Very agreed. At the very least, I'm a big fan of, in UI design, if you have anything at all that pops up (even if temporarily) it should have a close button. Close button presses can then be tracked, and the UI designers can then tell if people are always closing the annoying little thing.

That's the wonderful thing about web UI design, is that unlike a product like Quicken, you can then track everyone's every movement through the app.

Matt - thanks for the data. I assumed that LA still wasn't working as the transit layer doesn't appear on Google Maps. But transit directions certainly do work, as do they for Boston and New York. So, indeed, DC is still the bizarre holdout, trying to get Google to pay them for the data or some other odd arrangement.

Mr. Perkins: definitely understood, and I posted this more recent article here on the matter.

I'm 100% on your side, and it's indeed 100% in the court of the transit agency to be able to provide information to other private-sector agencies and companies such as Google so that useful products can be made thereby. Just check out what was able to be done by BART with their data being made available, and they basically were able to get millions of dollars worth of free development work done, all aimed at increasing transit ridership.

You stated it well in one of your 2008 articles on the subject: Google makes websites and web properties, and WMATA operates the second-most-used transit system in the nation. I think WMATA should stick to trains and busses and let Google and other such companies do what they can to help people use the Internet to their advantage.

Nice - I'll have to try that.

Will - thanks, and agreed. Oddly omitted is any information lately on Yahoo!'s core search product. We hear about them making home page updates and reworks of their mail offering, but nothing on their search engine -- which has been the mainstay of their business. Odd as well, is that when you do the same search mentioned in this blog post on that Dianetics DVD, you get _no_ blog results, whcih I find curious. Makes me not want to use their search engine -- not as I'm biased, but as it makes me think they're shutting me off from relevant results.

I've not gotten HDMI to work on Linux. Worked on Vista after a bit of effort, but no dice on Linux.   That's why I'm glad I got the dv7 as I've got 2 hard drive bays -- one that's still my stock Vista HDD and the other I have running Ubuntu. 

Thiago -

Thanks for writing. No, I haven't found anything that's made Firefox faster on Ubuntu. I installed the Chrome alpha build on it, and that is actually significantly faster (much much faster, actually) but at Chrome's current state of development on Linux, there is no plugin support so no Flash. So, unless you stay only on Facebook and such, it's not all that useful.

In terms of other distros, OpenSuse and Fedora both perform real fast and don't have the same sticky lagginess in Firefox, but unfortunately all I read these days is that fglrx just doesn't jive with xorg 1.6 and so if you have an ATI board and want to go Fedora, you're a bit screwed for the moment. I really hope that changes, though.

Lefty - I agree with you that the user experience on Windows for downloaded files seems to be the easiest right now -- if you compare WIndows, Mac, and most Linux Distros. However, the UX on Ubuntu seems to be the closest I've seen so far to approaching the Windows UX, with respect to not having to hit the console as much, and mainly just getting to double-click the downloaded file, and allow it to install.

Stephen -

Thanks for writing. The laptop I've got has an Atheros 2425 WiFi controller, and from everything I saw, OpenSolaris seemed to initialize the device with no problem. The issue, I think (and I'm no expert here -- but I think) the types of authentication supported over the WiFi interface. I only had two choices for authentication -- WAP or WAP Personal (I believe) and the Linksys router I have requires 40-bit WEP. So, it just repeatedly failed to connect when I tried -- just giving me either a password prompt, or no feedback at all. That was all.

Otherwise, I'd love to try out OpenSolaris. I've always been a big Sun fan, running tons of Sun servers. So, if I could make it work as a Desktop OS, I would.

Totally. I was starting to think that it was too much to ask to have 3D Video cards just WORK in Linux. It was bizarre to me that one could easily have all of the other hardware in the computer work without a hitch, but an integrated ATI video controller could then somehow be impossible to get to work.