Wikileaks: Still confirming bad things every reasonable person suspected anyway.
(While the old adage about arguing politics on the internet being akin to running in the Special Olympics is generally true, sometimes it is fun. Proceed with whargarbl.)
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I’ve liked fiddling with OSes for as long as I can remember, and have been through a couple VM solutions to ease the overhead of that habit. Until recently, I had been settled on qemu with the kqemu module for acceleration for some time, and thought it was pretty good. Then, one of the group mates got me to give VirtualBox, which was too much of a hassle last time I looked at options, another try. The result:
That is my ArchLinux-running T510 hosting Virtualbox VMs with a Haiku R1 instance and a Snow Leopard installer (with a bootdisc for CPU recognition issues, apparently once updated it will boot straight from VirtualBox’s EFI). The partially-visible terminal with htop in the bottom left shows that it isn’t even eating my machine to do that.
Basically, it’s faster, it’s lighter on host resources, it’s more compatible, and NATed networking for the guests just works. Also, there is no hassle because the Arch package maintainers wrote some excellent support scripts. Converting my images and moving over. Do like.
Cellular automation-based generative synthesizer in flash. Very cool. Incredibly easy to make pleasing patterns. Would love a scaled up version.
There is a new superauto espresso machine (specifically, a VKI Eccellenza Express) on the second floor of the Marksbury building. Life is suddenly excellent, although my continued health may be in danger.
My only compliant from my first use is that the macchiato button appears to make a latte macchiato (and a starbucks-like sweetened monstrosity of one at that), rather than a real macchiato. The manual doesn’t appear to be online (yet?), but I expect the next several weeks will be punctuated with attempts to coax something resembling a brauner out of it.
I ran into a description of harmonic drives earlier. I hadn’t seen anything quite like them before, and they are just so cool – flexible driven gear for high torque, high fraction engagement, and inherently loaded for zero-backlash. Even though … Continue reading
A while ago I installed KDE 4.6 on one of my machines, just to see what the bulky extreme of desktops looked like these days. Mostly, it was obscenely bulky (KDE alone is, seriously, larger than the sum of the software I have on my workstation on campus) and cluttered (what is the deal with that fucking cashew). However, there are a lot of improvements over the last time I fiddled with KDE, and a few features I really, really like.
Some of the little nice things: The control panels are all integrated and aware of each other. The GUI wrappers around randr are genuinely nice (display attachment behavior as good as Windows 7’s – which is frankly the best I’ve ever seen), and the fact that it customizes nicely to CDE-style right-click-the-desktop menus (sans this bug when I first tried) is promising.
The most important (The nomenclature alone for this behavior is nonstandard) is “Desktop Gluing” – Permanently fixing particular windows (or applications, or whatever) to particular virtual desktops. In KDE, a huge array of window behaviors can be set from “Advanced Window Settings” or “Advanced Application Settings” panels obtained by right-clicking the title bar of a window. It’s a good design – unobtrusive until you go looking for it, and obvious once you do. I always keep my “Communication and Identity” stuff (Email, Chat clients, a browser with whatever social things I feel like tending to, etc.) on my second workspace, and this makes it much easier to respond to message alerts without pulling those windows to other workspaces.
Any EWMH compliant environment SHOULD be able to do this, (and apparently E17 has behavior similar to KDE, but E17 has improved from “Broken” to “Useless” over the last few times I’ve played with it, so that isn’t terribly helpful). I can’t find a way to replicate this behavior with XFCE. The native settings don’t have anything, and Devil’s Pie and wmctrl can both cause windows to OPEN on a specified desktop, but they are both extra, somewhat fussy, programs that need to run in the background, and neither can force a window to STAY on a particular desktop.
When looking into the feature, I did make the excellent discovery that XFCE has had a setting for the last several releases that takes care of one of the problems window gluing solves. Based on this Bug Report, one can switch the obnoxious “Pull window to active workspace when activated” behavior to either move focus to the workspace the window is on (My desired behavior), or just alert in the task bar.
Always nice to find little ways to improve the workflow, and see what the other desktop environments are doing, especially with so much of the UI “Innovation” of late being disappointing (see iOS, and Unity).
There is another Humble Indie Bundle name-your-own price/donate to charity sale going on. Like last time, the average Linux user is paying about twice what the average Mac user does, which is in turn about 1.5x what the average Windows user offers. Who says we’re cheap?
I put $15 into the last one, and even though I didn’t end up liking half the games in the set, it was totally a good deal. Did it again this time even though I won’t have time to play them in the near future.
Annual Cadbury Creme Egg: Consumed. Successfully reminded that they are disgusting. The analogous peep was taken care of earlier in the week, so my spring confectionery tradition is complete.
I don’t give a flying fuck about UK athletics, but Lexington is gearing up for one hell of a riot. Be safe everybody.
