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Windows 10 Users “34 per cent more likely to be strongly satisfied with the filtered Taskbar”

Let that statement sink in for a minute – in Windows 10 Insider Preview builds, users have indicated they are:

"34 per cent more likely to be strongly satisfied with the filtered Taskbar"

… and based on that not-so-convincing statistic it’s been decided that the taskbar for a virtual desktop will only show apps running on that desktop (presumably hiding others that are running on other desktops at the time time?).

Gabe Aul at Microsoft describes in this post the latest features in the Windows 10 preview build and how feedback from preview build users is helping Microsoft decide what new features will make it into Windows 10, and which won’t.

And there you have it. Apparently the design of the Ribbon Bar in the latest Office versions was also designed the same way, based on observed/recorded usage patterns of ‘actual users’. If you think the Ribbon Bar is actually a good design then I won’t waste my time arguing with you, but most would probably agree from a usability point of view it’s a horribly cluttered, confused mess of somewhat related options. The Ribbon Bar reminds me of a set of cluttered drawers that are where you stuff your junk that you don’t have anywhere better to put. Each drawer has vaguely related things in it, but good luck trying to find something specific – you open a drawer and spend 10 minutes digging around in there trying to find what you’re looking for. Similarly for the Ribbon Bar – good luck finding that one specific feature.

So at some point if your’re lucky enough (?) to have Windows 10, you might wonder exactly how Microsoft arrived at a decision for why a certain feature is a certain way. And you can be assured that it was designed that way because 34% of preview build users (by a long way as far from a typical user as you can get) decided they were ‘most likely to be strongly satisfied’ if it was that way.

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Local javac path issues on older OpenShift WildFly8.2 based project

I have an app that I created a few months back on OpenShit based on the WildFly 8.2 cartridge. Locally in Eclipse the project builds and compiles fine, but executing mvn directly or in Netbeans (which also builds using your mvn pom.xml), it fails with an error regarding a path to javac:

-------------------------------------------------------------
COMPILATION ERROR : 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Failure executing javac, but could not parse the error:
/bin/sh: ${env.OPENSHIFT_WILDFLY_DIR}usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.8.0_05/bin/javac: bad substitution
1 error

This is obviously setup for building specifically in the OpenShift environment with this property defining the path to javac:

<maven.compiler.executable>${env.OPENSHIFT_WILDFLY_DIR}usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.8.0_05/bin/javac</maven.compiler.executable>

There’s a few posts and discussions about this (e.g. here and I suspect this is related), but I’m guessing the version of the pom.xml I have is older and been changed recently. I created a new OpenShift WildFly based project to compare the created pom.xml, and these two properties are no longer in the pom.xml file:

<maven.compiler.executable>${env.OPENSHIFT_WILDFLY_DIR}usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.8.0_05/bin/javac</maven.compiler.executable>
<maven.compiler.fork>true</maven.compiler.fork>

Removing them fixes my local builds, and pushing the code to OpenShift still seems to build ok too.

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Mounting Linux ext partitions on OS X

I wanted to check some files on an SD Card formatted in ext that I had used on my Pi and wanted to check if I had left some files in the home dir before I reimaged it. OS X doesn’t support ext formatted drives by default, but you add support using OSXFuse.

  • Install Fuse for OS X
  • Install the ext plugin for Fuse
  • Find the partition you want to mount with: diskutil list
  • Make a mount point – not sure on Mac OS X where is the best place, but I added /mnt/sdcard
  • Mount with:


    [code]sudo fuse-ext2 /dev/disk1s2 /mnt/sdcard[/code]

  • (replace with the /dev/ to your device)

I’m not sure if it’s best practice on the Mac to mount with sudo, but this worked for me for what I needed to do. Fuse mounts on ext are r/o by default, but there is experimental r/w support that can be enabled, check the docs.

Done!

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