3!, 2!, 1!, LEAP!, Happy new year.
Tonight we move into 2009 but the celebration this year is delayed. Because the earth is slowing down (oh noes!) every so often our official clocks have to add a second to the year. This year is graced by the leap second which will be added at 23:59:59 tonight.
Depending on how you look at it either this year is one second longer or there is one second that does not belong to any year. Either way tonight at 23:59:59 get ready to party for one second during 23:59:60! I plan on yelling "leap" and hope everyone will leap into the air to celebrate this special second.
Also I plan on having time.gov open and watching my UNIX clock since there is all sorts of confusion there.
12.31.2008
12.29.2008
eee
I got an eee pc as a gift and love it. It is the 1000 model so it has a ten inch screen, 40gb ssd (!!!), a gig of ram, 6 hours of battery life, wifi, bluetooth, webcam, everything. Here is a picture of myself taken with the built in camera on the first bootup
So far I love it! This model the keyboard is large enough to type normally without any problems but is still small enough to carry with me everywhere. I did however run into a few initial glitches. The thing runs xandros which is a proprietary linux distribution. Xandros has been nothing but frustrating. Updating did not work out of the box and the asus repositories have practically nothing in them. I just wanted simple things like emacs and rsync but had to seek out other places to install them. So xandros is derived from Debian but is proprietary enough to not support Debian packages. After some tweaking I got the system to a state I am satisfied with.
First I followed this guide to add some free xandros compatible repositories. These still were non ideal but they were enough to install what I needed. I then was able to customize the xp cloned theme with something thinner to make better use of the small screen. Switched the default console to Konsole since xterm is slow and ugly and I have plenty of ram. At this point I was pretty happy with my setup.
Now mostly I expect to do most of my work remotely connected to my desktop. So I figured out how to do some basic x11 forwarding over ssh so I can run some of my graphical applications from my desktop directly on here, such as my email client. X forwarding is cool but lets me run one application at a time and not the full desktop and without sound. So I have to figure out which will be a better solution, something like a remote login with XDMCP or figure out a vnc client for the eee.
Posted from my tiny eee
So far I love it! This model the keyboard is large enough to type normally without any problems but is still small enough to carry with me everywhere. I did however run into a few initial glitches. The thing runs xandros which is a proprietary linux distribution. Xandros has been nothing but frustrating. Updating did not work out of the box and the asus repositories have practically nothing in them. I just wanted simple things like emacs and rsync but had to seek out other places to install them. So xandros is derived from Debian but is proprietary enough to not support Debian packages. After some tweaking I got the system to a state I am satisfied with.
First I followed this guide to add some free xandros compatible repositories. These still were non ideal but they were enough to install what I needed. I then was able to customize the xp cloned theme with something thinner to make better use of the small screen. Switched the default console to Konsole since xterm is slow and ugly and I have plenty of ram. At this point I was pretty happy with my setup.
Now mostly I expect to do most of my work remotely connected to my desktop. So I figured out how to do some basic x11 forwarding over ssh so I can run some of my graphical applications from my desktop directly on here, such as my email client. X forwarding is cool but lets me run one application at a time and not the full desktop and without sound. So I have to figure out which will be a better solution, something like a remote login with XDMCP or figure out a vnc client for the eee.
Posted from my tiny eee
12.27.2008
xmonad
After reading an article about how Gnome and KDE have poor usage of screen real-estate I have spent some time customizing my desktop. First things like switching to thiner window decorations and menus and changing the gnome font sizes to be smaller so the menu bars at the top and bottom could be shrunk. Gnome customizations helped but not as much as changing firefox. I noticed that the most wasted space on my screen was the remainder of the bar after the file/edit/.../help menu in firefox. I moved my address bar and search bar to there and rearranged things so I was able to remove my nav bar completely. I was pretty happy with all my new found screen space.
Then for the holidays I was gifted an eeepc. I absolutely love it. Very small and much more power than I need to just browse and ssh home. The only problem was that it comes with xandros and the Asus repositories have been broken for the past week. So I started doing some research on other distributions of GNU/Linux to install on there. I still have not decided what I want on it, suggestions are welcome, but I am leaning towards arch Linux with xmonad.
In my research of lightweight window managers for my eee I discovered xmonad and am currently enfatuated. xmonad is a tiling window manager written in Haskell. Tiling means that it does not display windows in the traditional sense but always has all windows visable on the screen but tiled. It is super lightweight and suppoestly insanely stable. So here is a screen shot of my current desktop.
The system has many tiling algorithms which auto-magically re-tile the windows when a new one is opened or closed. It can cycle through a set of different modes in which the windows are displayed in different ways, including one taking up the whole screen, and is very customizable. There is a guided tour about xmonad if anyone would like to learn more about it.
Notice what I ended up doing is embedding xmonad into my gnome setup so I still have a full gnome desktop but uses xmonad as the window manager. This was great because all the customizations and applications I have already configured for my system still work as is. I was also able to rebind the xmonad keys to keep the workspace switching commands I am used to. I have my xmonad.hs available if anyone wants to play with my configuration. Tiling window managers are fun and appear to be much more productive than anything I have used before.
Then for the holidays I was gifted an eeepc. I absolutely love it. Very small and much more power than I need to just browse and ssh home. The only problem was that it comes with xandros and the Asus repositories have been broken for the past week. So I started doing some research on other distributions of GNU/Linux to install on there. I still have not decided what I want on it, suggestions are welcome, but I am leaning towards arch Linux with xmonad.
In my research of lightweight window managers for my eee I discovered xmonad and am currently enfatuated. xmonad is a tiling window manager written in Haskell. Tiling means that it does not display windows in the traditional sense but always has all windows visable on the screen but tiled. It is super lightweight and suppoestly insanely stable. So here is a screen shot of my current desktop.
The system has many tiling algorithms which auto-magically re-tile the windows when a new one is opened or closed. It can cycle through a set of different modes in which the windows are displayed in different ways, including one taking up the whole screen, and is very customizable. There is a guided tour about xmonad if anyone would like to learn more about it.
Notice what I ended up doing is embedding xmonad into my gnome setup so I still have a full gnome desktop but uses xmonad as the window manager. This was great because all the customizations and applications I have already configured for my system still work as is. I was also able to rebind the xmonad keys to keep the workspace switching commands I am used to. I have my xmonad.hs available if anyone wants to play with my configuration. Tiling window managers are fun and appear to be much more productive than anything I have used before.
First!
I have decided to start a bl[ao]g. I mostly just need to start writing again. While I am enjoying the microblogging of twitter sometime I have more to say than 140 characters and this will be the medium to display all of me excellent ideas and thoughts. I had a blog about 9 years ago before they were called blogs, I called it a journal, and it was mostly filled with my high-school emotions and angst.
This segment of the blogosphere will contain things like personal pictures, philosophical ramblings, my opinions about the world, and whatever newest piece of technology I am currently obsessed with.
This segment of the blogosphere will contain things like personal pictures, philosophical ramblings, my opinions about the world, and whatever newest piece of technology I am currently obsessed with.
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