John Kozubik < john @ kozubik . com >

Making the Mac more like Ion

For ten years - roughly 1999 through 2009 - all of my personal workstations ran the Ion window manager on top of X Windows (on FreeBSD, FWIW).  (actually, it was ratpoison at first...)

Modern GUIs are, IMO, extremely inefficient. Almost all of their "features", and arguably all of their graphical elements are at best wastes of time, and at worst major impediments to usability and workflow.

I first started thinking about this, ten years ago, when I noticed myself memorizing every possible keyboard shortcut in Windows. I realized, first subconsciously, that moving the mouse was inefficient. Later, as I switched to X Windows as my primary operating environment, I found that people were writing entire window managers around not touching the mouse. But that was only the beginning - things like overlapping windows, exposed areas of "desktop", and especially clicking to focus started to annoy me. Once you decide to give up the eye candy and optimize for actual work, you quickly shed a lot of things you used to take for granted.

Since all I ever work in is a browser and some xterms, this was a workable solution for a very long time, and I was perfectly happy with Ion on top of X Windows. However, as "web 2.0" evolved, it became increasingly difficult to simply get through the work day. My days of spending a week on configuration and compilation of five different packages just to get PDF reading to work ended a long time ago. I just didn't have time for the pain anymore. When you go to Usenix, or BSDcon, and all of the big name kernel hackers have mac laptops, you start to wonder just what you're trying to prove...

Enter OSX. I would click on a PDF link and it would open a PDF, immediately, in my browser. I would see a Youtube link and could actually watch it without crashing my browser. I could plug in a printer and print. I could use online banking without editing my browser identification. It really had been a slow boil for me over the last few years as I put up with more and more petty inconveniences in the name of "freedom".

The problem was the user interface. I believe that the Mac operating environment is judged by the ability of technically illiterate users to sit down and start using it. By that measure, it probably excels. But I'm not technically illiterate, and I have things like workflows and efficiencies that I need to develop and fine tune, and the Mac OE gives me very little leeway to do that. You can sum it up nicely with the inability to maximize a Window (that is, without manually dragging it to the corners with the mouse in a one-shot attempt to cover the whole screen).

But ... I can't go back to praying every time I go to a news site, or managing five different package installations just to view PDF files. So I decided to make the mac as close to Ion as possible. Lucky for me, this involved only two new package: sizeup and Mondo Mouse.

There are many aspects to the Ion Window Manager, and the most important are probably things I don't even touch here, like keyboard shortcuts and Lua scripting, and so on - but for me, the major usability features were tiling, non-overlapping windows, and focus-follows-mouse.

Sizeup provides the ability to precisely resize a window to one of many pre-determined geometries - things like "the left half of the screen" or "the entire screen" or "the upper right quadrant of the screen". This means you can quickly arrange a completely tiled and non-overlapping workspace. Further, you can, with a keystroke, toggle between tiling a window to some portion of a screen and making it full screen.

Mondo Mouse does all sorts of weird things. I have no idea what they are, as I turn all of them off. Except for focus follows mouse. From my own system build notes: In preferences, turn off everything except for focus follows mouse, set the timer to '0.00' and under the 'appearance' tab, uncheck "display information about the window under the mouse".

And there you have it. It's not perfect. Command-tab and Command-tilde still behave very differently (cmd-tab "remembers" your previous location, whereas cmd-tilde is always sequential) and new window creation on the mac is laughably braindead (especially on multi-head displays) but things are much, much better.

Flat Rate Storage Services vs. rsync.net

One of the most common pre-sales questions we get at rsync.net is:

"Why should I pay a per gigabyte rate for storage when these other providers are offering unlimited storage for a low flat rate?"

The short answer is: paying a flat rate for unlimited storage, or transfer, pits you against your provider in an antagonistic relationship. This is not the kind of relationship you want to have with someone providing critical functions.

 

Now for the long answer...

 

In 1998 I did some consulting for an early, and very successful provider of web hosting. They offered unlimited disk space and traffic for a relatively low monthly price. Of course, the immediate question was how this was feasible - why wouldn't I just pay my $14.99 per month and upload gigabytes upon gigabytes of data, etc.

They chuckled and said (I paraphrase) "the more you upload, the more we throttle you. The little users don't bother us and the big users eventually just go away".

It's hard to say how common this kind of (deplorable) policy is ... but the economics demand that something like this be in place. Bandwidth and disk space are not free, and even the most unsophisticated hosting or storage consumer has the ability to deluge a provider with both.

What this means is that the providers and consumers of "unlimited" services will necessarily have conflicting interests. If your interest is to store as much data per dollar as possible, it will be the interest of your provider for you to store as little data per dollar as possible. The more you utilize, the more antagonistic this relationship will become, as you move from "someone we don't make any money on" to "someone who is killing our business model".

These non-intersecting goals will manifest themselves in any number of ways from bad service and support to "unexplained" poor performance to outright disconnection. As described above, I know firsthand of hosting companies that practice these very measures, and our interaction with prospective customers at rsync.net has exposed us to many more examples.

 

Here are some specific examples:

 

The Backup Provider with Unlimited Storage - This is the most common provider we are asked about, obviously. Examples include Mozy and Carbonite. This is the textbook case of what we are talking about here. Traffic throttling, connection resets, and discriminatory support are all examples of things I have personally seen providers like this do to users that don't perfectly fit their business model.

The Web Host with Unlimited Storage - Once in a while a more technically savvy individual will point out that they could get a $4.99/mo web hosting account from 1 & 1 or GoDaddy or someone like that and use duplicity over FTP or something like that to upload unlimited data there. In cases like this, unlimited web hosts have very specific contract language that stipulates that ALL content you upload to the web host MUST be publicly available web content. So the good news is they aren't playing any tricks with the storage they provide (the bandwidth is a different story) but it is unlikely you want to publish all of your data on the web.

Gmail Drives, etc. - Technically very clever, and an example of "things that make me happy", but not worth discussing in terms of critical data backup. Even for personal use, you're moving beyond simply working at cross purposes to your provider, and into the realm of "this tool isn't even designed for this, and can change at any time".

rsync.net, and other per-gigabyte storage providers - We want you to store as much data as you possibly can with us. We will do whatever we can to help you with whatever solution you require to get your data on our systems. The more data you put here, and the faster you do it, the happier we are. It should be noted that we do offer unlimited transfer, or bandwidth, but this is not evidence of a possible conflict of interest. We offer the unlimited transfer as a complement to the data that we want you to transfer here as fast as possible. Since we do not allow anonymous access (or "web" access, or inline linking, etc.) to an rsync.net account, there is no downside for us in doing this.

 

All of this leads to a general rule that should be applied to all consumption of services: it is imperative that you be aware of the interests of your provider, fully understand your own interests, and make sure that those two things align as well as possible. It is naive to think that any workable solution can be built upon an underlying relationship that is at cross purposes.