I actually have control over the device that I paid (in my mind anyway) a pretty hefty sum to own. None of the steps were all that difficult and my biggest holdup was it would not flash the new rom until the battery was over 85% charged - which I thought was odd, but it worked out.

I'm getting all my stuff back to the way I like it and enjoying being on a newer version of Android than the one that Samsung and T-mobile officially supply for this phone right now. Which is idiotic.

So - moving forward I don't plan to purchase phones from t-mobile any more. I'll probably stick with Nexus phones from Google and avoid all this headache. I wont get another new phone for a while. I bought a new, high end phone so that it would last a while. But when I do I wont make the mistake of getting stuck depending on mobile phone companies.

Calligra Author was announced last summer. Things are still early and often there isn't much to see. (Clicking on the Author Handbook in the Author Help menu takes you to that page.) So things are still rather rough, but I bring it up because when I ran an update today Author got installed on my machine. I was excited to see that and ran it but there's not much to see yet. It's built on Calligra Words and still pretty much looks just like it. When you start Author you are asked to choose a template and none of those offered really make sense for Author, they are just brought over from Words. But I'm optimistic for the future.
 
I'd never noticed before but in the announcement for the project they said it would be compatible with Plume Creator. I checked to see if Plume was available in the Fedora repos but it's not unfortunately. It looks pretty interesting. They have debs, source and a windows installer at Sourceforge. Not sure if I'm interested enough to install it from source. Maybe later if they get it to 1.0 or something. Of course hopefully by then it'll get pulled into the repos.
 
So Author really isn't amazing or anything yet but it's good to see they are working on it and I'll be watching it.

It's freaking hot in Thailand. The night I left Budapest the outside temperature was 8 and when we landed in Bangkok it was 33. And humid.

But I can't complain, even though I just did. And it doesn't matter that much as all day I'm in an air conditioned conference room. I always enjoy being in Thailand, the Thai people could be the friendliest on the planet.

Got to go to "Monkey Island" and feed some monkeys. That was kind of cool. I've never seen monkeys in the wild before. Got a lot of work done with my co-workers from all over the world. They are good folks so I love when we get back together. Tomorrow I fly home (I've been here a week) and I'm looking forward to it. I missed the big Budapest spring snow storm but that should be melted and I can get to fixing up my yard.

I'll try to post some pictures later.

You wouldn't expect time to fly that quickly, when not half-unconcious on the floor....

2nd Edit- As Pudge points out the ability to turn off the box scores is right there. So I'm the stupid one on that count and all I have left is being slightly put out that I need to call to turn off auto-renew.

Little first world complaining here.

I did something last week I haven't done before. I subscribed to the premium NHL GameCenter Live service.It is a freaking train wreck. Let me tell you why.

The biggest problem is this - you cannot watch games that have already been played without seeing the score. Their interface for selecting games already played is by giving you a box score. Clicking on that will take you to a summary of the game with the final score repeated at the top. It is horrific design. I really don't feel like staying up until 1 or 3 am to watch a game - but if I want to watch it during the day it means I have to watch it already aware of the result. STUPID.

As I realized it worked this way I dug around their site looking for some hidden way to make it work in a desirable fashion and learned a fun little fact. When I subscribed to the service I also signed up to auto-renew every year and the only way to stop that is to call them on the phone. ON THE PHONE. Seriously. This is such a complete mess. So I'll be calling them on the stupid phone to talk to a stupid person about not making me pay again next year for their horrible stupid service. Idiots.

Edit - I have found one screen that shows past games without scores but they have a 3 day lag. Today, the 21st of February - the most recent games I can watch are from the 18th. Losers.