whistler’s blog

“Don’t tell people how good you make your goods. Tell people how good your goods will make them.” – Kenneth M. Goode

configuring the gnome desktop environment

Don’t judge a program by it’s screenshot

I first tried linux around in the year 2000 or maybe it was ‘01. Although I’ve used both along side, I found KDE better then Gnome as it has more features and lots of things to configure and tweak. I had mainly been using Redhat and then Fedora. In 2005, I shifted to Ubuntu and loved the simplicity the gnome desktop had to provide. Recently, I took a look at KDE 4 screenshots and was really impressed. KDE has a completely new polished look, and has evolved a lot since I last used it. Therefore I decided to check it out.

There are lots of cool new things: New Icons, amazing desktop widgets such as the desktop folders feature. There is the awesome alt+f2 program launcher. I love the way the USB harddisks are handled, same goes for the network connections. The KDE menu is very organized and searchable. Several of the compiz-like desktop effects are also available. The dolphin file manager is way better than Konqueror and of course the Amarok, the awesomest music player, integrates nicely into the environment. All this made me swtich to KDE 4 as the primary desktop environment.

But, still there exist a few usability issues. There are no mouse+keyboard shortcut keys. Hotkeys can only be a combination on the keyboard, which makes window management not nearly as fun as compiz does. Although I have four desktops, its hard to make complete use of them because of this. The thumbnail previews in Dolphin are not as good as in Nautilus. I have never felt the need for a password manager, so KWallet just seems annoying. Although the Klipper tool looks very neat, I hav’nt found myself using it at all, even when programming. I like Pidgin better than Kopete. The groupings in the panel are not that configurable, there is no option to show windows from only the current desktop. The GUI’s package management tools are not as good as what gnome has. My extra keyboard keys for music were not mapped to Amarok automatically. Vlc has a bug that shows videos in a seperate window. This turned out to be a Jaunty related bug.

At first I thought it would just take me a little time to adjust, I did adjust to some of the problems. For example instead of using tilda(~) as a shortcut for a terminal, I started using alt+ctrl+t, because KDE would not allow me to use tilda as a hotkey.  But it turns out that I cant use KDE as productively as Gnome even after giving it a few weeks to adjust. Although I give great importance to user interfaces and am a big fan of all the UI eyecandy, you shouldnt judge software by its screenshots.

hardcore Ruby on Rails coding

Gedit is a light weight, easy to use and simple text editor which comes with many useful plugins. Its like the firefox of text editors. For a few months I was completely unaware of how powerful this simple looking text editor is. At first I treated it like notepad, then I realized it has amazing syntax highlighting and began using it for editing HTML and writing C programs. Soon enough I became so addicted to it that I spent hours trying make it run on windows. Yes there are tons of windows text editors out there with similar features but most of them are really ughas been ly looking and not one is as cute as gedit. Despite of the big size of its windows port, I keep it on my flash disk so I can use it on the move.

Not long ago I found that it makes an excellent Ruby on Rails editor. Previously I used Netbeans and Aptana, they are good IDEs but they are very bulky and somewhat cluttered. For gedit, yes, it is hard to find the right plugins and install them but whilst planning to publish my own collection of plugins useful for Rails programming, I came across Gmate, which is an amazing set of gedit plugins. After installing these plugins, gedit has wonderful code completion and sytax highlighting, a really good set of tools for navigating through files, lots of shortcuts to minimize the number of buttons you have to click and is highly configureable.

Get Gmate here.

And here is the windows port of gedit to save you a few hours of compiling on cygwin.

I like talking about how the weather has gone crazy. After hailstorms in Karachi and Dubai and particularly snow in Ras Al Khaimah  it wasn’t surprising to hear about hail in Sharjah.  I’ve started liking UAE more, it seems now we have more rain and its cooler. Not all effects of global warming are bad.

I recently came across Django, the python equivalent of Rails. Since scalability and availability of low cost hosting is a major issue when I have a web app in mind, it seemed to me it would be better if I switch to python considering Google app engine provides free hosting and deployment, which could be useful at least in the initial stages.

I learnt a bit of python and checked out basic Django demos it seems it is as good as Rails for a serious programmer but as Rails has wider user base, I think I am going to stick with it. For an hobbyist programmer like me, Rails has lots of resources and plugins available to easily extend the features my web apps. To me sanity of mind and pure lazy fun programming is more important then performance.

Also now I find it very annoying to take my laptop to university, therefore I’ve started using Herokugarden, a web based Rails IDE. Gives you portability and you dont have to worry about deploying your app on a webserver.

is exploring django and python

This concept has been told and retold before, but I didnt get a chance to blog about it. Most of the year at AUS, it is unbearably hot outside, each time you enter a building you thank God for creating AC. Its usually quite cold inside buildings.

During a typical day a typical student has to go through several typical “sun crossings”. You get out of a building and walk in the burning sun to get to your next class. While in the sun your head expands, as your brain expands you feel smarter for a while (when not in a class). But within a couple of minutes you are in AC again and your head shrinks and by this time you are sitting in a class. Because of the contraction of your brain you feel really dumb.

As this cycle continues throughout the semester, numerous expansions and contractions of brain result in the weathering of the brain similar to what happens to rocks in the desert. During the day heat expands the rock, at night the cold contracts the rock, this creates stress in a very thin outer layer of the rock which then peels off. Overtime rocks just become sand. But the brain weathering I am talk about is much faster than the so called “onion skin weathering” because expansions and contractions happen to our brains multiple times a day instead of once as in the case of rocks.

So by the end of a semester it is perfectly normal to feel much more dumb than you were at the start of the semester.