Foxybuntu
Very interesting mockup of a simplified user interface by Nigel Tao: check out the UI mockup.
It may not be directly obvious, but that sure looks like Xfce to me ;-)
Bye-bye, Kitty
This past Wednesday, one of our three cats, Blackie, died. She was a diabetic, and had apparently developed stomach and intestinal cancer recently. She hadn't been eating for a few days, and so couldn't have her insulin shots.
I knew she hadn't been in the best of shape over the past few months, but I was really hoping I'd be able to make it home to see her while she was still alive.
She was always the sweetest little cat. We found her back when we lived in NJ. She belonged to one of our neighbors down the street, but they treated her like crap. She spent all her time outside (and thus was coverd in fleas), wasn't well-fed, and hadn't been spayed. At a very young age she had already had a couple litters of kittens. From that, and beeing fed so poorly, she was a very small cat, and never grew that much. Anyway, she always used to come to our backyard, and we would feed and take care of her. Eventually we decided just to take her in and get her properly cleaned up and checked out. We of course took her with us when we moved to MD.
She was one of the friendliest cats I've known, but not in an annoying way: she would constantly want attention, but most of the time would back off if I was busy or just not in the mood. She just wanted to be loved, but respected my space. When she developed diabetes, we didn't expect her to last all that long, but she did. I don't recall exactly, but she would have been at least 15 or 16 years old this year.
I haven't really seen any of the cats that much since I stopped living at home during (at least) the summers, but she'll definitely be missed.
Transparent future
Not being able to set my mind to doing anything useful, I played a little with rgba windows. For a future version of Xfce that can depend on cairo-based versions of Gtk, it should be possible to only make the panel background transparent, while keeping text and icons fully opaque.
Just changing the panel window and the base plugin classes, I got the following result:
Not too bad. All widgets that have their own X window, or that do some custome drawing are not transparent, but the others are. I had to choose a theme with white foreground text to make labels somewhat readable. That will require special attention to get right. Shadows or outlines maybe…
Craigslist Ads Suck
First I'll say this: I love craigslist. The best-of list gives me hours upon hours of amusement, and a good portion of the ads are useful and make me want to actually call the person when I'm looking for what they're selling.
But then there are the retards.
I'm sorta in the market for a new apartment -- well, not really until the spring, but every now and then I glance around to see if there's anything ridiculously amazing that would make me want to break my lease -- and probably a new bicycle. My old (crappy, rusty) bike was stolen about 3 years ago in Ithaca when I foolishly left it unlocked in the open garage of the house where I was living one summer. I've been thinking for a while about biking to work. It's only about 5 miles away, and I can avoid highways.
Anyway, I digress.
Some craigslist ad posters are morons. I'm perusing the SF-area bikes section today, and I come across this brilliant ad:
10 speed street bike call jeff [phone number]
What the fuck? That has to be the most information-free ad I've ever seen.
Well, ok, maybe that one's not the worst. A week or so ago I was looking at apartments, and I don't remember the exact ad, but it was something like this:
Beautiful 1 BR in lovely neighborhood. Call Jane at [phone number] to make an appointment to see the apartment at noon on Saturday, Sept 23.
Huh? How is it "making an appointment" when they're telling you in advance the only time you can come? And what does this tell me? All I know is that it's a 1-bedroom, and, from the ad title, I know the monthly rent and the town it's in. Useless.
Now, I understand that some people don't consider the internet (or perhaps just craigslist in particular) their primary form of advertisement, and would prefer that you talk to them on the phone or in person to get details. But I think that's retarded. If you're going to put up an ad for something in a place where they don't charge per-word, give as much information as is humanly possible. When I'm looking at a housing ad, I expect to see:
The location. If you don't want to give an exact street address due to privacy concerns, that's fine, but I want to be able to figure out the location within a 1-mile radius at worst.
The size of the apartment, in square feet. Bonus points for giving the dimensions of the rooms. I'm looking at 1-bedroom apartments, for crying out loud - there are only 2 rooms!
Is this an apartment in a house, or in a complex? I guess for a craigslist listing, it's likely the former, but I want to be sure.
Some detail about the rooms. Does it have wood floors, or is it carpeted?
What kind of amenities does the place offer? On-site laundry? Is it free? Is there a gym? Pool? Anything else?
Pictures. I want to know what it looks like inside. I generally like newer construction, or at least recently-renovated construction. Your apartment in a 40-year-old house may be, strictly speaking, clean, but if it looks old, I'm not going to want to live there. I'd also like a picture of the bathroom. I'm not a clean freak by any means, but a bathroom that looks dingy is going to turn me off about the place immediately. If the rest of the ad is decently informative, I'm willing to call for more info and maybe visit if there aren't any pictures.
There are other things, probably, but I'm too lazy to think of them. The idea is: more detail is better. Too little detail and I'm not even going to bother to follow up. In a typical browsing session, I'll probably click on 50-75 ads, and it's not feasible for me to visit or even call for information about each one. I'm most likely not going to call unless I can already say from looking at the listing, "sure, I could live there".
Cornell Featured
Cool, Cornell University is Wikipedia's featured article today.
Weekend
Suck: Buying $110 worth of clothes, then going to another store, where they give you a 15% off coupon good at the previous store. Awesome: Going back to the previous store, where they let you return and re-buy the stuff with the discount applied.
Suck: Getting two fingers closed in the power windows of a friend's car. Awesome: Eating lots of Italian cheese and bread.
Suck: Having no plans for the evening. Awesome: Talking on the phone for an hour with a far-away friend.
New Website Design
Not so much a new design, I suppose, though it's a little simpler. Mostly a new color scheme. Let me know if anything looks funny. I didn't put too much effort into testing it.
KDE memory usage
I might have to change editors now…
The biggest gripe I’ve had with emacs — alright, besides the finger-breaking key combo’s ;-) — is that it is just plain ugly. It just doesn’t fit with my beautiful gtk desktop with anti-aliased truetype fonts. Gvim got this right a long time ago.
But, no longer does this have to be true:
I already knew about the gtk interface, but I never heard of the xft support. I got the instructions from EmacsWiki:
$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs co -remacs-unicode-2 emacs
$ cd emacs
$ ./configure --with-gtk --enable-font-backend --with-xft
$ make bootstrap && make && sudo make install
$ emacs --enable-font-backend --font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-10"
nvidia drivers
I just noticed that some people are working on reverse-engineering nvidia's graphics chipsets. Sweet. Maybe we can someday get a decent 3D- (and 2D-) accelerated open source video driver.