Posted in Technology by Thomas Themel on March 31, 2006.
Last week, work set me up with a brand new Dell Latitude D610. This finally provided an opportunity for me to have a look at Ubuntu . While my desktop PC and my X40 are still ruled by the clunky-yet-stable Debian/X11/ion3 configuration, the new machine has become a hotbed of newfangled Linux desktop stuff… I’m trying to do as much as possible in KDE.
First of all, I have to admit that I’m amazed by the configuration system. The real difference between KDE and my usual hackerish Window environments is the same thing that made me see the light of EMACS – while ion is easily as configurable as KWin, the user process for changing something is entirely different. It might be just me, but messing with ion’s configuration was always a major anxiety source – will I make weird LUA syntax errors, wipe my key table by specifying an invalid macro somewhere? Just what do I have to reload/restart to get my new binding to work? Why doesn’t it work now? I tended to batch changes to my working habits until the pressure to implement them became unbearable (which, in itself, might be a good productivity habit). KDE, on the other hand, offers a semi-standardized user interface (so far, I’ve seen three slightly different variants on my system) that actually lists all the things that the WM (or application) accepts shortcuts for. This makes a world of difference for me – tweaking KDE to support my old working style was a matter of minutes, and when I find a new keyboard combination that I expect to do something different, I can just set it up and get back to what I was doing.
On the down side, KDE software seems to be less stable than traditional UNIX stuff – kcalendar crashed on me countless times on the first day, kopete and kmail did it once. On shutting down the machine, yakuake also segfaulted. Seeing the number of crashes I normally encounter in three months pile up on one day was rather disheartening.
Posted in Link Spam by Thomas Themel on March 24, 2006.
This [DE] is a major problem in Vienna, as evidenced by the fact that something as lame as an online petition managed to gather over 70000 supporters in just two weeks. Also, it’s definitely time to address this grievance – in recent years, the adversaries of dog poo are becoming increasingly radicalized – if this continues, we’ll be back to 1934 [DE] in no time!
While I don’t really believe in online petition’s power to change anything, I do agree Vienna would be even more beautiful with less dog poo around. I’m also glad that we live in a city that’s nice enough for people to feel that dog crap in the streets is a real problem.
Posted in Link Spam, Personal by Thomas Themel on March 20, 2006.
This week, I’m spending even more afternoons than usual at the university to see Heinz Oberhummer’s Origin of the Elements [EN][DE] lecture. I’ve been looking through the slides, and as a refreshing change from “real” physics classes, there’s only one equation in all 192 pages (and even that is the mathematically non-scary Drake equation)!
This sounds like a good place to list a few more popular science things that I hope I can somehow squeeze into my schedule:
Of course, I’m usually busy enough with my life to have no idea how much interesting stuff is going on… So how do I get to know all this? Well, a big thank you to shnitzl.org and those tireless contributors of interesting stuff, chris and earl – not that I’m going to actually DO any of all this, but it feels good to even know I could :)
Posted in Uncategorized by Thomas Themel on March 17, 2006.
… just why exactly would you want to do that?
Posted in Link Spam, Personal by Thomas Themel on March 13, 2006.
Via snikt.net, the What D&D Character Are You? quiz!
I Am A: Lawful Evil Human Mage Thief
Alignment:
Lawful Evil characters believe that a nice, orderly system of life is perfect for them to abuse for their own advancement. They will work within ‘the system’ to get the best that they can for themselves.
Race:
Humans are the ‘average’ race. They have the shortest life spans, and because of this, they tend to avoid the racial prejudices that other races are known for. They are also very curious and tend to live ‘for the moment’.
Primary Class:
Mages harness the magical energies for their own use. Spells, spell books, and long hours in the library are their loves. While often not physically strong, their mental talents can make up for this.
Secondary Class:
Thieves are the most roguish of the classes. They are sneaky and nimble-fingered, and have skills with traps and locks. While not all use these skills for burglary, that is a common occupation of this class.
Deity:
Velsharoon is the Neutral Evil god of necromancy, liches, and undeath. He is also known as the Vaunted, the Archmage of Necromancy, and the Lord of the Forgotten Crypt. His followers practice the necromantic arts, and raise the dead to do their bidding. His symbol is a crowned skull.
Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy of 
NeppyMan (e-mail)
Hrm. Interesting, to say the least. For starters, I’ve never thought of playing a mage. And lawful evil, too… Never thought of that. Maybe I should try and find time for some NWN again.
Posted in Personal, Technology by Thomas Themel on March 11, 2006.
Ever since its inception in summer 2004, Wannabe Everything was powered by Nanoblogger. While I really liked its philosophy and could live with the rather abysmal run time performance, I really started missing comments early on. For a time, I fought with the then-suggested CGIComment, but was never really happy. Nowadays, the author suggests using a replacement named nbcom, which appears a bit weird to me in that it requires PHP and MySQL database to be installed, while the point of Nanoblogger is specifically to have minimal dependencies and be as static as possible.
Since Wannabe Everything is no longer running on a 133 MHz Pentium, I decided to switch to one of the more popular blogging packages and see if I liked all the niceties that they supposedly provide. The migration didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped it would, but I think that the current result is rather presentable – even your old links should still work. here is a quick writeup and my Python script to migrate a Nanoblogger directory to WordPress. There’s still a couple of things I need to fix, most notably character coding issues and some problems with the style sheet.
If you notice anything wrong with the new site, please let me know in the comments (finally! :)).
Posted in Personal by Thomas Themel on March 3, 2006.
China trivia, piece one: In a way-too-trendy tea place in Xi’an, I discovered the pleasures of bubble tea.
I can’t exactly tell you what makes it great, especially since I normally
abhor tea with milk, but there’s something strangely satisfying about sucking
milky liquid and gelatinous tapioca balls through a straw. Even though I always
felt slightly nauseous after vacuuming up the remaining bubbles when all the
tea was gone, I definitely suggest giving it a try. I haven’t yet figured out
how to get it in Austria, but Tapioca balls are easily available, so maybe I’ll
just have to make my own. I’ll keep you updated. If you know more than I do
about this, please share.
