‘Make it look good! Thats not what we think design is. Its not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs
So very true. Via a comment on an interesting blog post comparing Tumblr to Posterous.
Ironically, this short post would have been better suited to a one liner, throwaway post correctly labelled and nicely formatted as a quotation on a service like, well Posterous or err, Tumblr but I am trying to consolidate all my efforts into this blog.
Cary Millsap posts a brilliant article about his approach to performance troubleshooting that resonated loudly with me.
When I first started working at Siebel, a standard review was a production health check that consisted of meetings with key project staff (Siebel Administrator, DBA, systems and network admins, project manager, developers) coupled with some standard checks on key Web, Siebel and Oracle configuration parameters.
At the tail end of one engagement where I had precious little to note or report on, I asked to meet with an end user for a brief chat. The response was surprising and not dissimilar to the standard retorts Cary describes.
'Talk to a user ? Why on earth would you want to do that ?' (delivered with suspicious frown)
'The user won't understand your questions.' (patronising)
'The users don't understand the business requirements.' (surprising and worrying)
'The users are too busy.' - 'Can't you just talk to a supervisor instead ?'
Of course, most of these responses are instinctive, defensive measures, immediate responses to what is probably a rather unusual request and, to be fair and in the interests of balance, I have been introduced to end users by development staff who do know and obviously have a healthy relationship with the user community.
If and when I succeeded in getting an audience with an actual user, I didn't actually chat at first. Instead I introduced myself and simply asked if I could watch the individual use the system for 10 minutes.
It was often very enlightening just to sit quietly and observe the business process (typically, handling an inbound call at a call centre), the subset of available screens accessed by the agent, typical searches executed to locate data, actions they expected to be slow, actions they needed to be fast, common tasks they did frequently, lengthy interactive queries that were truly batch reports as well as interactions with other applications.
I have been running Linux Mint for 8 weeks now and Ive been delighted with it. My desktop PC is fast and responsive and I am hugely impressed by the sheer amount and quality of software available for Linux. Printing, scanning, wireless networking, audio, DVD writing and all my USB devices just work.
I don't have a virus scanner consuming memory and chewing clock cycles. I am no longer considering a memory upgrade as Linux works fine with my paltry 512MB.
I have all my favourite applications available (Picasa, Chrome, FileZilla, Emacs). Linux is brilliant as a development platform and installing software is easy. The Mint desktop looks great and with the addition of Microsoft TrueType fonts, my display is razor sharp and crystal clear.
Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, my wife has also embraced the change. She now uses Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express, Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Word and Excel and Nautilus instead of Windows Explorer. All of this was fairly transparent and painless.
This fulsome praise all sounds like an advert for the wonders of freedom loving, a precursor for some open source software evangelism and a concerted attempt to convert the great unwashed to Linux. However, there is an elephant sitting in the room. Right there - in the corner.
The Ubuntu and Linux Mint (which is based on Ubuntu) distributions have a 6 month development cycle. This means that a new release will appear twice a year which is great because users know when the next major release is due. In addition, minor fixes, security patches and improvements are continually being pushed out via automatic updates. What is not so good is the actual process of upgrading to a major release which, in my opinion, is relatively complicated and risky for an inexperienced, new user.
To be fair, Linux Mint are upfront and honest and describe the upgrade process fully, the options available and the pros and cons of each approach.
'There is no guarantee that it will work for you. In fact, this [dist upgrade] is quite a risky process. If you're experienced and if you know how to troubleshoot and solve common Linux problems then you're probably OK. If you're a novice user we recommend you perform a fresh installation of Linux Mint 8 instead.'
David Marsden is an experienced Linux user and comments that he is comfortable performing Ubuntu upgrades, quickly and reliably without losing his data. He claims that Ubuntu upgrades are quicker and easier than applying a Windows Service Pack.
Of course, David's absolutely right. Even I managed to upgrade to Linux Mint 8 at the first attempt without losing any of my user data and even managed to preserve the configuration settings for all my favourite applications. In fact, apart from the modified login screen and wallpaper, the four people who use the Linux computer would have struggled to notice the change, it was that transparent.
In fact, all I needed to do was:
When originally installing Linux, create dedicated, separate partitions for user home directories and data. I use '/home' (user directories) and '/data' (music, photos, documents).
Try to stick to the default Mint (and Ubuntu) software repositories.
Note down the additional applications and software packages you have installed.
Jot down user and group id's (copy '/etc/passwd' and '/etc/group').
Backup the home and data file systems (twice). Check the numbers of files. Check the size of the directories. Check the checksums. Check the backups are readable. Check the hidden directories. Check the backup disk isn't full. Check everything.
Burn the Install CD and install the 'upgrade'.
Preserve the '/home' and '/data' file systems, leaving all existing data intact. You did remember to jot down that '/home' is '/dev/sda6' and '/data' is '/dev/sda8', didn't you ?
Move '/home/user' to '/home/user.backup'. Repeat for each user account. This ensures that Gnome and desktop related settings are re-created.
Re-create the necessary user accounts and ensure the user and group identifiers are the same as before.
Selectively, copy the various, 'hidden' dot directories for applications (Rythmbox, Picasa, Pidgin) back into the user directory to preserve the application settings.
Reconfigure wireless networking.
Reconfigure the printer.
Remove the irritating fortune cookie from 'Terminal' (Mint only).
Now I am fairly technical and understand most of this. I have no problem whatsoever doing all of this. David is correct - all of this is common sense, quick to do and the whole process takes less than 2 hours. I don't even mind repeating this process every six months because, as David points out, I have a new, shiny operating system with new features, additional applications, bug fixes and improvements.
What I have a problem with is trying to explain this whole, convoluted process to my father. Or rather, rescuing his system after he has failed to follow this process. Remotely.
Of course, my father has a few options available. If it ain't broke, don't fix it - if Mint Gloria works fine than stick rather than twist. Alternatively, he could use a distribution that automatically performs rolling upgrades so his software is always the latest and greatest.
Dear Father - It is 6 weeks since my last confession. Since then I have...
Installed Thunderbird 3 which handles all my work email. This upgrade went smoothly enough although there were some minor glitches with server authentication and message filters. Thunderbird 3 adds tabs, UI enhancements, IMAP synchronisation, much needed improvements to the address book in addition to faster searching.
Upgraded my desktop PC to Linux Mint 8. Again, this went smoothly enough, mainly because I did a full blown install while carefully preserving my user data. Until Linux upgrades are 'rolling' and as easy as applying a Windows Service Pack, Linux will never succeed in the mainstream.
Installed Google Chrome on Mint 8. This was probably the only software I missed from Windows and God, I had forgotten how much faster Chrome is than Firefox. Chrome is blindingly fast on Linux, staggeringly fast, unbelievably fast.
Playing around with DokuWiki to replace Diigo and Google Notebook in an effort to use more open source software and get more of my data under my control.
Installed Laconica 0.8.2 so Billy has his very own sandpit to play with spammers in.
Upgraded this blog to the latest bleeding edge of Habari (0.7 alpha) and was relieved to see it still worked.
'Go in peace, my son. Admirable efforts but my sources tell me you are flagrantly continuing to use freedom hating, Microsoft TrueType Fonts to enhance your browsing experience on Linux, so please say three Hail Mary's and an Our Father as penance. Go in peace to love and serve RMS.'
After the Yak was shaved, we suddenly realised we had missed Football Focus and proceeded directly to the casting couch.
I fully appreciate that evaluating a Linux distribution is just 18 minutes and 32 seconds isn't probably sufficient to probably gain a full picture of the capabilities (or otherwise) of any software let alone a full blown operating system.
However, this superficial, high level, cursory review of all the distros below is useful as it solely focuses on the installation process, ease of use - both of which are key for prospective Linux users; particularly those people who might be looking to migrate, as in my case, from Windows.
As I have installed Ubuntu before, this was fairly straightforward. As I now had the full 80GB disk to play with, I allocated four 20GB partitions (root, home, apps and data).
The installation prompted for my timezone, keyboard type and was pretty quick. Once I rebooted, I was able to configure my Linksys wireless adapter and access the network. As I was using a Ubuntu version that was 12 months old, the system update utility soon notified me that I had over 800MB of available updates which I downloaded.
I was mortified to see the file transfer speeds was variable. Very variable - it ranged between 35-50 KB/sec and I also noticed the strength of the wireless signal was incredibly sporadic. On Windows, I would consistently get a signal strength between 75 and 95%. This computer was in the same room as the router with clear line of sight. I tried browsing the Web - the experience was painful, It was like the bad old days of 56KB dialup modems. I killed the system update which only improved the state of affairs slightly.
I then discovered that there was a Ubuntu mirror hosted by my ISP (Virgin Media) so reconfigured system update appropriately but still - no improvement. A ping to ubuntu.virginmedia.com took 4-5 seconds - yes seconds - not milliseconds. A ping from another Windows PC in the house took 20 ms. This was a major concern and might kill this experiment dead in its tracks with yet another Windows install beckoning.
Another of my concerns about adopting Linux full-time was printer support so I was delighted to see that drivers for my Canon IP4000 inkjet printer were included in a comprehensive list and printed a test page to prove it.
I imported photos, music and documents from my external USB Windows (NTFS) drive (which just needed to be mounted as 'root'). OpenOffice was able to read all my Word 2003 (and 2007) documents, Excel spreadsheets (and PDF's were also accessible using Document Viewer. I could view photos fine and I intended to use F-Spot to manage my photo library.
I was puzzled to see Evolution installed as the default email client so I installed Thunderbird and configured it to access Virgin Media email servers to send and receive email which worked fine.
Next, I installed another year old distribution - Mint 5 with the XFCE desktop interface (as opposed to the more common Gnome desktop which comes with Ubuntu).
Again, I simply reformatted the root partition and left the user data well alone. Mint looked impressive and has a slightly better utility to manage the wireless network. I was offered the chance to install 'Restricted' packages for proprietary software (e.g. the nVidia drivers, Flash). Open source purists may object but I accepted the invitation. I was rewarded by being able to play YouTube videos straight away with no fuss. I recall hunting around on Ubuntu for ages until I discovered the 'Restricted-Extras' package.
My main concern, the performance of the networking seemed unchanged (not wholly surprising as I believe Mint 5 is also based on Hardy Heron).
Next up was OpenSUSE which offered a slightly different administration interface and a green theme. This was another old CD and I was gratified and hugely relieved to see that OpenSUSE started loading system updates at a decent speed (500-705KB/sec). If all else failed, I could also revert to this distro although I wasn't entirely comfortable with the Nautilus File Manager after becoming accustomed to Gnome.
CrunchBang was an interesting distro with a very different interface - Black background, very minimalist with a handy system dashboard (CPU, memory, disk utilisation) with all applications were available from a right-click menu.
I really liked CrunchBang as it appeared to have a small set of carefully selected and useful packages without being overly cluttered with megabytes of additional software. I prefer distros with a compact base where I can then install additional software as required.
If I was the sole user of the computer, I probably would have gone for CrunchBang as the monochrome, minimalist beauty of the desktop was appealing. However I doubted that Norma would be as comfortable with the cut-down interface and funereal colour scheme.
I embarked on the now familiar installation process but once Fedora booted, I got a couple of disconcerting kernel diagnostic error messages when using Firefox and the automatic system update failed. There was also a worrying amount of blue - both during the installation process and on the default theme.
I dearly wanted to love Debian as I get the impression it is the distribution of choice for Linux aficionados and the technically minded crowd. Also, it had lots of red during the installation process which was very promising.
By now, I was getting bored of these time consuming full blown installations onto hard disk so thought I would evaluate the remaining distros simply using the Live CD approach and make allowances for any sluggish performance.
Unfortunately, Debian assume that Debian is the one and only and the best Linux distribution for you so you will obviously be installing the software on to the hard disk. For some reason, (as far as I could see) Debian don't see fit to provide a Live CD so people can choose to evaluate their software so, once again, I found myself performing a full blown installation.
Thus far, every single Linux distro had correctly auto-detected, configured my Linksys wireless adapter and managed to connect to my Linksys Router (running Tomato firmware) which was a pleasant surprise.
But not Debian. Oh no - although the WiFi card was recognised and I could enable wireless networking, see the available networks, enter my WPA credentials, Debian stubbornly refused to connect. There seemed to be a worrying assumption that all wireless networks used WEP and I felt I would have to do some serious digging to fix this and that somehow because I wasn't prepared to do so, I was unworthy to have the privilege of running Debian. Maybe it's some sort of Debian initiation ceremony. In any case, life's too short.
Arch is an interesting distro - it uses a character based installer. It reminded me of installing SUSE Linux way back in November 1999 when I had to recompile the kernel in order to get the mouse to work. Having been spoiled by all the GUI installers, I was tempted to give up on Arch there and then but proceeded until the partitioning utility decided that I had overlapping partitions (which was odd as every other distribution disagreed) and refused to go any further.
Another short lived experiment - some obtuse failure meant I wasn't able to evaluate this distro.
Finally, I looked at Mandriva which was a great looking distro and very user friendly. I particularly liked the WiFi management utility. It also performed well (even booting off the Live CD).
After all this effort, I still had a nagging doubt, that I was using dated versions of Ubuntu and Mint that were more than 12 months old. As there will have been a lot of updates and two full releases during this period, I decided to burned two more CD's for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) and Mint 7 (Gloria). My main reason was to see if the problems with my wireless Linksys card was resolved in the current stable version of Ubuntu and I also wanted to try the Gnome version of Mint.
Sure enough, support for the wireless USB adapter in Jaunty seemed much, much better and I was able to use the network normally and large downloads were now as quick as with Windows and Open SUSE.
The Linux Mint distribution is based on Ubuntu which means you can also access the Ubuntu repositories which have a wealth of software packages.
I liked the look and feel of Mint 5 (using the smaller, lightweight XFCE desktop) and was similarly impressed by Mint 7 (using Gnome).
The software update process is slightly more refined on Mint than Ubuntu - updates are classified based on priority.
The clinching factor in Mint's favour was the new Mint Menu introduced in Mint 7 which offered a (I hesitate to say it), a start menu that would be reassuringly familiar to Windows users.
The desktop interface was simple, stylish and uncluttered and I liked the Mint management tools. Also, support for an Ubuntu based distro would be easily available.
So that was it - after a day of evaluating various Linux distributions, I decided to go for Mint 7. Now the boring bit was over with, it was time to sit back and enjoy my new computer.
How I ditched Windows and embraced Linux - the prequel.
On Saturday morning, I thought it might be fun to install Linux on my home computer. A year ago, I had experimented with a few Live CDs and actually installed Ubuntu (not officially supported) followed by Oracle Enterprise Linux (officially supported) on my work laptop (Thinkpad T61). For various reasons, I subsequently had to reverse that change so I thought it might be worthwhile and interesting to install Ubuntu on my own computer (an ageing but reliable Dell 4500).
There was no problem with the computer, there was no problem with Windows XP. I am not a rabid, freedom loving, Microsoft hating individual. I just wanted to play around with Linux before 'Football Focus'.
As Norma also uses this computer (email, Web, Word documents), I decided to install Ubuntu as a dual-boot option alongside the existing stable Windows environment. This was firstly to evaluate whether Linux supported all my various peripherals and software requirements and secondly, let people continue to use Windows.
I dug out an old Ubuntu (8.04 - Hardy Heron) Live CD and started the installation process. When I came to partition the hard disk, I chose the 'Advanced' option so I could preserve all my existing data with 60GB allocated to Windows with another 20GB for Linux.
The re-partitioning failed; the 'ntfsresize' program helpfully told me with a typically cryptic Unix style error that '1028 is greater than 1024'. No matter - just get a Windows recovery disk and use the 'fdisk' utility to re-partition.
I booted from the Windows recovery CD. After a while I saw 'Files being copied for installation...' and wondered if I had missed the prompt to enter a DOS prompt enabling me to run fdisk. So, I hit 'Control-C' and rebooted. As I expected, my computer was now completely screwed as I had aborted during a full installation.
I sighed inwardly at my impetuousness and stupidity. I also blamed David Marsden who had helped sow this original tiny, little seed in my brain which was now turning into a long running saga and a complete waste of time and effort. Just to get back to where we had started. Almost.
This whole exercise was a classic example of Yak shaving as its finest. I was justifiably proud of myself.
I decided to postpone the Linux experiment to another day and simply re-installed Windows. One hour later, the machine was usable again. All my data was preserved so I took a full backup to an external USB drive. However, although none of my programs were installed and the Windows registry was pure and virginal, the 'Program Files' directory was horrendously cluttered with lots of unused folders.
Now I had a choice; dig out all those drivers and install disks for my Linksys Wireless Adapter, Canon printer, scanner, reinstall and reconfigure all the important software (Picasa, Firefox, Office, Outlook Express) so the machine would actually be usable again. Preferably before Norma got home and asked 'Can I just quickly check my email ?'
Alternatively, now I had a full backup, I could do the right thing, rebuild the computer completely and install Linux. So that's what I did. Only I didn't because I wasn't entirely sure Ubuntu was the best Linux distribution for me. Using the excellent, open source program InfraRecorder. I embarked on burning ISO images for all those distributions I was aware of, have seen recommended or reviewed recently.
I also perused DistroWatch to look for the most popular and used Dan Lynch's excellent, comprehensive, honest, balanced reviews of various Linux distributions.
The cast list, in no particular order:
[Obligatory hat tip to How to stop defragmenting and start living. As an aside, if youre an Oracle DBA and havent read this whitepaper, please do so. Now.]
I have used various devices and software over my 76 years on this planet to listen to music:
18 months ago, I finally caved in and bought an iTouch which I use a lot; mainly for listening to music and podcasts at airports.
I duly downloaded iTunes in order to get my music library onto the iTouch. I seem to remember that iTunes couldn't play Windows Media Player files which was slightly irritating. In any case, with a sense of a new beginning and a fresh, clean start, I re-ripped all my music CD's into Apple's AAC format, added the missing album artwork and synchronised my music, photos and applications to the iTouch.
Over the last 18 months, Apple proceeded to add more and more 'features' to iTunes which I don't want or need:
When Apple recently released iTunes 9, I suddenly realised I was downloading 98.4MB - just to play music.
It slowly dawned on me that, whenever I started iTunes, my (admittedly ageing PC) was unusable for 40 seconds while iTunes initialised and CPU usage hit the roof.
I also realised that iTunes consumed a staggering 82MB of physical memory while playing a tune and this excessive memory consumption could increase to 134MB after connecting to the iTunes store.
I realised this was madness. Complete madness. Finally, I came to my senses and sought out alternative programs to replace the oversized, obese, bloated, multi-function and very slow iTunes.
I soon discovered Foobar 2000 which is a small, compact, lighweight audio player for Windows. I downloaded the program and was immediately struck by the size of the Foobar2000 distribution - 2,985KB, 2.81MB or 3,056,036 bytes to be precise.
This was already promising so I installed the program. I was pleasantly surprised that Foobar quickly imported my existing iTunes music library in its entirety and I was immediately able to play AAC encoded music. No need for additional plugins or codecs.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see Foobar 2000 start up instantaneously (no delay or hourglass here) and consume a slightly more reeasonable 25,888KB of memory.
However, all of this was redundant unless I could actually synchronise music to the iTouch as using two completely separate programs to mange my music was self-defeating. So I downloaded a Foobar extension promisingly named 'Ipod Manager' and configured it.
For a complete fresh start, I took the rather brave (or stupid) move of completely resetting the iTouch to the factory settings which deleted all data and promptly hit 'Sync' in Foobar.
Although it took a while, synchronisation was 100% successful and I even got a 'Preview' of what songs were going to added/removed from the iTouch. This feature was incredibly useful as it gives you a chance to abort if your entire music library is going to be (unexpectedly) deleted.
There were some minor issues - not all album covers were displayed on the iTouch. I discovered that iTunes embeds album artwork in the AAC file. I preferred Foobar's method of adding the album art to the folder as 'Cover.jpg' so you have complete control over the images used. Later on, I actually removed the embedded artwork completely.
What else was missing ? I previously used iTunes to manage podcasts although this was never really satisfactory as iTunes had a weird concept of when the status of a podcast should be modified to 'Listened'. I rather thought listening from start to finish would qualify but Apple obviously disagreed and repeatedly kept sync'ing old content onto the iTouch.
Foobar had another useful extension called 'PodCatcher' which worked brilliantly. It would automatically download new podcasts (in the background) and I was able to easily sync to the iTouch simply by including the new 'Podcasts' category to the synchronisation list.
I wasn't completely happy with the default UI of Foobar so I used the Columns UI extension to make it look slightly more usable with the album artwork displayed.
Foobar 2000 really is the complete music player - once you add the appropriate encoders, it can play virtually music in any format (FLAC, WMA, AAC, WavPack, Ogg Vorbis et al).
One great feature is that Foobar can perform conversion between the various formats. If I can summon up the energy to re-rip all my CD's yet again, I plan to rip all my music to a lossless format (FLAC) and Foobar would dynamically convert to the required lossy, compressed format during the sync to the iTouch.
Another couple of useful extensions for Foobar:
Although I am now blissfully almost iTunes free, I still need to use iTunes to update the software on the iTouch but I am delighted to say that is the sole extent of my iTunes usage. If I need to install any applications on the iTouch, I can do that directly from the iTouch.
It was particularly satisfying to copy my Foobar configuration and music library to my work laptop and completely remove iTunes from that computer.
Garry Tan, a developer for Posterous (a simple but powerful blog platform), wrote a brilliant post about product design.
Are there any questions? I said yes -- one last one: "When do we decide to remove features?"
In a similar vein, Amit Agarwal asks 'What's Common Between an iPod and Google ?' Answer: Simplicity.
If I had a cube, I would print both articles out and pin them up.
Recently, I started messing around with DokuWiki as a replacement for Google Notebook (which Google have helpfully decided to ditch) and Diigo (after the well publicised and unfortunate collapse of another cloud bookmarking service - ma.gnolia).
In recent months I have also contributed to the Habari Wiki (MediaWiki), looked briefly at WikkaWiki and read Michael's interesting, thought provoking article about his Wiki nirvana wishlist with interest.
Last night, a throwaway post by Douglass Clem about TiddlyWiki resurrected my interest in my own long neglected, unloved local TiddlyWiki which I then upgraded to the latest version and then pondered consolidating that content into DokuWiki.
Today, a couple of colleagues expressed an interest in a group wiki at work for knowledge management so I have just requested a hosted TWiki (which coincidentally is being upgraded tonight) behind the Oracle corporate firewall. I am curious to see whether it will fare any better then the placeholder, skeleton Siebel page, I carefully seeded when Oracle first launched the official, public Oracle Wiki (Wetpaint) nine months ago.
And now, I discover that today, Wednesday 25 March 2009 is the Wiki's 14th birthday.
You may say 'So what ?' and attribute all of that to pure coincidence.
You may not find that spooky and disconcerting but I do.
Pownce (a microblogging service) has been sold to SixApart and decided to close the service on December 15 which is a nice early Christmas present for all their users - both freeloaders (like me) and 'Pro' users who pay $20 per year.
Although I have a dormant Pownce account, I don't actively use the service. However, I find it odd that Pownce have decided to close the service and provide all their users with just two weeks notice to extract all their data and find another home.
The Pownce blog claims that:
'we believe we'll come back with something much better in 2009'
However, that 'belief' must be pretty weak and the date in 2009 must be a long way away. Otherwise, why on earth would Pownce and SixApart force all the existing Pownce users to evaluate and migrate to alternative services if a viable, better alternative was being planned.
Will those users really come running back to SixApart after being kicked out ? When they're already been forced to move once ? After the way they've been treated ?
Surely, it would have been better to do what Google did with Jaiku. Absolutely nothing. Leave the service exactly as it is with no fixes, no improvements, no additional services or functionality. That way, the hardcore, diehard users will remain on Pownce and, at least, you have a hope of getting those users converted onto the new SixApart product (whenever it is available). There are a few obvious choices for Pownce users:
In fact, identi.ca have already responded to the imminent demise of Pownce and started work on the ability to import Pownce feeds into identi.ca and are actively looking for developers to assist with providing a Pownce compatible API.
However, I suspect the main issues here for disillusioned Pownce users aren't purely technical and won't necessarily depend on the advantages and disadvantages of the alternative services. The key factor will probably be the 'community' which has now been suddenly and forcibly broken up.
I suspect most Pownce users are on Pownce for a reason - they like the Pownce service and they like the community they have forged on Pownce. Consequently, I suspect a significant number will simply migrate wherever the majority of their friends go to or maintain multiple presences.
I also suspect that most Pownce users may well have already considered (and rejected) alternatives that were around (Twitter, Tumblr, FriendFeed) when they originally chose to sign up with Pownce which may be another positive factor in identi.ca's favour.