This is really sad. London has been attacked another time. This time the damage is smaller, as are casualties, but it’s still sad to see what’s going on.
Terrorists figure if they keep on attacking, they’ll keep radicalizing us more and more toward war, fulfilling their dreams of a holy war with the West. It’s going to be hard to reason with people in the next few days.
I am beginning the somewhat painful process of uploading my thousands of images to Gallery, so that I finally have them in a nice web photo album. I’m gonna have to leave a computer on at night uploading all of them and then use Gallery’s “add from folder on server” feature to add each one.
For now, though, I need to get some homework done.
It’s finally done! I have finally managed to get my new and improved pixelmonkey.org site online. I am now fully powered by WordPress and Gallery, two amazing projects (written in PHP) which allow for blog/content management and photo gallery management. I even integrated the two together by having them share stylesheets wherever possible.
Now to begin the actual posts, and the fun.
Will not be blogging for quite awhile.
That’s the truth, be it sad or good, windows XP/XP-Pro they do just work “out of the box”. Install the driver given you by the vendor of the machine (or preinstalled), and voilà, a wifi is automatically detected, acpi works perfectly, soundcard has never been “blocked” (I learned this could happen working with Linux…), and, last but not least, printing is quick, easy, and standard of all the applications, not the nightmarish list of “todos” of the typical linux environment.
Mind you, I used Linux for 8 years, but I give to Cesar what Cesar deserves: for sheer usability of the machines features, for “mindless” operations throughout, there’s no comparison at all…
I can close the lid of my laptop now, go to sleep, and reopen it and everything working in a second; I had to twitch even the kernel sources to get that from Linux, and never reliably…
I think it’s time to stop being geek-minded and be honest: Linux needs a lot to become a viable desktop platform for the masses; the sooner developers realize this, the better.
Otherwise, desktop linux will be only for programmers, curious (and affected by a light form of sadism) people, and people who use its incredible tools and power for something very specific, like simulations, where a Desktop environment is probably useless anyway.
Eugenia is right: why do I have to find a solution to watch Star Wars trailer when it*s obviously supposed to just click&work? is it the computer who has to relieve me of some work, or vice versa?
Lorenzo
Right on. Linux is great for me to work on because everything already “just works” for me. Once you do your tweaking and reading of newsgroups, you can actually get to work. But the second I had to install Linux on my new laptop, I was back to the old tricks.
Linux has a ways to go, but what’s interesting is that it is not that far away, and all these changes are coming. Once Linux gets to the point that things “just work,” then what do we have? Well, we have a free OS that works as well or better than Windows XP, and also comes with tens of gigabytes of free software, excellent package management, a great developers community and powerful new ideas everyday. In other words, computers in the ideal.
Whereas with Microsoft, the “just works” part is there, but all these other elements are missing, and there are no efforts to get to them. Will Microsoft Windows ever have the enormous free and open source software movement that Linux has surrounding it? No. Will it ever get powerful UNIX integration beyond Services for UNIX? No. Will it ever get a development community that is smart, clever, active and passionate? Not so long as IT reigns.
Linux has that glimmer of what computers could be in it, but it’s just missing on some of the basics. But we’ll get there.
Was over Max’s house, and while he played online poker, I played Doom 3 on his brother’s insanely overpowered Alienware desktop machine. The game is extremely well-done, from graphics to gameplay, but I really have no patience for First Person Shooter games anymore… they get boring so unbelievably quickly, and I just don’t have the time anymore.
The only FPS that might, MIGHT draw some time out of me is Max Payne 2, which I’ve had sitting at home, unopened (except when I tested Cedega by installing it under Linux–it worked), for quite awhile.
Look at me, the old fart at 20, yearning for the days of good adventure games like Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, King’s Quest and Curse of Monkey Island… *sigh*
Call it cliche, but the “greatest film about film ever made,” 8 1/2, has become one of my favorite movies. It really is an unbelievably directed movie, and despite the language barrier (wearing thinner every day!), I was really able to connect with the characters. More amazing is that this is the first film to be self-referential to such a high degree, a style that, I think, has been copied ever since (i.e. Adaptation, which I also liked). But I really loved the scenes from Guido’s childhood and how magical they felt with such simple cinematography. There were no special effects or anything, but some sequences (especially the opening one) had such an uncanny dream-like feel. Anyway, it’s really a great film.
I watched Mark Crispin Miller’s “A Patriot Act” on DVD last night, per my Dad’s recommendation. Check out its website if you like.
Absolutely tremendous show. It basically paints the Republicans in the White House for what they are: religious zealots trying to merge the church and state. Even though this was performed before the election, watching it now, after, Bush has won, made me a bit depressed. I should be storming Washington right now.
To upgrade this website to Movable Type, among other things.
Last-minute hacking with my version of Metacity, and I finally got what I wanted. Basically, I was using xfwm4 for window management, and since it is NETWM compliant, I was supposed to notice no difference at all in GNOME. Except that’s not true, since xfwm4 doesn’t know about gnome-panel, and since a lot of useful hotkeys I want to use in gnome-panel are generally bound in metacity. Plus, the gnome theme manager doesn’t work without metacity. So, shame on GNOME developers, basically. You claim you are compliant, but you aren’t.
But then I did some reading and figured out metacity is actually a bit better than xfwm4 anyway, just that some of its features are hidden in gconf and other places. Also, someone has coded a neat app called devil’s pie which lets you manager your windows at a very fine-grained level, which I like… though it is a bit buggy right now, it shows promise.
So, the main thing I was annoyed by is vertical/horizontal maximize. xfwm4 has this working fine, and I’m quite used to it. Metacity doesn’t treat it as a “toggle,” so if you hit maximize vertical button twice, you just sit there with a maximized window… it doesn’t switch back and forth. I find this annoying since when I have vim windows open, sometimes to see more I just quickly maximize vertical rather than scrolling down, and then toggle it back afterwards.
Someone coded a patch to this. You can find it on bugzilla here at Bug #113601. Unfortunately, no one has written a “proper patch” that also works with session management and such, but I don’t really care, I wanted this patch to get back to work. So, in order to jive with my Ubuntu system, I created some debs with the patched version of metacity.
nonsense, but useful nonsense:
if you have tags working, cd into the directory with the tags and hit something like:
vim -t env_alloc
vim will automatically open to the file with that symbol. Nice.
Other nonsense:
:ab #d #define
vim abbreviations, make it so whenever you type #d it will be replaced by #define
you can actually execute a proper shell from vim, just use the :shell command.
finally, there is a “confirm” option for the substitute command, so:
%s/foo/bar/gc will globally replace foo with bar and confirm each replacement.
