Oblomovka

2002-11-01»

So back in the new home (which is an older house than the previous home). Still living out of cardboard food and cardboard boxes, and a fantastic backload of mail, and trying to pick up the rubbery tatters of busted deadlines I dived through to go up to Portland.

But I’m getting there with my desktop PC. It’s now got a Soundblaster Live!, SCSI card and tape backup, CD-RW, video capture, webcam, and PCMCIA card stuffed into it, and is still coming up for air. Everything’s supported under Linux; I haven’t had to recompile the kernel once, although some dancing was required for the CD-RW.

And my desktop is looking a lot better. Here’s what it looks like now (as opposed to a few days ago). I’m running Gnome 2, which has just turned up in Debian unstable. I just typed:

apt-get install -t unstable gnome

to get it all set up. It’d have been a bit tricker if I was upgrading from an old Gnome installation, but as it is, I timed this pretty well.

Session management still sucks under X-Windows. That’s a bit unfair, as session management doesn’t really exist anywhere else. It’s the feature that’s supposed to let your apps pop up and reinstate themselves in all the right places when you login. In theory, all the windows you see on my desktop should appear without prompting or dragging or clicking or manhandling of any kind. Well, that’s the theory. For some reason, Mozilla is one of the few X-Windows apps that pays no attention to session management, which is a pain. X-Chat seems to obey it, but gets very confused as to where it should be. And multi-gnome-terminal – the cool tabbed term you can see in the top left of the desktop plot – just crashes. Yay.

Better news: windows managers are finally getting off the crack pipe in Linux and doing what they’re supposed to. Metacity, Havoc’s cut-down window-manager for Gnome2, does just what I need: including allowing arbitrary commands to be run from key presses anywhere on the screen. That, and a decent Alt-Tab logic means I’m pretty close to having an almost mouse-free existence.

I’m pretty excited about this. I can now get to almost anywhere I want on the net with just a few keystrokes. I have ALT-G set to go to Google, and I have ALT-ENTER set to go to my bookmarks page. Mozilla’s new typeahead feature means I can zoom through my bookmarks by just typing what I think the URL is called. This works fantastically well – I can get to boing boing by just typing ALT-ENTER,b,o,i,ENTER. I can get to Tom Coates’ site by just typing ALT-G,Tom Coates,TAB,TAB,ENTER (that’s enough to do “I feel lucky” on Tom’s name).

It’s funny looking at all of this and observing what habits I’ve picked up from my time with an iBook. I’m not using multiple workspaces on my new desktop, a combination of learning to live without them on the iBook, and suddenly having more screen resolution than I’ve ever had in my life. And the whole ALT-ENTER thing smacks a great deal of LaunchBar, a great Macintosh intuitive keyboard shortcut utility that really needs to be ported to Linux.

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2002-10-28»

Grandfather doing much better. Talking to neurologist tomorrow.

Rejected names for kid: Medusa, Yoko.

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2002-10-26»

Quinn’s grandfather just had a stroke. We’re not sure of the seriousness of it yet (mainly because for cost reasons, he’s been moved to a hospital that doesn’t have anyone to do any tests until Monday. God, I could wave my little NHS card in the air and have it work its kindly magic here.). Anyway, we’re about to fly up and might be a bit incommunicado for the next few days.

Donations of spare luck gratefully received.

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2002-10-25»

“We”, in this case, meaning both Blogger and me. I’m sitting in the new home – because home is where the homepage is – using the Net for the first time, thanks to Gilbert‘s late-night net-fu. I ended up doing NTK in a local cafe at six this morning, stopping occasionally to filter the latest blogger news. The nomadic net life is giving me flashbacks of being hunched over underpowered Macs in cold Edinburgh flats, handcoding bits of the Guardian’s first Website. Weird, and ancient.

With the new house, we’ve had a PC cabinet reshuffle. Gilbert’s got a brand new thang, so I got his old 1Ghz machine, which I’ve been regutting to form my new Debian desktop. Rather than just copy over my old machine’s hard drive, I started with a fresh install, and have been adding the useful bits of code from old backups as I go. Like anyone else, I’ve collected a lot of cruft over the years, and this seems to be a good way of paring it down to the essentials.

One can go a bit too far.This is my desktop right now, as set up by default on a minimal Debian install. A bit too barebones. It’d be interesting (well, interesting for me anyway) to compare what it looks like in say a months’ time, when the cruft is drifting back.

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okay, I’ve set up a QuickTopic for this. Remember you can subscribe for email updates on the discussion.

One of those stories that is, by it’s nature, a bit hard to get out (especially as Metafilter is down right now too). Mr Tom Plasticbag Coates reports:

A good proportion (over half of the people I’ve asked) passwords has changed, and everyone who has been part of the attack has now had their e-mail address, site URL and password changed. No one can publish. We can’t add new users either because the database is full and has crashed. All the content appears to be intact at the moment, but we won’t know for sure for a while yet. No one can get in touch with Ev…

I’ll post a link as soon I find out (or someone tells me) where the refugees are gathering to pool news.

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2002-10-22»

I’m really sorry if you’ve been trying to get hold of me for the last few days. We’re in the middle of moving house, and while it’s going pretty well, it does involve me doing most of my Net work within a two hour window in our old but still-wired house. Our old house is empty of anything but a Web server, a wireless AP, and house-moving sheddings, so I feel like I’m hacking from a squat. Again.

Still, relocating is one of those perfect excuses to do a mass re-re-re-re-organisation of one’s life. And thus I imagine that I will have much more free time, just as soon as I have scanned in all my books’ barcodes, re-installed Debian from scratch, and bought a bunch of useless boxes from Organised Living.

Yeah, right. Still, we did our final moving cash splurge today, and bought a Roomba. And, what do you know, it’s actually pretty good: both at cleaning and removing the bejesus out of nearby cats. It backed Dyson into the corner of our living room within minutes – she kept tottering backwards for about ten yards, like she was facing the Feline Terminator.

I feel somehow safer knowing that as I sit here, surrounded by crap, writing crap, somewhere else in town my new home is being cleaned by a small beeping robot.

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2002-10-07»

… for not updating: I’m doing the guestblog at Boing Boing. Now to find an excuse for missing last week.

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2002-09-23»

There are a few net innovations that have far greater ramifications than you would, at first hearing, expect them to. Napster, at heart just IRC with a UI, was one. Google News is another.

In its first day, I’ve already noticed:

• The front page changes its editorial stance depending on where the earth’s terminator is. So in the evening on the West Coast, Google News is lead by the South China Morning Post, and various Asian english-language papers. By the late evening, the BBC and European papers are kicking in.
• The site may be created by algorithms – but what about the choice of sites? The most arbitrary dividing line I see in Google’s coverage is what is a news site, and what isn’t. Slashdot is, for instance, as well as some very obscure newspapers. What about Blues News or Scripting News, though?
• Big companies spend mucho money paying “clipping services” that send them copies of any press coverage they receive. Clipping services are going to have to find some added value, very very quickly.

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2002-09-20»

Neal Pollack proves the self-parodying can still be parodied.

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2002-09-19»

Doc has the info on my close encounter – it was a Minuteman III missile launch from Vandenberg airbase. The bowl-shaped scattering patterns came from the first and second stage separations, I suppose. Greetings from the heart of the military-industrial-entertainment complex!

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