Pigsflew.com

I started working last week for TripAdvisor.com, an internet travel supersite company–it may be the best employment I could possibly have hoped for. The team is full of incredibly smart, very personable people, the workplace is like anyone’s dream of the dotcom boom, and the work is high-visibility, with heavy loads, and looks like it will get interesting fast, and stay interesting.

They hired me because I’m a nerd and I know my machines, so I’m going to sidestep the benefits chatter and talk about the real reason I’m posting:

The MacBook Pro (v4) Penryn. I’m not too big an OS X fan, too many of its design choices annoy me too often for me to want to spend a lot of work time in that environment, so I instantly resized the partition, installed rEFIt (a graphical EFI bootloader), and installed Ubuntu 8.04.

Here’s what didn’t work out of box:

• Wifi
• Touchpad
• Graphics Acceleration
• Some wierdness with keyboard

The wifi and graphics acceleration was a snap to fix. Graphics, provided by NVidia, means that I was using this beautiful piece to drive a 30″ (or so) widescreen monitor in thirty seconds. After years of struggling with older ATI drivers on unsupported hardware, this was a breath of fresh air. The WiFi still has no linux-native driver, but ndiswrapper means I can use it reliably anyway.

The weirdness about the keyboard is not really a functional problem: there are some differences between mac keyboards and windows ones that I will have to get used to–and map some key combinations to get around. The lack of “end” and “home” keys is a real sore point… and the position of ctrl, opt (alt), and cmd keys makes some things a bit less easy on the hands than on other keyboards.

The touchpad is the most intriguing one. Penryn has a multitouch-sensitive pad which allows for awesome things like two-fingered tap for right click, two-fingered touch-anywhere scrolling, and other finger gestures under OS X. I played with it for a while before figuring it out, but I finally did it: two fingered scrolling and two-fingered right click (as well as three-fingered middle) under Ubuntu.

I know when I say it on here it sounds uninteresting, but believe me: This is the best interface for a laptop since we moved to the trackpad from the old style “nubbins”.

So I updated about three weeks ago to the latest Ubuntu version, Hardy Heron. For the first time ever, on my largely unsupported laptop, everything works completely, without even the most minor reservations.

Previous problems were:

• BCM43xx Wireless (Didn’t work until Edgy, had to use NDiswrapper until Gutsy)
• ATI 300M Graphics (unable to get reliable hardware acceleration until Hardy)
• ACPI Support (Unable to sleep or hibernate until Hardy)

The most important improvement was that the ATI driver now has working ACPI support, meaning that I can put my computer to sleep and throw it in my bag, carry it around, and open up to continue working on what I’m doing. Nice!

It is beginning to ruin my life however. Before the Sleep function worked, I had to keep my browsing and coding in neat little sessions: Remember to save, quit, put a note on the desktop to remind me of what I was doing, then shut down.

Why do all of that when I can just put it to sleep?! Two reasons:

• I open it up and find three browsers open with twelve tabs each, and have *no idea* what’s important
• Without a sticky note to tell me what I was working on, I just have a bunch of text editors open with random code.

The idea here is actually one seen in code: Garbage collection. Shutting down was like taking a note of all the things I was working on (shifting the active memory over), then neatly closing out everything (freeing the old space), then eventually turning it back on and lazily reopening the things I need. Without it, I have all of this unfreed memory cluttering my desktop and slowing down my context switches!

Ah well. I guess now is as good a time as any to learn some organization.