So I installed enlightenment 0.17 today just for kicks. It seems rock solid for pre alpha code. I was going to post a screenshot, but these videos are way cooler.
Enlightenment
Posted 2640 days ago
Get your Math Here
Posted 2654 days ago
Donnie posted a couple of math puzzles. The one about having aribtrary denominations of currency seems the most interesting to me.
A couple of days ago I installed fyre on my gentoo box. Fyre is a Peter de Jong map renderer.
Check out the screenshots on the fyre website.
Sports
Today is the aniversery of the day that the Packers aquired Brett Favre (nice pick, Cowher, I mean Wolf).
The UWM Panthers won in Loyola tonight to clinch at least 2nd place in the Horizion League. This means that they will host at least quarter finals and semi finals here in Milwaukee. Bruce Pearl really has the team playing well and they are poised to win their third straight Horizion League champoinship and third straight trip to the NCAA tournament.
Other Links
- Gallery Of Computation
- Flikr Color Field Picker
- Mac HTPC — A blog documenting a quest to incorporate the Mac Mini into a home theater system.
- epicurious.com — The worlds greatest recipie collection
- 100 Random Colors
…and now, off to watch the Simpsons
Gnome Goodness
Posted 2657 days ago
So I spent a few hours installing a few Gnome goodies. First, I found a few portage overlays and installed nautilus-sendto and nautilus-share. Nautilus-share is especially cool since it lets users add folders that he/she wants to share over samba. Nautilus-sendto allows you to right-click on a file and send it to an email recipient or a gaim buddy. I am going to look at the source some time and try to add some functionality to it. In Windows, I use the Sendto command a lot to send files to notepad to view. I sorely miss this option in Linux. There are times when a file does not have a mime-type in Gnome and I want to view it’s contents. Other times, the mime type points to an app that I don’t want to open (say OpenOffice) because I just need a quick view of the file.
I also got gnome-launch-box to install after modifying a few lines of the source. This is a pretty slick application. Following a post on this page you can bind it to a set of Keys and bring it up at will. This acts similarily to the Windows keystrokc Win+R to call up the “Run… Dialog”. Gnome-launch-box is way cooler then the Run dialog in Windows. It can read your mozilla bookmarks and history and files in your home directory.
Of course it is only at version 0.1 so it crashes a bunch and it is quite slow while scanning for files. It could really use integration with beagle to speed up searching.
Java GTK Binding Demo
Posted 2669 days ago
Backups and School
Posted 2670 days ago
So I came across this blog post while reading Planet Gnome and it reminded me that I do not have a good backup strategy for my computers. My main concern is my linux box and the various config files I’ve tweaked over the years (especially my kernel config). Most of the data om my computers I can live without if a drive crashes or a computer blows up. I can always re-rip my CD collection back to a hard drive and all of the code I’ve written I really could care less about. The only code that I have written that I currently use is this website design. I have a temporary backup solution which is to keep a file which contains a list of the files that I want to back up. Then I issue the command tar -T filename to create an archive or the files in the list.
This works OK for a couple of files, but doesnt scale well, as you have to type in each file that you want to include in the archive. What would be nice is a simple user interface which would list your directory structure and let you check off the files that you want to backup.
My final semester started yesterday with a discussion for Physics II, even though the lecture for the class hadn’t met yet. Today I had lectures for Digital Logic and the aformentioned Physics II. What is not a good sign is that I am already sick of school and I havn’t even had a week of it under my belt. Thank goodness that this is my last semester.
Around the Web with Java, now with more Java
Posted 2682 days ago
Matt Wattenburg’s website is full of some neat Software and Research products. Make sure to check out his Art section and in particular, the bewitched section. One of my favorites is a neat Java applet called The Shortcut which is “An exercise in abstract storytelling that escalates in tension before its ultimate resolution.”
Another Java applet, the Copernica Art Database, is a NASA commisioned art gallery “chronicling the wonders, risks and triumphs of space exploration.”. They have a neat Java browsing interface which you can filter and customize.
And speaking about Java, I am working on a Java front-end to the Del.icio.us social bookmarking service. I plan on using it to keep my bookmarks syncronized between my Powerbook, Linux box, and my work computer. Basically, what I want to do is set up a folder structure, similar to any current bookmarking system. The catch is, you can add Del.icio.us tags to a folder and bookmarks from that category will automatically fill into that folder. It will also export the bookmark structure to to a bookmarks.html file so it can be read by any mozilla-based browser. The app will also let you keep track of local bookmarks, for example, links that may not be work-safe. Eventually I would like to add RSS support to the application to, so you can have a (or many) RSS feed folders, when accessed, would retrieve feeds for the links in that folder and display them to you in planet or Kinja style format.
As I am relatively new to Java, I’ve already scrapped one version of the application, which was working to some extent. But once I started thinking of more ideas, it became increasingly difficult to add the functionality to the existing model.
This one is not Java, but CSS, Accessibility 1st shows how you can use 2 gifs and some CSS to create a dymanic rounded-cornered div.
Books
And finally, found off of del.icio.us (I hate typing that), the Chicago Tribune has an article about the editor and founder of bookslut.com. I am such a sucker for book lists and if you are too, check out the bottom of the article.
Weather
So yesterday, the temperatures where in the 40′s … in January! … in Milwaukee! We had a Severe Thunderstorm Watch as well as a flood watch. But, in typical Wisconsin weather fashion, tomorrow’s high will be around 5, with temperatures tonight falling below zero and wind chills of -20. That’s more like it.
Take Cygwin with you
Posted 2711 days ago
Now you can take Cygwin with you where ever you go.