Colin Charles Agenda

So, its the 30th of December here. But that’s no excuse for the dismal service that Tanjong Golden Village Cinemas (running Microsoft IIS nonetheless) has to provide. Meet the Fockers is premiering in Malaysia today, so the natural thing to do is to go watch it. So, here comes my tale of trying to book two tickets…

To make an online booking, I need to sign-up at the website. Except they ask for some ridiculous personal information, like your Identity Card/Passport number – why?. I don’t like giving away this information, especially over HTTP, but I comply. After the signing up, I quickly hop on into their ETicketing service (UI Improvement: when clicking on showtimes -> and “book now” for a movie of your choice, it takes you to the e-ticketing feature, but I still have to manually choose everything again (I’d expect the movie to be pre-selected for me already)). I choose my cinema, the movie, and the time, and enter a value for tickets to be purchased, all of which work really well. Then it contacts the cinema, or tries in vain to do so, and when its done after over a minute, it complains that I lack the Java VM, and I can’t get tickets allocated.

I install the JRE, link it correctly, restart the browser, and attempt to do this again. Now, the server is non-responsive – i.e. it says it can’t process the request. I also get the occasional IIS error page, which stupidly sends me to a page at Microsoft to resolve my error. (UI Improvement: Better error messages, rather than going to the IIS administrator page would make more sense – customise the 404).

Now I call the number that’s listed at the website. Go thru the menu, and what error do I get? One that says their system is down, so contacting the cinema directly would be my next best option. So I take the number down, and try dialling it repeatedly, to no avail. At the same time, I’m trying to get the e-ticketing stuff to work.

I finally get lucky, and it allocates my two tickets. I can’t choose my seat allocation, it seems broken (and now, I have the JRE mind you), so I get auto-allocated to the fifth row from the screen. Semi-happy that it worked, I take down the booking number, and agree to pay the extra RM1 premium for online booking. (UI Improvement: I don’t want to re-enter my mobile phone number, and other random information thats already in my user profile – mine the data for me, so it saves me typing, thanks.)

Contrast this with my experience with trying to do this in Australia. I booked my seats at about 2.45am on the day the show was playing (TGV closes at 1am), paid for it all via card, and just hopped over to the cinema on the day itself and got the machine to spit my ticket out when my card was inserted. Never had to see a human, at all. Didn’t waste time from 10.49am right up to 11.26am.

I don’t mind paying a premium for convenience. But when a cinema doesn’t value my time, and makes me waste over half an hour just to get a ticket, it seems rather silly. Well, its either that or battling queues that might take you just as long, and you’ll probably not get a movie on time either. And I paid full price today as well, no discounts, whatsoever.

So reading the OpenOffice.org 2.0 preview review, Hubert thinks OOo 2.0 is non-free now. Well, its always been the case then…. for both building and the app itself

• Accessibility features need Sun’s JDK 1.4.1 with the ATK layer
• XML file filters as well as XSLT filters, including that for Docbook
• JDBC database connectivity
• Report Wizard
• PocketExcel/Word import features
• Java UNO bridge
• The SDK itself has Java depends – on OS X, we point to Java as well as Ant in configure
• Rhino for scripting
• Applet access when doing HTML stuff (or embedding in Impress for instance)
• And now… HSQLDB for database integration

On the bright side, this is all disabled in the ooo-build that most Linux distros tend to use, so OOo 2.0 is generally free, as opposed to being non-free. And with work done to get OOo building using gcj, I wouldn’t worry so much about OOo 2.0 being non-free. Join Caolan and the rest of the free-JDK people at jdk@tools.openoffice.org.

Back on dialup for a while, and boy is it slow. To all Thinkpad R51 owners, for wireless you need the ipw2100 drivers. For the modem, its the linuxant hsf (softmodem) drivers – its well worth shelling out the USD14.95, it also works with a stock Fedora kernel. So the last thing that I need working, is sleep – it goes to sleep, but I can’t wake the display up (s3 sleep). Bad acpi.

So as Seth has mentioned, Fedora-wise things are coming into play. CVS, pre-extras, etc… this is a big week for The Fedora Project and all ears tuned, there’ll be lots of announcements this week. Really. Or I’ll cut my hair. So no, all of you using it, you definitely weren’t stupid and a nice gift will come your way.

Otherwise, Beijing LUG meeting last night, with a Fedora talk. Nice. Many questions, many convertees.

So, I think this is our (Fedora Project’s) most successful week in a long time. And we all now sport cool @fedoraproject.org aliases :)

Interesting point: The Ubuntu team seemed to have made the Debian installer a lot better, and a lot more friendly, and so on, and I thought it was a marked improvement. But for Joe End User, it still breaks baby. They do an FC-3 install without issue, but they ain’t getting by with Ubuntu (X is missing, grub partitioning is wonky, etc…). And I ask myself, how, oh how, did they break it? And why is python-dev not installed by default?

Quick note before I forget. FC-3 PPC pretty much just works, really, everything in it is so cool and sleep works, among other good things. udev problems are fixed, and G3 sleep even with X running and stuff works – the FC-2 tree was plagued with a broken GNOME control-center, the FC-3 tree is plagued with a haldemon.

/etc/init.d/haldemon stop before putting the iBook G3 to sleep is all you need. Of course if you have a G4 with the recent sleep patch and dwmw2’s kernels, I have no idea how it works, though I’m assured it does.