Another day, another video interview. This one was with Greg Jarboe at SES San Jose. You can watch it on the Search Engine Strategies channel on YouTube, or I’ll embed it below:

Some of the things we discussed:
- a quick story about interviewing at Google in 1999
- the opportunities of cell phones and mobile platforms (3 billion of them!) vs. personal computers, as well as hyperlocal information.
- cloud storage servers and storing your data in the cloud
- how it’s cheaper than ever to start an internet business, with a choice of platforms ranging from Facebook, iPhone, Android, OpenSocial, to Google App Engine.

In my last video I got rickroll’ed in the background. This time the background was psychedelic, because the main conference stage was behind us.

I spoke at a few conferences in the second half of 2008, and a video interview from PubCon recently came out.

The always-charming Mike McDonald and I did a 10 minute video interview at PubCon a couple weeks ago. A few of the topics that this interview covers:

- how personalized search affects SEO and how ranking reports become less important over time as a result
- the fact that Google returns different search results by country, e.g. a search for [bank] for the United States returns different results than [bank] in the UK or in Australia. (Note: I had a brain freeze and said “Thomas Cook” when I meant to say “Barclays” or “Lloyds TSB” as an example of British banks)
- the broadening role of SEO and embracing the fact that SEO is a type of marketing
- we talked about Flash, and I pointed out that while Google has gotten much better at crawling and indexing Flash, you can’t just think about search engines; you also have think about the user experience, especially on mobile devices these days.
- we discussed 2009 trends in SEO, including: 1) expect many people to embrace broader view of SEO that includes marketing and social media such as Twitter, and 2) blackhat SEO will become even more malicious
- subdomains vs. subdirectories
- we also chatted briefly about the Kentucky basketball team (Go Wildcats!)

Check out the interview for yourself if you’re interested.

I hadn’t looked at my browser marketshare in a while, so I fired up Google Analytics:

Rough browser numbers are

OneStat says that they see 0.54% share for Google Chrome. Net Applications provides an hour-by-hour graph, which is nice, but they hardwired it to look for the string “Chrome 0.2″ when Chrome is on version 0.3 or 0.4 by now. Just eyeballing the Chrome 0.3 version stats, it looked like about 0.85% market share according to Net Applications. Hey Net Applications folks, any chance you’d be willing to roll up all the Chrome versions into your hourly report?

I hadn’t realized that Internet Explorer usage had dropped so low for my site. What does your browser marketshare stats look like for the last month or so for your site(s)?

I really want to run Ubuntu, but it shouldn’t be this hard. Plugging in an SD card reader that I picked up from Best Buy shouldn’t cause a hard freeze of my system (on both Gutsy Gibbon and Intrepid Ibex):

The card reader works fine in Windows. At this point, I’m honestly thinking about crashing the Ubuntu Developer Summit that will be held in December at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA to pick peoples’ brains.

Okay, so Ubuntu freezes hard when you plug in the card reader (sometimes). Unless you report that bug, no one will know to fix it. So I’m trying to follow these instructions for debugging removable devices to do a good Ubuntu bug report, and finding that the instructions are pretty out-of-date.

For example, you’re supposed to kill, then start gnome-volume-manager in a foreground mode to see debugging messages. Except that the latest version of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) doesn’t even install gnome-volume-manager. Oh, you can install it (and you’ll get the sound-juicer package with it). But when you try to run it, you’ll get this helpful message:

$ /usr/lib/gnome-volume-manager/gnome-volume-manager -n
manager.c/685: setting[0]: string: filemanager = nautilus -n –no-desktop %m
manager.c/690: setting[1]: bool: autophoto = 0
manager.c/685: setting[2]: string: autophoto_command = f-spot-import
manager.c/690: setting[3]: bool: autovideocam = 0
manager.c/685: setting[4]: string: autovideocam_command =
manager.c/690: setting[5]: bool: autowebcam = 0
manager.c/685: setting[6]: string: autowebcam_command = cheese –hal-device=%h
manager.c/690: setting[7]: bool: autopalmsync = 0
manager.c/685: setting[8]: string: autopalmsync_command = gpilotd-control-applet
manager.c/690: setting[9]: bool: autopocketpc = 0
manager.c/685: setting[10]: string: autopocketpc_command = multisync
manager.c/690: setting[11]: bool: autoprinter = 0
manager.c/685: setting[12]: string: autoprinter_command =
manager.c/690: setting[13]: bool: autoscanner = 0
manager.c/685: setting[14]: string: autoscanner_command = xsane
manager.c/690: setting[15]: bool: autokeyboard = 0
manager.c/685: setting[16]: string: autokeyboard_command =
manager.c/690: setting[17]: bool: automouse = 0
manager.c/685: setting[18]: string: automouse_command =
manager.c/690: setting[19]: bool: autotablet = 0
manager.c/685: setting[20]: string: autotablet_command =
manager.c/699: settings[21]: float: percent_threshold = 0.050000
manager.c/699: settings[22]: float: percent_used = 0.010000
manager.c/664: daemon exit: live and let die

It’s easy to find the source code of gnome-volume-manager online, but the relevant function is more cute than informative. Searching for ["live and let die" gnome-volume-manager] finds this post where someone tries to guess what the message means:

Fedora no longer uses gnome-volume-manager to auto-mount removable media — it’s now built into Nautilus. I am guessing that “live and let die” means “hey, someone else is already managing this” but that is pure speculation on my part. So if you get that error message it just means that you shouldn’t have been running it in the first place.

With that clue, you can go back and find this thread where Ubuntu developer wgrant helpfully lets someone know “gnome-volume-manager is no longer necessary either - nautilus does the mounting now.” It is good to find an Ubuntu developer posting answers online. But now I’m not sure how to generate Nautilus debugging logs akin to the gnome-volume-manager logs that fellow Ubuntu folks could use to debug the hard freeze. At least I do know how to generate udevmonitor logs using the new udevadm program.

Please pardon the melancholy tone. It’s just frustrating that plugging in an SD card reader can cause sporadic freezes on my Ubuntu computer. And if you plug in the SD card reader often enough, you may corrupt your system. I do see progress from Hardy Heron to Intrepid Ibex with several annoyances fixed, but there’s still a way to go.

In case you’re looking for the “udevmonitor” program on the Intrepid Ibex version of Ubuntu, it’s changed; use “udevadm monitor” now:

$ udevadm help
Usage: udevadm COMMAND [OPTIONS]
info query sysfs or the udev database
trigger request events from the kernel
settle wait for the event queue to finish
control control the udev daemon
monitor listen to kernel and udev events
test simulation run
version print the version number
help print this help text

It looks like udevmonitor was a symlink, and around April 2008, that symlink was removed. Someone asked about it on the Linux kernel mailing list and received this reply:

All udev tools are in one single binary called “udevadm”, which is
always in /sbin, and not like the old tools spread around in /sbin,
/usr/bin, /usr/sbin. See “man udev” for the reference to udevadm, and
“man udevadm” for the commands, which have been the individual tools
before.

So if you have a USB device that causes a hard freeze of your Linux computer when you plug it in, and you want to run udevmonitor to debug it, use udevadm monitor instead.

(This is a boring post that I’m writing for people that have this same problem in the future. Just skip it.)

Every good Linux user knows that if you want to drop from X down into a text-based virtual terminal, you can press control-alt-F1 (or any other key up to F6), and control-alt-F7 returns you to the graphical mode. But what if that doesn’t work? In my case, it turned out to be my keyboard. My Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 has a key marked “F Lock” and unless that FLock key is activated (the “F” LED should be on), the wrong keystrokes were being sent to my Linux Ubuntu version of Intrepid Ibex. How can you debug this? Well, it took me a while.

After some Googling, here’s how I’d write the flowchart:

- Try running “chvt 1″ to switch your console to virtual terminal 1.
- If “chvt 1″ does not work, you might get the message “Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console”. You probably need to be superroot. Once you run as root, that command should work.
- Maybe “chvt 1″ fails in some other way. Dude, you’re outside my area of expertise. You could try typing “sudo modprobe vga16fb; sudo modprobe fbcon” . Or you could try typing the command “setupcon” to set up the font and keyboard on the Linux console. Or it’s possible that you need to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and tweak the vga= setting or remove the “splash” parameter. Or you might want to check your /etc/gdm/gdm.conf file.

- Quick check: you might have the “DontVTSwitch” option set in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, which would disable virtual terminal switching.

- If running “chvt 1″ as superroot does work, then you probably have an issue with your keyboard mappings somehow.
- If you have a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, make sure that the “F-Lock” key near the top-right of the main part of the keyboard is properly engaged. The “F” LED below the keyboard should be on.
- Next, run xev (possibly as root) to see raw xevents as you press keys. This thread helped, where the person said

Recently I tried to switch to VT (console) and I couldn’t - Ctrl+Alt+F1 didn’t work (and they used to couple of weeks ago). I don’t even know where to look for the problem; xev detects KeyRelease XF86_Switch_VT_1 event, /etc/inittab contain getty respawns.

When I ran xev myself, and pressed control-alt-F1, I saw an event like

KeyPress event, serial 38, synthetic NO, window 0×3400001,
root 0×1a6, subw 0×3400002, time 1848943, (42,37), root:(1751,59),
state 0×0, keycode 146 (keysym 0xff6a, Help), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

The fact that I saw a “Help” event rather than “XF86_Switch_VT_1″ was what made me suspicious. Sure enough, activating the “F-Lock” key then triggered this event:

KeyRelease event, serial 34, synthetic NO, window 0×3400001,
root 0×1a6, subw 0×3400002, time 2873229, (38,51), root:(1747,73),
state 0xc, keycode 67 (keysym 0×1008fe01, XF86_Switch_VT_1), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

and life was good. You might also consider tweaking xmodmap to return the values you expect. Or you might have a strange XkbModel or XkbLayout setting where switching your keyboard language or layout (e.g. from pc105 to pc104) might help.

Last year I got these reindeer car antlers for my wife. This year she let me have them for my car. They look like this:

(Note: this is the picture from the catalog, not one of our cars.)

Tons of people stop, stare, and then break out in a smile or start pointing out my car to friends as I drive by with my sleek reindeer antlers and big red nose. The antlers slide onto your windows, which then shut securely. That means you don’t need to worry about antler-theft in a parking lot or losing an antler as you scoot down the highway at 65 miles an hour. You may need to pay attention if you roll down your window at a McDonald’s drivethrough though.

I ordered mine from What on Earth and they’ve worked great. Lots of fun and highly recommended.

• To get Google Mobile App on your iPhone, go to the App Store and search for “Google Mobile App,” or click on this link to install from a computer. If you have an older version of Google Mobile App installed, you might want to uninstall the older version before installing the newer version.
• Voice recognition is turned off by default for non-U.S. users. To enable voice recognition, click on the “Settings” tab at the bottom of the screen and slide “Voice Search” to ON.
• If you hold the iPhone up to your ear and don’t hear the “baBUM” sound to start talking, swing the iPhone down and back up to your ear. Sometimes a little wrist flick helps to tell the iPhone you want to search.
• You can search things besides Google’s main web index. Do a regular query such as [daffodil pictures]:

then press on the magnifying glass near the top left corner to bring up other options to search. By default you’re searching iPhone and Web, but you can also search Maps, Images, News, Shopping, or Wikipedia:

Press an option like Images and the application will immediately redo the query:

• If you want to go straight to the onscreen keyboard, you can tap the “Search” tab at the bottom of the screen twice.
• Searching with the keyboard can be very handy. As you type, the application will suggest contacts, websites, previous searches, and related query suggestions:

and do you see those query suggestions in the middle of the screen? You can slide/flick them to get more suggestions:

• The “Apps” tab at the bottom of the screen is a one-stop shop to get to all your Google services easily, including Google Apps versions of services:

• You can use Google Mobile App with multiple Google Apps accounts. In the Settings tab, click on Domain. Then you can add multiple domains, separated by commas.
• Google has posted HTML documentation for Google Mobile App and also provides a Google Mobile Help discussion group.

Bonus tip: If you want to understand what your cat is trying to say to you, start the voice recognition and just hold it up to their mouth as they meow. Then Google will try to convert the meow into regular English text. Thanks to Sean Harding for this tip.

I have a very good feeling about Google’s new iPhone app that does voice recognition. I’ve been playing with this voice recognition application for several weeks and I have to say that I’m really impressed. First and foremost, the voice recognition works really well. Crazy long-tail specialized vocabulary is tricky (more on that later), but for queries with normal words in them, the voice recognition is really accurate and I think it will get even better. You can say “population of Troy, New York” and you’re pretty likely to get good search results:

I like the slick interface, because all you have to do is start the app. When you want to do a search, just hold the iPhone to your ear. The iPhone’s accelerometer senses the movement and makes a “baBUM” noise to let you know when to talk. Then just say a query like [daffodil pictures] or whatever. It’s much smoother to experience than it is to write down. The net effect is as if you had some kind of Star Trek communicator device, except powered by Google instead of Spock and the rest of the crew.

I’m really impressed with the team that worked on this. They pulled this together in a very short time and they’ve produced an extremely polished application. Every time I’ve emailed someone with feedback or a question, they replied quickly, but also thoughtfully. It’s clear to me that this application is a labor of love and they want it to be outstanding. I can’t wait to see what they do next; maybe the application can start to learn your specific voice and its inflections?

Do you remember Battelle and O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0? At the risk of mangling it, they define Web 2.0 as “applications that harness collective intelligence (either implicitly or explicitly) to get better as people use them.” I expect the voice recognition of Google’s search app to get better as people use it, much in the same way that the intent of GOOG-411 was partially to improve our text-to-speech models.

The last thing I like is subtle. This app has changed the way that I do queries. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a huge search geek. I’m hyperaware of when my query habits change, and I notice myself much more likely to do off-the-cuff queries such as [what's the average price per square foot for carpet?] or [how many miles per gallon do Audis get?] or [what is a softshell jacket?] or [what does the 11-99 foundation stand for?]. Marissa Mayer once kept a diary of all the searches she wanted to do during one day, and mentioned about 20 queries that came to mind. I feel like I had almost that many queries just driving into work. This app lowers the bar to doing searches. For a few days I was like a five-year-old just doing queries as they popped into my head. The easier/faster it is to search, the more I searched.

Not only have I started to do more queries, but I also say longer, more natural-language queries. Why? Because the more contextual clues I can give to the voice recognition engine, the better it will do. So a query like [mount everest elevation feet] might work, but [how high is mount everest] is more likely to be recognized (in my limited experience). The way you formulate queries is different when you’re speaking compared to when you type. I’m still pondering the implications of that.

Is the app perfect? Of course not. Right now it keeps a history of my last six queries. Personally, I’d like to keep all my queries so I can go back and find previous searches. And the voice recognition, while very solid, will continue to improve over time. I’d also love a way to add my own personal vocabulary of terms such as “PageRank” or “webspam” (which currently comes up as webcam). So the app will improve, but I still feel like I have K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider in my pocket a lot of the time.

The first time you hold a phone up to your ear and just say “18 percent of 33 dollars” and get a Google calculator answer back that it’s 5.94 dollars, it’s an epiphany. Now I don’t need a tip calculator application; I just talk to my phone and it tells me to leave a six dollar tip:

You may have a similar epiphany when you say the phrase “miles per gallon” and the app knows to type “mpg” or you say “one hundred and seventy-six” and the app returns “176.”

That rocks, and it feels like just the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential. Imagine if you had voice “bookmarks” like “Go to my email” or “Bring up today’s calendar” and you’d automatically see which room your next meeting was in. I think this will be a fun application. If you have an iPhone, take it for a test drive yourself: go to the App Store and search for “Google Mobile App,” then try it out. If you have iTunes installed, you can also click on this link to install from your computer. Oh, and if you’re a non-U.S. user, the app turns off voice search by default. To enable voice recognition, just click on “Settings” and slide the “Voice Search” setting to ON.

Read other people’s impressions of the new application over on Techmeme, if you’re interested.

I’m not sure what Google Docs market share is, but I thought it would be interesting to mention a couple data points and add a new data point.

Data point #1: Compete. Compete just estimated that 4.4M visitors stopped by Google Docs in September, which is just a hair below 2.4% of the U.S. online population, according to them. Compete buys data from ISPs, among other sources, but doesn’t reveal which ISPs sell their surfing data, so it’s hard to tell if those ISPs’ users tend toward tech-savvy vs. newbie or affluent vs. lower income. One other metrics service (Nielsen//NetRatings) has claimed that Google Docs users tend to skew toward higher-incomes and are more likely to be technology early adopters.

Data point #2: ClickStream. A recent press release from ClickStream Technologies that claims that 1% of internet surfers use Google Docs. Honestly, this felt a little low to me. So I read about how they collected their data, and I have a hunch why ClickStream might have come up with lower numbers. From the press release:

“From May to November 2008, ClickStream Technologies recruited 2,400 U.S. internet users over the age of 18 to complete a survey and install ClickSight® …. Participants were recruited through a market research firm which awards cash and prizes in exchange for completing online surveys.

- Sample is self-reported (in initial recruitment survey) as 65.5% female, 34.5% male…

A few things come to mind:
- 2,400 users is not a ton of people.

- Tech-savvy, more affluent users are probably less likely to agree to click-monitoring in exchange for cash and prizes. I would go so far as to say most tech-savvy users would actively avoid such offers. If Google Docs users really do skew more toward affluent/tech-savvy (and I think that they do), that would result in fewer Google Docs users in ClickStream’s consumer panel.

- 65.5% female users sounds way too high. I think a more representative number is something like 52% of the online population. If ClickStream is getting 65%+ female users and not even in the 50% range, there could be all kinds of sampling errors in the data, e.g. if users were recruited from sites that didn’t represent the overall internet population.

I was thinking about ClickStream’s study and how it got a fair amount of coverage that implied Google Docs might be struggling, despite the fact that ClickStream recruited a relatively small number of users by offering cash/prizes to complete online surveys. And I asked myself: “Matt, are their any application monitoring services that tech-savvy people do use?” As soon as I asked that, I remembered that I signed up for Wakoopa recently. Wakoopa is a Web 2.0 website + client-side download that lets you track and share which applications you run. It’s the sort of service that tech-savvy users like Louis Gray are likely to use, and Wakoopa just recently started tracking web apps.

Datapoint #3: Wakoopa. Let’s see how many people are using various applications on Wakoopa. A little bit of searching turned up these stats:

Windows Explorer: 23,985 people
Finder: 6,254 people => 23,985 + 6,254 = estimate of 30,239 active users

Word: 14,985 people
OpenOffice: 3,762 people
Google Docs: 1,516 people
Corel WordPerfect: 80 people

I don’t think Wakoopa says how many active users they have, so I took one popular-but-Windows-only app (Windows Explorer) and one popular-but-Mac-only app (Finder) and added them to estimate that Wakoopa has about 23,985 + 6,254 = 30,239 active users. The reasoning is that if you’re running Windows or Mac, you’d expect that Wakoopa would see you running Windows Explorer or Finder at least once. Now let’s see how ClickStream and Wakoopa compare:

It’s easier to see this as a graph:

According to ClickStream, users are 3-5x more likely to use WordPerfect than Google Docs. But Wakoopa’s data suggests that Google Docs is about 20x more popular than WordPerfect. So who’s right? Well, both sources of data have self-selection bias. Wakoopa gives data on at least 10x as many users as ClickStream, but you have to bear in mind that Wakoopa’s users skew toward the tech-savvy. If you have friends that sign up for cash/prizes in online studies you might lean toward the ClickStream numbers. If you run with a more Web 2.0 crowd or don’t know anyone that runs WordPerfect, you might believe the Wakoopa data. If ClickStream disclosed their percentages of (say) IE vs. Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera, I suspect that would also help calibrate the differences. The correct answer is probably somewhere in between the 1% estimate from ClickStream and the 5% estimate from Wakoopa.

Google Docs is clearly the underdog in this area. But I’ve talked before about how Google’s tech-savvy user base can skew usage metrics. It would be a shame if people read the ClickStream Technologies press release and failed to consider some of the additional factors in estimating market share.

I arrive Wednesday afternoon for the 2008 Pubcon conference, and I’ll be staying until after the networking event on the last day, which is the heart of the event. It’s the heart because the networking event is held at a pub, and the original idea of Pubcon was that some of the best parts of a conference take place at the pub after the official conference is done.

If you see me, please come up and say hello! Tell me how you’re doing, or what you like or dislike about Google. I’ll be participating in the Search Engine Super Session that traditionally wraps up the formal part of the conference.

What are you likely to see if you head to Las Vegas? Well, here are some pictures that I’ve been meaning to post for a year. No joke, I’m that behind on things I want to blog. First off, you’ll meet lots of search engine optimizers (SEOs) and webmasters:

As you can see, they’re a very fun and friendly bunch of folks. And if you’re lucky, you might run across a celebrity. Last year, we saw David Caruso:

The rumor was that Caruso was there to record some promotional material for Microsoft, but I never saw anything. If anyone knows of a David Caruso/Microsoft commercial, please send me a pointer.

WebmasterWorld is also a nice place to get a glimpse of what other smart people are doing. Last year was the first time I saw an Asus EEE:

Nowadays this is known as a “netbook” and they’re getting pretty popular with the kids these days. It looked so cool that right after the conference I went right to Amazon and ordered one. Unfortunately, my order got delayed and delayed until I finally canceled it, so I never ended up getting a netbook. Maybe I’ll try again at some point.

What else do I like about Pubcon? It’s a great chance to connect with people and just talk. For example, remember when I did this post about how triple-tap power adapters should be branded as schwag? Well, at the conference last year both Topix and CareerBuilder surprised me by actually doing exactly that:

and

It’s pretty cool to see someone take your idea and just run with it. But the best reason to head to Pubcon is that lots of fun, smart people go, and it’s a chance to catch up with what’s happening in the world of search. Again, if you see me there, please say hello!

Every so often I get an email like this:

Dear Webmaster,

I have browsed your site and I’m interested in purchasing advertising space in it.
I am mainly interested in placing a new page on your site with content and links that I will supply.

Please let me know if you would like to discuss this further or if you have other ideas.

Kind Regards,
Rob

Normally I just delete junk like this, but I decided to reply. I wrote back “Can you show some other examples of stuff you’ve done before?” And usually at this point, the person realizes that I’m a webspam person at Google and shuts up. But I got a reply:

My offer is this:
I want you to create a new page on your site.
I will send you a gambling related article with my links on it that will be
on the new page.
I wish that this page will have only my links on it with no other external
links.
Also I wish that this page will have a link from all the pages on the site.
Please let me know what you think and how much will it cost to me.
Best regards,
Rob.

I wrote back and asked Rob for an example page; we’ll see if he bites.

Later: He did bite.

The polls will be closed by this time tomorrow, so don’t forget to vote, everyone.

I missed a few Halloween tidbits:

- Our Halloween post on the Google webmaster blog gives you a feel for Halloween at Google. The dog dressed up as a lion was pretty awesome. There was also a guy dressed as the Android from Google’s mobile phone OS.

- What happens when a witch accidentally collides with a telephone pole? This is what happens:

- Besides the yummy mummy cupcakes, my wife also made chocolate candy corn cupcakes:

- Fitz took a turn as the Dude.

- And my cat Ozzie decided that he wanted to be a feather boa dancer for Halloween:

I hope everyone had a happy and safe Halloween!

For Halloween this year, I decided to be Rick Astley. With a little bit of hair spray, spray-on hair color, and some make-up for a widow’s peak, it looks like this:

What fun. To make the costume complete, I took my Android G1 phone and bought a copy of Never Gonna Give You Up from Amazon for $.99. Then I put the song on continuous loop and turned on the external speaker. The G1 can really belt out music! Presto, not only do I look like Rick Astley, but I’m Rickrolling everyone who comes within ten feet of me!

In order for you to fully appreciate the experience, I’ve added an “embed” code into this blog so you can experience the costume for yourself. Let me know if it works for you. Thanks to my wonderful wife for the idea and for her help with the costume this year. She also made a special treat for people at work:

Mummy cupcakes!

Other Halloween fun from previous years.

You probably saw Google’s Halloween logo today:

But you may not have noticed that Google made another change for Halloween. Check out Google’s robots.txt file today:

That’s right. Zombies are disallowed from accessing /brains on Google today. You can never be too safe!

A little late, but I hope everyone had a good Diwali! I enjoyed some good Indian food and I hope you did the same.

A new version of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) is coming out this week, so I’m trying out the release candidate. Here’s an annoyance I hit and how to solve it. I keep a list of steps to perform after installing Ubuntu, and one of my steps is

Drag the bottommost taskbar/panel to the right and the topmost taskbar/panel to the bottom.

I like my “start menu” at the bottom of the screen like Windows does rather than at the top of the screen like Apple’s Mac OS X does. Dragging the bottom panel to the right works fine, but dragging the top panel to the bottom of the screen didn’t work! So I do what any GNOME user would do: I right-click the panel, select “Properties,” and try to set the Orientation from “Top” to “Bottom” in the General tab. Except I can’t.

Instead, I see the message “Some of these properties are locked down”. So I do a Google search for that exact phrase. There’s not many pages that match that phrase, and most of them are translation pages. Grr. That means that not many people have encountered this problem before. After a little query rejiggering, I search for [gnome panel properties locked down] and find this Ubuntu forum thread in which the person says

It sounds like your gnome-panel is locked down. You can remedy this from gconf-editor. Start it from the quick launch dialogue (ALT+F2) or from the terminal: [with the command] gconf-editor

Once the editor has opened, navigate to “apps” > “panel” > “global”, and uncheck the key called “locked_down”.

Great! That sounds easy. I fire up gconf-editor and navigate to that spot, only to find that apps/panel/global isn’t set to locked_down. Hmm. Maybe there’s another locked_down value that is superseding things somewhere else? I search for locked_down anywhere else in gconf-editor and find something at /schemas/apps/panel/global/locked_down, but the value for that is a “<schema>”, and when I try to edit that, gconf-editor helpfully tells me that “Currently pairs and schemas can’t be edited. This will be changed in a later version.” Grrr. So that schema might be affecting my locked-down panel, but I can’t edit it? This is roughly where I start cursing in my head.

But that’s okay, because I’m a computer science geek. If I have to find a “locked_down” text string in the underlying filesystem, I can do that. I search in all the delightful dot directories in my home directory, and I don’t find any mention of that string. Quick pop quiz: would it be in .dbus, .local, .config, .cache, .gconf, .gconfd, .gnome2, or .gnome2_private? Hey Ubuntu/GNOME developers, do I really need 29 (really!) dot directories after a fresh install?

By the time that I’ve sudo’ed to a root shell and I’m in /etc running “find .* type -f | xargs -i{} grep -i locked_down {}” that’s when I’m cussing out loud. So I take a deep breath, metaphorically step back, and head to the Google again. This time I search for [gnome lock top panel] and the #1 result is this Ubuntu bug which leads me to this GNOME bug.

Browsing those bugs makes it clear what happened. Some non-savvy users with really sensitive touch pads were accidentally dragging their panels all over. The solution was to lock the top panel. I can understand why that decision got made. The discussion on the thread didn’t contain the answer (they were talking about making ALT+drag move the panel and mentioned another discussion about this issue), but it made me rethink what I was doing. GNOME/Ubuntu people were shooting to make accidental drags impossible, but they must have made it possible to drag the panel somehow. So I go back to the panel, right-click on it, and carefully read through the options. Sure enough, there’s an option under the right-click menu: “Allow Panel to be Moved“.

I understand why GNOME or Ubuntu folks decided to lock the top panel: they wanted to avoid accidental click-and-dragging by novice users. And maybe it’s my responsibility to carefully study every new menu when I install a fresh version of Ubuntu, instead of just quickly working through the instructions that I’ve written for myself without scouting out every new option. But if I right-click on a panel and select Properties, it’s pretty utterly useless to tell me “Some of these properties are locked down”