Posted on

Linux with a Macbook Touchpad Feel, Pt 2

Update: Below are what I believe to be the best settings available to tune a Linux touchpad to feel like a Macbook Pro touchpad, but it still isn’t perfect, and a year of research had led me to believe that it can’t be perfect without bigger changes to the underlying Linux drivers. I’ve written this follow up post to explore paths forward.  Original post follows…

Since my last laptop upgrade to a Dell Precision, I have made it an ongoing project to try to match my laptop (running Arch via Antergos) touchpad to the smooth & predictable operation of a Macbook Pro. It has been a long road, but at this point I have a setup that I think compares favorably to a Macbook experience.

In my previous entry, I covered the three available options for Linux touchpads before settling on mtrack as my touchpad driver of choice. In the weeks since, I have walked back this decision due to the jittery behavior of the mtrack driver when one slides a thumb in an effort to click. I frequently found myself barely missing my click target, and that’s no way to live.

So I returned to review my three options. In spite of its halting development progress, the next best option seemed to be the Synaptics driver. The fact that it was initially included as the default drive for Arch added to its credibility.

Having opted for Synaptics, the foremost challenge became locating a single concise & authoritative source to explain all available Synaptics touchpad driver options. Read on for a link to that source. I will also share my current touchpad configuration, with annotations on the updates I made to maximize the consistency & elegance of my touching experience.

Installation

Since Synaptics is the default driver for many Linux distros (including Ubuntu and Antergos, to my knowledge), you might well be running the Synaptics driver already. The easiest way to determine is to run

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep synaptics

If you see output like the following, you’re in good shape:

[ 16885.807] (II) LoadModule: "synaptics"
[ 16885.808] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/synaptics_drv.so
[ 16885.808] (II) Module synaptics: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[ 16885.808] (II) Using input driver 'synaptics' for 'DLL07BF:01 06CB:7A13 Touchpad'

If not, chances are there is a configuration file for libinput or mtrack that has a lower alphanumeric file name in either /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/, the first directory Xorg looks for touchpad config files, or /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ its secondary location. To get your laptop to choose Synpatics over other drivers, you must change the filename of your Synaptics driver config file to have a lower alphanumeric precedence than its competitors. I.e.,

bill /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d $ ls -l
total 16
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1350 Dec 25 05:03 10-quirks.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 bill users 1935 Jan  7 11:03 30-synaptics.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   951 Dec 20 09:24 40-libinput.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1753 Nov 18  2016 70-mtrack.conf

In my case, my Synaptics driver config file lives at /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-synaptics.conf. The “30-” that my config file begins with is a lower number than my libinput or mtrack config files contain, so Xorg chooses to use Synaptics and ignore the other drivers.

Configuration

In my past post, I lauded mtrack for going big on configurability, noting the 50-100 different options available on differing versions of mtrack. The good news is that Synaptics has even more options available than Mtrack. The bad news is that you’re not going to find any one complete & accurate source to learn about all of the options available to you.

This page is the best you’re going to find. It’s pretty good.

After reading through the litany of options available, and experimenting in real world usage, the final Synaptics config file I settled on actually implements relatively few custom options:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad catchall"
        Driver "synaptics"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        # Enabling tap-to-click is a perilous choice that begets needing to set up palm detection/ignoring. Since I am fine clicking my touchpad, I sidestep the issue by disabling tapping. 
        Option "TapButton1" "0"
        Option "TapButton2" "0"
        Option "TapButton3" "0"
	# Using negative values for ScrollDelta implements natural scroll, a la Macbook default. 
        Option "VertScrollDelta" "-80"
	Option "HorizScrollDelta" "-80"
        # https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Touchpad_Synaptics has a very buried note about this option
	# tl;dr this defines right button to be rightmost 7% and bottommost 5%
	Option "SoftButtonAreas" "93% 0 95% 0 0 0 0 0"  
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
EndSection

You’ll note that this config file doesn’t setup coasting after a two-finger scroll, since Synaptics enables this by default. The -80 values for scroll delta correspond closely with the rate at which a Macbook will scroll with two fingers. The greatest difference between my Linux and Macbook config is that I have enabled a slight area at the bottom right of my touchpad to function as my right click. After several hours of usage, I’ve found this area sized such that I only end up right clicking when I make an effort to go for the bottom right corner. It’s a handy optimization that prevents me from needing to remove right click from the touchpad entirely.

On to the finer details

The previous post lamented how challenging I had found it to tweak values for the touchpad properties without restarting Lightdm (logging out and logging in again). Since then, I’ve discovered two means that allow experimenting with different touchpad values without requiring a log out/log in cycle. Both methods will allow you to precisely configure your touchpad settings without needing to log out and log back in.

The first method is via xinput, the second via synclient.

Using xinput

The greatest benefit to using xinput directly in changing touchpad settings is that it will work with either the Synaptics, libinput, or mtrack drivers. The second method I’ll outline below (synclient) only works with Synaptics.

To configure your settings using xinput, start by running xinput --list. Note which ID corresponds to your touchpad (for me, it’s ID 13), and then run xinput --list-props id. For example:

$ xinput --list-props 13
Device 'DLL07BF:01 06CB:7A13 Touchpad':
	Device Enabled (142):	1
	Coordinate Transformation Matrix (144):	1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000
	Device Accel Profile (274):	1
	Device Accel Constant Deceleration (275):	2.500000
	Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (276):	1.000000
	Device Accel Velocity Scaling (277):	12.500000
	Synaptics Edges (282):	49, 1179, 50, 878
	Synaptics Finger (283):	25, 30, 0
	Synaptics Tap Time (284):	180
	Synaptics Tap Move (285):	67
	Synaptics Tap Durations (286):	180, 180, 100
	Synaptics ClickPad (287):	1
	Synaptics Middle Button Timeout (288):	0
	Synaptics Two-Finger Pressure (289):	282
	Synaptics Two-Finger Width (290):	7
	Synaptics Scrolling Distance (291):	-80, -80
	Synaptics Edge Scrolling (292):	0, 0, 0
	Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling (293):	1, 0
	Synaptics Move Speed (294):	1.000000, 1.750000, 0.129955, 0.000000
	Synaptics Off (295):	0
	Synaptics Locked Drags (296):	0
	Synaptics Locked Drags Timeout (297):	5000
        ...

Each of these property values correspond to properties you’ll find in the Synaptics configuration documentation. To change a value, you would then use xinput set-prop, for example:

xinput set-prop --type=int "DLL07BF:01 06CB:7A13 Touchpad" "Synaptics Scrolling Distance" -70 -70

You’ll note the first string is the copy-pasted name of my touchpad from xinput --list, the second string is the copy-pasted name of the setting that was shown via –list-props, and all of the settings that follow are the values to be used. After running the command above, when I re-run xinput --list-props id I see Synaptics Scrolling Distance (291): -80, -80, meaning my natural scroll is about 15% faster than before.

Using synclient

One benefit unique to the the Synaptics driver is that it comes with a dedicated utility for configuring its setting values. You can see all current applied settings by invoking synclient. You’ll see something like

$ synclient
Parameter settings:
    LeftEdge                = 49
    RightEdge               = 1179
    TopEdge                 = 50
    BottomEdge              = 878
    FingerLow               = 25
    FingerHigh              = 30
    MaxTapTime              = 180
    MaxTapMove              = 67
    MaxDoubleTapTime        = 180
    SingleTapTimeout        = 180
    ClickTime               = 100
    EmulateMidButtonTime    = 0
    EmulateTwoFingerMinZ    = 282
    EmulateTwoFingerMinW    = 7
    VertScrollDelta         = -70
    HorizScrollDelta        = -70
    ...

Again, you can consult the Synaptics settings documentation to map these esoteric names into actual behavior. Setting a new value is then simply a matter of running synclient VertScrollDelta=-80

Persisting configuration changes

After you’ve tweaked your touchpad to your satisfaction, you’ll need to propagate all your settings changes back into the config file we discussed in step one. The only bit that can make this challenging is if you used synclient, the variable names used by synclient can differ significantly from those that are known to xinput when it goes to configure your touchpad upon login.

If you’re not sure how your synclient values correspond to values you would feed to the Synaptics driver config file, use the steps from the “Using xinput” section above to list all the properties for your touchpad. Here, you’ll be able to see the config setting names that xinput knows for your touchpad, as well as the values it is currently using. For example, xinput --list-props tells me that after tweaking in synclient, I set up my button regions as follows:

Synaptics Soft Button Areas (314):	1079, 0, 760, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0

I can then copy those into my config file 30-mtrack.confas follows:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad catchall"
        Driver "synaptics"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        ...
        Option "SoftButtonAreas" "1079 0 760 0 0 0 0 0"
EndSection

After the setting values have been saved in your configuration file, they will be applied automatically upon restart/login.

Posted on

Toward a Linux touchpad as smooth as Macbook Pro

Update: After continuing to use my system, I opted for the Synaptics driver instead. Learn why in my follow-up.

As a longtime Macbook Pro user, I’ve grown an insatiable appetite for exceptional hardware+software implementations of laptop functionality like suspend/wake, bluetooth, wifi, and touchpad.  If there’s anything that my past Linux laptops taught me, it’s that these functions are not automatically perfect [insert shock here]. They seem easy & perfect only when they work flawlessly, and they work flawlessly only because Apple employs large teams of experts to test & polish the hardware/software interplay on a Macbook such that it feels perfect.

Since Apple gave me and the rest of the Developer community the heave-ho with its decisions on the latest generation of Macbook Pro [1], it has been a long & harsh journey toward getting a laptop experience that feels as flawless as my Macbook Pro did. But after weeks of experimentation, I wanted to share my current touchpad setup, which feels like it is approaching the buttery smoothness of my past Macbook Pros.

Touchpad options

There are two good articles on setting up a touchpad with Linux (Arch, Antergos, Debian, Ubuntu et al). As these articles explain it, there are three touchpad drivers available on Linux: synaptics (no longer supported), libinput, and mtrack. Preferring to avoid starting with abandonware, I narrowed my search down to libinput and mtrack. The choice between these options was made easier by reading the libinput philosophy not to implement features that aren’t likely to be needed by mainstream users. In their words: “In the old synaptics driver, we added options whenever something new came up and we tried to make those options generic. This was a big mistake… we’re having none of that” Practically speaking, this means that the limit of configurability in libinput is far more limited than the 1,001 settings offered by mtrack.

This isn’t to say that mtrack is a flawless choice. This is not a driver being supported and tested by teams of users & experts. It has no visual settings panel that I’m aware of, all configuration is done via text file. And the correct version to install is initially ambiguous. The officially developed version hasn’t been advanced since 2015, so a popular fork has taken up the torch in recent years. This is why Dayne’s Medium Post recommends installing directly via git. And I recommend the same.

Installing mtrack

Here are the basics to get the latest mtrack installed on your system:

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/p2rkw/xf86-input-mtrack.git
cd xf86-input-mtrack
./configure --with-xorg-module-dir=/usr/lib/xorg/modules
make
sudo make install

At this point you’ll have mtrack’s driver files built/installed, but Xorg still calls the shots in enabling it vs other drivers. By default, mtrack’s xorg configuration file gets placed in /usr/shared/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-mtrack.conf, which in my case meant its precedence was lower than both synaptics (placed in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d, which takes precedence over the /usr/shared/X11/xorg.conf.d directory) and libinput (which initially had an alphanumerically lower file name (40-libinput.conf) than 50-mtrack.conf. To fix these issues, your best bet is to move your mtrack.conf file to a location/filename with higher precedence:

sudo mv /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-mtrack.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-mtrack.conf

Once you’ve done these steps, mtrack should become your default touchpad driver after restarting X server. Of course, this being Linux, there is no single answer as to most easily restart X server. These people think that you can simply run startx, but that didn’t work for me without sudo, and when I ran it with sudo, I ended up setting root permissions on a file (~/.Xauthority) that prevented me from logging in. This well-rated response thinks you can sudo restart lightdm, which did work for me (albeit with different syntax since I’m on arch), but still ended up logging me out, so my official recommendation for re-starting X server is unfortunately to log out then log back in. At that point, if you run cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep mtrack you should see a series of messages that show mtrack being loaded. If you don’t, this was the best thread I found for diagnosing what input driver is actually being used. If you find anything interesting, please do post it to the comments.

Crafting the dream touchpad experience

Once you get mtrack functional, then begins the process of creating a configuration file that best approximates Macbook Pro settings.  Here is my annotated config file:

# https://github.com/p2rkw/xf86-input-mtrack
Section "InputClass"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
Identifier      "Touchpads"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver          "mtrack"
# Sensitivity controls how fast your cursor will move. 1 is the default
Option          "Sensitivity" "1.1"
Option          "FingerHigh" "5"
Option          "FingerLow" "5"
Option          "IgnoreThumb" "true"
Option          "ThumbRatio" "70"
Option          "ThumbSize" "25"
Option          "IgnorePalm" "true"
# This ignores tap-to-click, which causes more problems than benefit in my experience
Option          "TapButton1" "0"
Option          "TapButton2" "0"
Option          "TapButton3" "0"
# If you want a middle-click, then "ClickFinger2" should be value "2"
Option          "ClickFinger1" "1"
Option          "ClickFinger2" "1"
Option          "ClickFinger3" "3"
Option          "ButtonMoveEmulate" "true"
Option          "ButtonIntegrated" "true"
Option		"ButtonEnable" "true"
# "ButtonZonesEnable" means that your trackpad gets divided into three equal sections, where clicking any third of the touchpad sends the click code in "ClickFingerX". Since I didn't want middle-click, the left two thirds of my touchpad are left click, and the right third is right click:
Option          "ButtonZonesEnable" "true"
Option          "ClickTime" "25"
# Ensures that bottom 5% of touchpad doesn't register taps
Option          "EdgeBottomSize" "5"
Option          "SwipeLeftButton" "8"
Option          "SwipeRightButton" "9"
Option          "SwipeUpButton" "0"
Option          "SwipeDownButton" "0"
Option          "SwipeDistance" "700"
# ScrollCoast makes touchpad feel a bit more Mac-like, although it coasts in chunks and isn't relative to speed at which two finger scroll was happening
Option          "ScrollCoastDuration" "600"
Option          "ScrollCoastEnableSpeed" "0.05"
# This sets up Macbook-like natural scroll. If you want to scroll down by swiping your fingers down, reverse the "5" and the "4" here:
Option          "ScrollUpButton" "5"
Option          "ScrollDownButton" "4"
Option          "ScrollLeftButton" "7"
Option          "ScrollRightButton" "6"
# Without this option set to a high value, there are types of click+hold-and-move functionality (most easily reproed by click and then move up-right) that get ignored
Option          "Hold1Move1StationaryMaxMove" "1000"
# Smaller ScrollDistance translates to faster scrolling. ScrollDistance of 10 scrolls a long page in one swipe.
Option          "ScrollDistance" "22"
Option		"ScrollClickTime" "12"
Option		"ScrollSensitivity" "0"
EndSection

In a more perfect world, Wordpest wouldn’t have removed the indentation in that block. It is not the world in which we live.

Future improvements

Compared to the miserable touchpad experience I had endured with synaptics and libinput, it has been delightful to get reliable two-finger scrolling that coasts, and to get my two-finger scroll speed comparable to what feels normal from my time in OS X. Still on my list to try to improve the configuration as I move forward:

  • Fix the couple pixels that touchpad tends to stray when I am setting down my thumb in an attempt to click (classic Linux touchpad annoyance)
  • When beginning a new scroll action while coast is active, scroll occurs at 10x normal speed
  • Setup two-finger scrolling to work as smoothly as OS X, rather than scrolling the page in small, discrete increments
  • Determine if it’s somehow possible to restart X server without getting logged out (unlikely, given how much Googling I’ve done on this topic)

Footnotes
[1] While the touch bar is as bad for programming as numerous developers predicted, it was minuscule amount key travel inherent in their butterfly keys that served as my breaking point. Honorable mentions to the laptop hard crashing every few days, and the touchpad that is so impossibly large as to occasionally pick up spurious input (although their software integration makes that problem occur a fraction as often as it would for a comparable Linux laptop)

Posted on

Fixed: My i7 Intel Dell Laptop is Ridiculously Slow

Most of the Google results I found when digging around on this subject pointed to usual boring causes of slowness: too many programs being run on startup (which you can test with ms-config if you’re running Windows), anti-virus software, and other boring stuff of that sort. In my case, I had been running Ubuntu so most of those tips are moot. But to be thorough, I did remove practically any and every resident program that was running on what should have been a zippy Dell Latitude E6520 with a i7-2720QM (2.20GHz, 6M cache) processor.

And yet, running a utility that averaged about 5 seconds on my desktop consistently took 30 seconds on my laptop. Except for every once in awhile, when it would take 6 or 7 seconds.

Before splurging for a new laptop, I decided to take a peek through my BIOS settings and managed to stumble across the culprit: the Intel “Speed Step” feature. On my Dell, this was under the “Performance” settings. I guess that the idea of Speed Step is that the i7 powers itself down when it decides you’d like your system to perform like a 486. Whatever the logic is that determines when to power down was clearly NOT working as intended on my laptop. After disabling Speed Step, I have been running for the entire day at speeds very similar to my desktop.

Hopefully someone else thinks to Google for this problem and find themselves helped by a similar approach. FWIW I suppose that this might mean that the laptop uses more battery, but you can be an informed consumer about whether you want to run fast or power-efficiently.

Posted on

Why’s “open link in new tab” not working in Safari + iOS 10 + iPhone 7?

From the files of “endlessly frustrating problems that Google wouldn’t help me with.”

When I bought my iPhone 7, I couldn’t open links in new tabs in Safari for the first six months I owned it. Whenever I tried to hold a link to open it, Safari would sometimes ignore me, sometimes it would start showing a preview of the destination for that link. Which behavior it chose to do seemed to depend on the whether Mercury was in retrograde.

After much searching, I eventually learned this behavior isn’t a “bug.” According to Apple, it is the “feature” that they have long been marketing as “3d touch.” That is, your iPhone is now paying attention to how hard your touch your Safari links. If you hold a link “hard,” then, instead of popping up the context menu that allows you to open the link in a new tab, you instead get the obnoxious popup preview of the next page.

The solution to being able to pop the standard iOS Safari context menu? Hold on a link in Safari, but do it lightly, tenderly, as if you were stroking a baby dove.

This is what “intuitive UI” has become on the new iPhone.

Turning off 3d touch

If, like me, you find 3d touch to be more of a nuisance than a feature, you can disable it as follows: open Settings, search for “Touch,” and pick what should be the first option in the list:

Then click into the 3d touch option, which can be turned off for a 32% less aggravating mobile experience:

PS bonus fix! Have you had trouble moving your iPhone’s icons around since upgrading to iOS 10.1? Guess why. That’s right, 3d touch. As with the above, to move around app icons on a 3d-touch device, you have to touch them ever so lightly.

I will continue waiting for this to feel like a “feature.”

Posted on

Evernote vs Quip: A note taker’s detailed comparison

Over the past 5 years, I’ve probably spent more time in Evernote than most any other productivity app. I’ve created thousands of notes across Evernote’s OS X, iOS and web clients, becoming intimately familiar with the limitations of each. Over the years, I’ve periodically tested alternatives, mostly when Evernote obliterates my changes via merge conflicts with unsynched notes. I had high hopes for Onenote when I gave it a few weeks’ test run recently, but ultimately determined it was even more fatally flawed than Evernote (not to mention how difficult they make it to import past work from Evernote).

A couple days ago I discovered Quip. It is a multiplatform note-taking app that apparently started as a collaboration platform, and was acquired by Salesforce for $750m in 2016. It sports a reasonably effective built-in Evernote importer, plus an impressive suite of free features. Based on my initial impressions, I’m giving it even odds to replace Evernote as my note-taking app of choice. Yet, like Evernote, it too comes with a set of warts.

Given how powerful-yet-flawed both products are, I’m going to attempt to enumerate, from a note-taker’s perspective, where each shines. Hopefully this list (ordered roughly by impact on my everyday productivity) helps others decide which set of drawbacks is most forgivable to them.

Evernote Advantages

  • Notes can be displayed in grid while ordered by recency of update or other criteria (Quip only allows user-defined sorting in list view…and only on desktop clients at that. C’mon dudes, allowing notes ordered by recency of update is utterly essential feature)
  • Can navigate from note to note with single click, since list of notes remains visible in left pane even when a note is being edited
  • Better UI for text formatting: resides permanently at top of each note (in Quip, text formatting options are hidden behind a sometimes temperamental popout in left gutter)
  • Support for searching phrases (not just individual words)
  • Essentially instant search
  • Not as aggressive about trying to spam all my contacts during install (unlike Quip — forcing me to manually uncheck every Google contact during iOS install. Not a great approach to build goodwill with a new user, Quip)

Quip Advantages

  • Notes are saved in real time as they’re created (!). The note’s text is automatically synchronized to all devices that have the note open. Not only does this fix Evernote’s most fatal shortcoming (merge conflicts), it also allows multiple people to edit the same document concurrently, a la Google Docs
  • Less janky checkboxes for todo lists. They don’t slow down the note when there are lots of them, they can be copy-pasted without introducing weirdness, and their line gets crossed out when you check off your todo item.
  • Spreadsheets with full Excel-like functionality (functions, etc) are natively supported, and can be inserted inline into any note
  • Code blocks can be inserted into any note (!)
  • Variety of attractive pre-built font themes can be selected and set as default for notes
  • Can use across more than two devices for free (Evernote now charges for this functionality)
  • Note’s edit history can be viewed without paying monthly fee
  • More robust feature set for collaboration (collaboration seems to have been the initial purpose behind Quip’s existence) than Evernote. Can add inline comments to any line of any note.
  • More intuitive interface for working with multi-level lists (arrows to move back and forth between list level, rather than needing to use tab+shift)
  • Can organize notes into subfolders within a notebook
  • No upsells as yet in free version

Both apps allow chatting (because everyone wants to chat in their note taking app…right?), and both allow some degree of collaboration on notes (Quip much stronger here). It’s my goal to use Quip as my primary app for the next couple weeks before I make a final call on the victor. If you have experience with either app, would be delighted to hear your power user tips in the comment section below!

Posted on

Fixed: Rubymine doesn’t show files in “library” directories

If you work on a medium or large-sized Rails project, there’s a good chance that you utilize the vendor/gems or vendor/engines directories to help keep your code organized into modules (as opposed to stuffing hundreds of models, controllers and views into a web of subdirectories in the app folder).

Unfortunately for us, the Powers that Be at Rubymine do not index any of these directories in file or symbol searches under the belief that any file in these directories must be third party library code, and therefore not shown unless one checks the “include non-project files” every time they want to look up their files. Even with this burdensome workaround, one would still find their methods/files listed below any partial matches that may occur in the main project.

The fix is to edit your Rubymine project’s iml file, it’s located at [project dir]/.idea/[project name].iml. You’ll need to find “NewModuleRootManager” and make the following update within it:

<component name="NewModuleRootManager">
<content url="file://$MODULE_DIR$">
<sourceFolder url="file://$MODULE_DIR$/spec" isTestSource="true" />
<sourceFolder url="file://$MODULE_DIR$/engines" isTestSource="false" />
<excludeFolder url="file://$MODULE_DIR$/packaging/vendor" />
<excludeFolder url="file://$MODULE_DIR$/public/assets" />
<excludeFolder url="file://$MODULE_DIR$/tmp" />
</content>
</component>

You’ll then need to close and re-open the project, and voila.

I have repeatedly and unsuccessfully lobbied Jetbrains to at least create an option for users to make their own decision about whether vendor/engines and vendor/gems should be treated as libraries, but they have denied the motion, telling me to file a bug for it. I did so, it lives here: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/RUBY-18315. If you care about this file, you should login to Youtrack and cast a vote for it. Or leave a comment on this blog.

Posted on

Evernote QA Report: Merge & Sync

Hi Evernote,

Your sync and merge has long been broken, and I hope to provide you enough detail to get it fixed here. All the below should be reproducible, let me know if you find otherwise.
List Fruits 1

It starts simple. Create a note in Evernote webview. List some fruits. If you’re anything like me, you probably make a couple lists like this per day. All seems well. Later that day, you remember this list, and have a burning need to add “Starfruit” to it. All looks well?

2015-11-05 16.06.47
But things are not so well, because when we return to the webview, there’s some bad news awaiting:
List Fruits Double Note               ^– Now two notes, instead of one

That’s right, my fruit list has split itself in two lists with edits from desktop and mobile. Similar problems persist as I try to use the document.

Unless one is fastidious enough to sync every note when finished, and then manually sync when resuming on another platform, you are liable (at rate inversely proportional to speed of your internet connection) to soon find yourself with something like this:

Two Syncs Later

Every time I switch devices, I must remember “ensure save,” then pre-sync on the new device (and remember to confirm sync finished). Granted, there are a number of trigger points for syncs, but it’s impossible to be sure which, if any, have triggered/completed. One too-fast move, and I’m back in the ghetto of Mergetown.

I usually don’t even know I’ve been losing list items (to duplicated versions), until I notice the note lags in load/save time. And then I realize there are 10 copies of the list in my note, below the (already long) version I was treating as the “real list.”

I sympathize that getting sync to work reliably across disparate platforms is a hard problem [2]. So why not, instead of fully fixing the sync, just spend a few days fixing the merge?

If you could automatically add new lines to both documents without creating duplicate copies, that would be a good start. If you kept the note differences in the area they were found (not bottom of document), that would help. Source control tools have spent 20+ years building great systems to merge two documents. You can probably crib most of your implementation from a plugin/library in that domain? Or at least mark “duplicate documents” so I know I’ll need to hand merge them?

Thanks for considering these improvements. I take the time to write this because I still believe you’re the best solution in your space. If you could just address this fundamental stuff, I’d reap benefits greater than the (sizeable) time it took to create this report.

[1] Lists featuring fruits.
[2] Albeit the hard problem you ostensibly built your business to solve

Posted on

Remove green checkbox from Dropbox on OS X

As of November 2015, here’s how to do it with one line of code in console:

mv /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Resources/emblem-dropbox-uptodate.icns /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Resources/emblem-dropbox-uptodate-back.icns

Then you just need to restart Finder. You can do this by opening Finder and choosing “Force quit” from the Apple menu.

The Cnet instructions didn’t work for me.

Posted on

Is Gmail secure from its employees?

The recent essay from Paul Graham, “Don’t Talk to Corp Dev,” reminded me of a question I’ve wondered from time to time over the years: what would stop Google from accessing a startup’s Gmail (or Google Apps) if it were advantageous to their business negotiations? A part of me always cringes at this thought; it’s too paranoid. It goes against their culture. Still, given how bad an internal breach could be, I was curious to see what language Google would use to assure its users that their Gmail was in safer hands than, say, an Uber itinerary.

The first result I came upon in my Googling was a guy (Christopher Nguyen [1]), who on Quora who gives a clear and explicit description of what Google has done to protect Gmail from internal intrusions. The author describes a tough privacy policy that inspired several upvotes, not to mention at least two separate articles from tech sites quoting his answer as proof of “Google’s policy”. Nguyen concludes: “… ultimately, an internal culture of respecting users’ privacy helps keep [us] in check.” It sounded pretty good, like the sort of approach I’d expect Google to take.

My problem with the answer? It’s not from Google. Dropbox is explicit about how employees access data; I find their policies well-thought out and comprehensive. Evernote’s security is moderately explicit [2] that it has more lax policies [3]. Either way, I can evaluate the security of my accounts from an internal employee who might be bored some Wednesday night.

Meanwhile, Google itself is mum on who internally can read my Gmail, and for what purposes. “Gmail security”-related queries yield results ranging from how to secure your account against external entities to how Google keeps us safe from open wifi. They also assure us that they aren’t manually reading every one of our emails to serve us ads (Really?? So do they contract hamsters to pick all those ads? [4]). But nothing in my Googling can locate a Google-authored document that describes their internal Gmail security policy at all.

Does this lack of explicitness matter? I’m torn. Google’s generic privacy policy paints the picture of a company that cares about security. They seemed to get pretty upset when the NSA spied on their users. And yet, I’ve probably had more conversations in Gmail over the past 10 years than I’ve had in the real world. If there were any service I’d like to see a clear, tough, explicit policy on all aspects of data security, it would be Gmail.

I think their policies are probably as good or better than Dropbox, but at this point they are forcing me to assign an awful lot of credibility to that guy on Quora.

 

[1] Christopher Nguyen says he worked at Google between 2003 and 2008.
[2] See the “Customer Account Access” section
[3] “This [admin access] tool allows our customer service and platform administration teams to resolve customer issues.” Which customer support personnel are accessing? What do they access?
[4] Blog sarcasm

Posted on

Determine Ruby GC Garbage Collection Settings

Ever wish that you could determine what garbage collection settings your current running version of Ruby was using? Me too, but Google was not much help for it. There are two techniques for getting the current GC settings.

Technique 1: Use sh

In Rails console (or debugger), you can run shell commands by surrounding your command in the “ characters. So you can do:

`echo $RUBY_HEAP_MIN_SLOTS`
`echo $RUBY_HEAP_FREE_MIN`
`echo $RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT`

The pros of this approach is that it maps directly to the way that most people configure their GC settings: by setting environment variables. This is a means to be certain that the files you think are getting sourced when you start Ruby are being loaded correctly.

Technique 2: Use GC.stat

As of Ruby 1.9, running “GC.stat” can tell you all sorts of information about your current GC stats. The drawback of this approach is that there isn’t clear mapping between the environment variables you set and the data that GC.stat returns. Anecdotally, it appears that GC.stats[:heap_free_num] corresponds to RUBY_HEAP_MIN_SLOTS. I’m not sure yet how the other variables get reflected, but feel free to chime in with a comment if you know how the standard Ruby GC settings map to the hash keys returned by GC.stat