whistler’s blog

There has been much speculation over the green light in the library basement in the AUS Library. Students are not allowed down there, nobody has even seen even staff go to the basement. What is exactly there in the basement? From the freshman year there have been various theories about the library basement: such as a three headed Harry Potter dog living down there to green light preventing important archives from being damaged, just like in Angels and Demons. It has truly mystified me over the semesters. Until at last I could not handle the curiosity anymore and decided to write an email to the library help desk and ask them what that green light is exactly for? I got a nice and concise reply: “My sources tell me that the green light serves no specific function!”

Clearly, they dont want us to know!

Linux is a great operating system to run on a netbook. There are many linux distributions available made specially for netbooks, but running a standard lightweight distribution is a good idea. I will not take sides, but Xubuntu, Debian and Arch are good choices. What matters more is what desktop environment you are using. Gnome and KDE are excellent desktops, no matter how much better they are then windows, they still consume a lot of resources. There are a lot of lightweight desktop environments like fluxbox, icewm, but they either look ugly or are not that user friendly.

What comes in between is xfce. Not too heavy and not too light, just right. It can give you an exact gnome look(default Xubuntu install) with a lesser memory footprint. But I actually prefer the default xfce desktop. I dont like some of the default xfce applications: I prefer gnome-terminal over xfce-terminal and gedit over mousepad, but this is not a problem, you can install gnome or kde applications without a problem.

On your netbook, you have limited screen space, so two panels doesnt make sense. Instead Gnome-Do should be used to launch applications. And unless you are doing some hardcore programming on your netbook, you don’t even need that single panel except for the notification tray. I like making that notification tray auto hide and dock it on the right side of my screen instead of top or bottom. Two reasons for that, firstly it takes less space when open and also, the screen width is more than the height.

Keyboard shortcuts should be set up according to your liking. The tilda key opens up a terminal for me, which is really useful. I also have a shortcut to show desktop, windows+space opens up gnome-do. If the touchpad doesn’t work well, use gsynaptics to tweak it, for me I have to dig deeper and use synclient(command line) to get the best out of my touchpad.

And of course, customize your theme, wallpaper, icons, cursors, window decorator, splash screens to personalize your netbook and make it truly yours.

For the first time I have considered Ruby for programming a desktop application. Switching from Visual Basic, it seemed that programming the GUI would be very difficult, but it seems that you can do it easily with glade. Also I like how you can get gems from ruby forge.

I wanted to fetch and post some data from a website, and I found that you can easily integrate curl into your ruby program. It seems really exiciting. Its good to be programming again.

Excellence is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never ends. –Brian Tracy

@gpatryk Netbeans is good, but made in java(slow), try using gedit, its my favorite http://bit.ly/yc8EX

Define life.
You don’t define life, life defines you.

Yes there are a lot of lists like this already. This one is my own, a list of software I installed right after reinstallingUbuntu. These go well with the Gnome Desktop.

exaile – Music player based on Amarok.

gnome Do – Amazingly simple way to open programs, files and much more, even tweet.

Vlc – The universal video player.

Tasque – A simple todo list which works well with Remember the Milk.

wine – For running windows programs.

picasa – For all your photo editing, resizing, etc, needs.

virtualbox – For programs that can’t run on wine.

google earth – For exploring the world.

ubuntu-restricted-extras – To make sure the wma’s and other propriotory formats work.

“Don’t let school get in the way of your education.”
- Mark Twain

“Crossing into Gaza, I was asked at the check point
if I was carrying any weapons. I replied, Oh yes, my prayer books.”
- Mother Teresa

For other things, you can motivate yourself by saying: “I can do it, its not rocket science”, but Mechanical engineering IS rocket science.