Vehicle speed units
Just an idle thought this morning: wouldnt it be great if vehicles and road authorities agreed to use SI Units to measure vehicle speed?
Posts about geek
Old MIT Quotes file
I found these quotes on a random blogger's site, who in turn found this whole file randomly looking through a Terry Pratchett ftp directory on an MIT machine, back in 1995 or 96. He luckily saved a copy and I'm reposting here because I don't want to lose them to the fickleness of the Net.
Awesome KDE, Java composite hacks
I've been experimenting with the awesome tiling window manager as a replacement to KDE's kwin, and I've managed to hack together a recipe for getting them up an running. It's surprisingly simple, although the learing curve was a little steep.
This post documents what I've done to get things working nicely with the basic awesome config. No customisations here, see the awesome wiki for some ideas.
MS-Windows focus-follows-mouse Registry hacks
I like the "focus follows mouse" window-focussing model from X11, because
- I don't have to click on the window, just move the mouse and the window it's over is focussed
- I can focus a window without bringing it to the front, which is sometimes handy. If I want it in front, I can click it.
However MS-Windows follows the old-fashioned, Macintosh/Smalltalk style of having users click on a window to focus it for the keyboard. How do you make MS-Windows behave more like X11?
Asus kEeeboard -- way kewl
Asus just unveiled their prototype Eee keyboard at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It looks so much like my first ever computer (an Amstrad CPC 6128). Check it out:
Pretty-printing XML with Emacs' NXML-mode
Did you ever get a stream of XML out of a log file, or in a data stream, and it's all mashed together without line-breaks so that it just appears as gobble-de-gook? If there's a data error (not an XML parsing error) then you have to read it so that you can find where the error is, but you don't have XML-spy and NetBeans is overkill or takes forever to fire up...
Emacs to the rescue! Benjamin Ferrari wrote this increadibly useful (and simple) elisp function to pretty-print a block of XML code:
Microsoft Vista keyboard?
I spotted a "Vista compatable" keyboard in K-Mart the other day, which set me thinking... what would a Vista keyboard actually do that a "non-Vista" keyboard can't?
Then I Googled for "Microsoft Keyboard Vista" and found this ad from Microsoft (Google Cache).
What the? "Designed to make it easier than ever to control PC media from your desk, your lap–or even from the comfort of your couch". So… if I use this keyboard's Play button to try and play media that Vista's DRM system thinks I shouldn't be playing, does it administer an electric shock? What if I have the keyboard in my lap :-D Ouch! No so comfortable now…
Thanks, Microsoft, but … ahem, no thanks!
Mystical jargon
This post was originally published at sinewalker.wordpress.com on 4 April 2006.
I'm sure this observation has been made elsewhere, but I can't find reference to it online.
Have you ever noticed the prolific use of mystical/fantastical words in computer jargon? I'm sure there is a significance, or at least a tongue-in-cheek pointing to the wizardly ways of early and contemporary computer experts. It is funny I suppose, and when you look at how wide-spread it is, it may be revealing of the hacker psych.
Dvorak keyboards
This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 27 March 2006.
I prefer Dvorak keyboards to QWERTY, which confounds my work colleagues no end :-)
I've been typing on Dvorak for about 3 years now [ed: That is, since 2003]. The main reason I use the Dvorak keyboard layout is because, after 15 years of six-finger typing on QWERTY, I decided to learn to touch-type, and Dvorak is very easy to learn (I learnt it in 2 weeks, back to my old typing speed after a month).
Crashed Linux
This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 24 March 2006.
This is a pretty neat shot of the in-flight entertainment system on an Airbus A330 having a boot-up issue. Note, the kernel is Linux.
Originally uploaded by milliped.
This photo has a big rant in the flickr comments about whether or not it's a Linux crash. Well, what's a Linux crash? Most of the public Windows crashes do not involve the Windows kernel (except for blue-screens) but they get called Windows crashes. So, to be fair, this is a Linux crash, even if it appears that the kernel itself is fine.