GeoShell

GeoShell is an amazing minimalistic Windows shell replacement. No more stupid taskbar. Just about everything can be keyboard shortcutted. I've set it up so my desktop is basically just a wallpaper. The main keys I use are alt-shift-F for task switcher and alt-shift-S for my customized start menu. I'm using the geoXWM plugin to use virtual desktops like in most Linux window managers.

So happy. My efficiency: up 25%, productivity: -300%. I waste so much time mucking around with my UI.

The Yuppies are coming

A poetic post from slashdot comparing Macs, *nix, and Windows to real-world locales:

The yuppies are coming

(Score:5, Insightful)

by BlueStraggler (765543) on Monday July 03, @04:15PM (#15653193)

What's really happening is that Mac "nerds" are becoming versed enough in Unixisms because of OS X that they can take a walk on the wild side with Linux and not get completely freaked out. They have just enough street smarts to take a walk through the OS inner city with the tough nerds, and not get shot or beat up. And they've discovered that, hey, wow there's a lot of cool shit happening on the mean streets of Linuxville.

But what they don't know is that downtown Linuxville hasn't been a rough a place for a few years now. It still clings to its tough reputation, but it's all college kids and coffee bars now. The place is gentrifying, and has a bit of that yuppie stench to it these days. It's not yet all Wonderbread and Wal-mart, like Windowsland, up the highway, but the Windowsland folks are moving in, and it's starting to get that feel.

The old-timers who gave Linux the frightening reputation that it carries, have long since settled down, had kids, and moved out to the leafy lanes and plush lawns of Mactown, to get away from the plastic Windowsland people. As a result, the Mactown folks have realized those Linux guys aren't so scary after all, beards and sandles notwithstanding. Maybe, some of the Mactown folks think, we could get a condo in Linuxville, and try some of that inner city living. Just on weekends for a start.

So they get a luxury condo in Linuxville, right on Ubuntu Street, which was built by a big-name property developer who saw that all the starving artists were living in the area, building cool lofts and studios from the abandoned tenements and factories of old Unixville. So he bottled up that artsy mojo and built a condo development with new appliances, and hardwood floors, and put in a Starbucks on the ground floor, and marketed it heavily to Mactown and Windowsland people looking for a change. Come to Linuxville! Not as scary as you think! But every bit as edgy! Now with taskbars! Sometimes you get contemptuous looks from the mean looking men who still hang out on Slackware Road, but it's best not to go down there if you can help it. If you can avoid them (and ignore the snotty punks on Gentoo Avenue), then it's all terrifically edgy and artsy, and just so-o-o-o nerdy cool in that certain je-ne-sais-quoi kind of way. It feels like they're right on the cutting edge, where the culture is created, where everything happens, just like they read in Wired Magazine in 1996.

I Love Programming

I just finished a tutorial on making a Java chat server and client. My first attempt at network programming, and it works like a charm! Yea, I know it's nothing to brag about, but I thought it would be so hard to do any kind of network programming because it was hard enough to do interprocess communication in Visual C++. But Java is so clean and simple! And to think, it's free as in beer, and Eclipse is free as in freedom.

Damn, I should've gotten into Java a long time ago. I wouldn't have had to detour into these other crazy interests of mine. Not that I regret them, but I could've saved them for later, after I get a regular programming gig.

Gnaural vs. NNS

I like Neural Noise Synthesizer but but it's $35 price tag is a bit hefty for a simple noise/tone generator, so I'm feeling like contributing to Gnaural and making it as powerful as NNS. What a perfect way to contribute to the open source community as well as expand my brain wave entrainment experiments! Okay, now someone tell me how to program in GTK.

LyX for Math

I just discovered LyX and its math editor, and I'm in love. I was looking for a math editor to do my physics homework. A teacher recommended MathType. It costs $100. Heck no! So I searched for a GNU alternative, and wham, I saw a picture of AbiWord with a LaTeX popup editing a math formula! Beautiful.

Unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with LaTeX or plugins/customizing AbiWord. I decided to just use LaTeX, which is when I discovered a frontend for it called LyX.

Wow, keyboard shortcuts for every symbol (e.g. \infty for infinity symbol)! Wow, subscripts (^) and superscripts (_)! Why math with pencil and paper sucks:

• Writing tiny sub- and superscript numbers can get messy.
  
• Big matrices are a huge waste of paper.
  
• Make a mistake near the top, eat a fraction of an eraser.
• No copy & paste means more tedium and more errors.

I think I'm going to like math again.

FreeDOS to the Rescue

I installed Ubuntu 5.10 again on my good old laptop, but I made a booboo. I told it to overwrite the MBR. It overwrote the Windows 2000 MBR. I used my Windows 98 boot disk to fdisk /mbr. Destroyed the partition table. I tried booting with W2K boot disk, but it could never read the 2nd disk for some reason. I used Partition Magic 8.0 Boot Disks to recreate the partition in hopes of repairing the table. Still broken. Worse still, the Windows 98 boot disk doesn't recognize my 2nd partition, a FAT32 with a Norton Ghost image on it of the C: drive.

Didn't sleep well last night. Today, I downloaded a boot disk that used FreeDOS. It could read the (broken?) partition table and loaded my D: partition with the Ghost image!

Palm V Battery Replaced

Replaced the battery on my Palm V PDA finally. I had the new battery for almost a year. I thought it was going to be harder to open the Palm, but it wasn't a big deal. I just put a blow dryer to the sides for about 2 minutes to melt the glue with the Palm V face down and then pried open the back with a blade, starting from a corner. I only needed to remove the back panel. (There's a middle and front piece as well.)

To put it back together, I heated it up again with the blow dryer and pressed the panels together. Remember to use gloves because it's hot.

Palm vs Laptop for Writing

The Palm is so much harder to use for note taking because of its setup time (I use a portable keyboard) and lack of a backlit display, but I like how small it is and how I don't have to worry about the battery drain as much. If only I could make this laptop use as little power as the Palm. Hm, I think I can if I install a very minimal Linux on this laptop. It could avoid accessing the hard drive except for explicit saves. It could run without X to facilitate boot time, although Ion doesn't take much time to load at all. Another benefit would be that I could type in Dvorak. One annoyance is that I won't be able to use metapad, which is for Windows. Vim is not great for prose, its text-wrapping has to be fixed after an edit. Nano doesn't word wrap. Nedit is for X. Anyone know of a lightning fast (to load) word processor for console Linux?