Ecological Footprint
This is pretty interesting. I won't vouch for their accuracy or objectivity, but it's worth thinking about. For the record, my "footprint" is 24 if I include the flying I do for business (~100 hours total), or 18 if I only include personal travel (~25 hours total).
I think my lack of a commute really helps keep my mobility score down.
Getting Up On Time
As most people I know are aware, I have major issues getting up in the morning. In general, I set my alarm for anywhere between 8am and 8:45am (depending on when I go to bed), but I rarely ever get up when the alarm goes off (there are exceptions, but I'm talking about the general case here). On a normal workday, I'll usually actually get out of bed anywhere between 9:30am and 10:30am. Now, this is mostly OK in the sense that I usually don't need to be in the office that early, and I usually stay later than most people. However, it's just a shitty habit, and I hate doing it. I'd set my alarm for 9:30am or 10am, but I'm afraid I'd end up snoozing and getting up 1-1.5 hours later.
So I think I'm going to try this exercise to help me get up immediately after my alarm goes off.
The idea is pretty simple: when you go to bed, you decide that you want to get up at a certain time. Presumably, before you go to bed, your conscious mind is pretty rational and coherent. However, when your alarm goes off, you're still pretty foggy: your conscious mind is not capable of recognising that, were you in your right mind, you'd make yourself get up. So you make excuses, and carry on an internal semi-conscious dialogue which eventually convinces you "a few more minutes" won't hurt.
So the solution is to take it out of the hands of your temporarily-impaired conscious. Condition yourself to get out of bed immediately when the alarm goes off. Make it a subconscious action. Actually teach yourself to get up when the alarm goes off, when you're fully awake. Pick an afternoon, get in your pajamas, make the bedroom dark, as much as early-morning-ish as possible. Set the alarm clock for a few minutes in the future, and lie down, curled up in a sleeping position. When the alarm goes off, don't think: take a deep breath, stretch your arms and legs, and get up. Then start to do whatever you'd usually do right after you get up. Then repeat this for a few hours. The idea is that, if you think at all when the alarm goes off, you're not there yet. It needs to be an automatic, subconscious, conditioned response.
It seems a bit wacky, but I have very little to lose, and if it does work, quite a bit to gain. The one hurdle I see is that I need to make myself go to bed earlier at night. 2-3am just isn't going to cut it. But that's something I can handle with conscious discipline. We'll see how it goes.
Update: There's also this article, which I'll need to follow in parallel, about becoming an early riser.
Xfce 4.4-beta
First I have to say that Xfce upstream rocks. Benny is quick and responsive to bugs and requests, even though there's so much on his plate from Thunar alone. I asked for a small feature, and it was added in a very short time.
Xfce 4.4 and Thunar are shaping up to be an even better, speedy desktop environment. This is the most impressive release yet.
And on the Gentoo side of things, dostrow pushed out an excellent set of 4.4-beta ebuilds to package.mask within a couple of days of upstream's release. Thunar et al. are a joy to use.
Thanks for all your hard work!
How Does it Work?
Best README section ever:
You can also install files into your favorite directory by supplying setup.rb some options. Try "ruby setup.rb --help". Since we don't really know how setup.rb works, we've included the English-language version of the setup usage file. Enjoy.
Ok, maybe not best ever, but amusing, nonetheless.
State of the Intersection
(Yeah, that's a lame play on "State of the Union". Sorry, I'm retarded.)
A few people have asked me what's up with xfmedia, since I haven't done any work on it in months. So I figure I'll write a little about the various projects I'm working on.
xfdesktop
Clearly I've been putting most of my effort on xfdesktop lately. The icon view refactoring and file icons stuff was a lot of work, and we've been trying to get 4.4.0 out for a while now. Now that we're in beta and thus feature-frozen, I should only be doing bug fixes on xfdesktop for the next couple months or so.
xfmedia
Due to all the work on xfdesktop, I haven't touched xfmedia in many months. No, I haven't abandoned it. I intend to get back to it soon after Xfce 4.4.0 is out. Don't hold your breath for any new great features, though. The focus of my next release is going to be mostly user-invisible: I'm refactoring the codebase to make it more maintainable and extensible, which will save me a lot of headaches and fix some long-standing issues I have. It'll also hopefully lead to a sane, reasonably-useful plugin interface, unlike what we have now. I've decided that one I'm happy with the plugin interface, that's when I'll release xfmedia 1.0, with probably a couple RCs before that.
mailwatch
For the most part, I consider mailwatch finished. It does basically everything I wanted it to do, and supports all the protocols I thought would be useful. It's remarkably stable, and I don't think there's much to do with it. (I'm sure someone will go and prove me wrong now.)
transd
I intended transd as a kind of throwaway thing just to see if I could get it to work. But apparently a fair number of people have found it useful, and I'm glad. There's one small thing I'd like to do with transd, and that's to integrate another mode of operation that sets all inactive windows semi-transparent, and the active window opaque. I already wrote a quick-n-dirty standalone app to do this, but it couldn't hurt to consolidate it into transd.
xfce4-perl
I haven't touched the Xfce perl bindings in a while, but I'd like to have these polished and ready for 4.4.0. It shouldn't be too much work, I don't think. I need to finalise the bindings for libxfce4panel, and check over the libxfce4util and libxfcegui4 bindings, but otherwise it's in good shape, I think. I'd also like to write a bunch of test cases for all the parts of it, but I'm not sure of the best way to do GUI test cases that fit into perl's testing framework.
garxfce4
I worked on GarXfce4 before we had Benny's awesome graphical installer, so predictably my interest in maintaining GarXfce4 has waned. It might not be a bad idea to update it for the 4.4 betas and RCs, however, since they probably won't be packaged by many distros, and we need all the testing help we can get. We'll see if I have time. It's not really all that difficult to update; it's just a little tedious.
So that's more or less everything I'm working on. There's another project that I don't really want to talk about quite yet, but I've been devoting a good amount of energy to it in the past couple weeks, so likely that will take up some of my time as well.
Google SoC
We've been discussing submitting Xfce for participation in Google's Summer of Code program, and even came up with some good project ideas. Unfortunately, we got rejected. Boo on Google.
MySpace for the Dead
Incredibly disturbing and morbid site of the day: MyDeathSpace.
Little Kids
I just read the cutest story ever about a little kid and computers.
Why Kill Good (Fake) People?
Ok, so if you haven't caught up on this season of 24 (i.e., if you haven't seen up to tonight's new episode), and intend to watch it later, stop reading. There will be spoilers. You have been warned.
Ok, are you gone yet? Good.
So in the past three episodes, they've killed off an assload of people. That's nothing new for 24: they kill off people (even main characters) all the time. Aparently, fans actually complained that not enough people died in season 4. Weird. Whatever.
Anyway, first they killed off Edgar. Now, Edgar wasn't your typical hardcore main character: he was just a tech guy, and essentially was Chloe's bitch. But they killed him off in episode 1 of this little three-episode arc. It was pretty sad. Then, at the beginning of episode 2, they of course had to show it again in the previouslies.
Then they killed off Lynn. Now, Lynn was pretty much a jackass. He just wanted to control CTU, even though Bill was doing a pretty damned good job, got in the way, didn't trust anyone, and basically sucked. It's essentially his fault that 40% of CTU got killed by the evil plot-device nerve toxin. But he died heroically, saving the people that survived the initial attack. It was heartbreaking. In all fairness, it was probably more heartbreaking when the random red-shirt trapped with Lynn called his young daughter to say goodbye, but still, it was pretty damned sad.
And then, the crap-fest began. Tony, fraught with grief after learning of his wife's death, wanted to kill the bastard responsible. But of course, CTU needs this dude for interrogation. So finally, when Agent Random Torturer Guy finally says that Evil Bastard is in a coma and useless, Tony knocks out Agent RTG and prepares to kill Evil Bastard with a lethal injection of some nasty shit. Of course, Evil Bastard was faking, wakes up at the last instant, and jams Tony with the needle instead. Tony falls to the ground, Evil Bastard escapes, and Jack runs in to find Tony, who soon dies in his arms. All of this happens in under two minutes, and the episode ends.
Then episode 3 starts with a shot of someone pulling a blanket over Tony's head. And that's it. He's not mentioned at all after that. Tony, one of the only three people remaining from the first episode of day one, on a show with a ridiculously-high body count, is dead. Tony, arguably the most kickass of them all, who has gone through a ridiculous amount of shit, got a 2.5-minute hollow-hitting death treatment. What the fuck is wrong with 24's writers? Could they at least give him a good, noble reason to die? Edgar's death was just sad. Lynn's death was of the heroic, giving-one's-life-for-redemption kind. Tony's death was brought on by poor reaction time, a grief-induced stupid plan of selfish revenge, and falling for the oldest trick in the book. Seriously, if you're getting tortured, and you have governent agent training, wouldn't you fake a coma? I was actually hoping that they'd pull a cheap shot at the beginning of this week's episode and resusitate him, if only so they could do a proper job of killing him off later in the season.
God dammit, show. I'm willing to overlook your blatant misuse and total misunderstanding of computer technology because you otherwise rock. But you just don't kill off my favorite character in such a meaningless way, and then toss it aside like it doesn't matter. You just don't.
Xfce4-Terminal future
Hello folks!!!
I’m rewriting xfce4-terminal.
You should already know that Benny’s Terminal is really ok with the common usage. It’s just a normal terminal, like gnome-terminal and konsole.
I really don’t want another terminal, with tabs and so on… So i’m working on a new restyling of xfce4-terminal based on a screen like concept.
I use screen everyday and i think it’s approach is ok for most advanced use… so why don’t keep the whole thing easy while focusing on functionality?
I’ve started to code some prototype and i’ll commit as soon as it will work :-)