dwc

Fun

Had fun at the Acceleration Halloween party. I hadn't seen most of the crew in probably a year. Met some of the new people, and saw some neat costumes: Kent was dressed as Superman, and Dustin came as Domo-kun. Ramon was crazy, as always. Ross and I talked a little, until Kent smashed my drink from behind (I'm still running Gentoo, by the way, Ross - just curious about Ubuntu). I tried my best to debate politics with Kent, but he pretty much talked me into the ground by the end of the evening. I feel bad because I was very belligerent for much of the debate, and did not do very well expressing my opinions. Oh, well, it was still a lot of fun. :-)

Dear Ubuntu Developers

Please add a more obvious way of updating packages. A lot of people are coming here looking for a way to easily update their systems, and all I've said is that I tried Synaptic.

Michiel Sikkes' proposal looks promising; hopefully Canonical will include something like this in the next release.

If you're currently using Synaptic, Ubuntu has some documentation on their wiki.

Something's got to give...

Last time I said that, I had a bike accident.

I fool myself
To sleep and dream
Nobody's there
No one but me

Is this Yon Hall?

We get a lot of people asking how to find Yon 4C, or where to pay for CPR classes, or where some random person's office is. The thing is, we have absolutely no clue. We just run the UF Home Page.

We've tried to reduce the number of questions by posting signs. It started with a simple "100s = first floor, 200s = second floor", which we all thought was obvious. We later added a "4C is downstairs", since that was a pretty common question.

It wasn't enough, apparently. We tried a big STAIRS sign generated with FIGlet, which didn't work very well. My latest attempt:

I printed it as a 4-ft banner (which is a lot of trouble when all you have is letter-size paper). It's probably the first thing you see if your head isn't shoved up your butt, so hopefully this will reduce the number of questions....

Insanity?

So last night I woke up screaming.

Daniel in the Tower

One of my favorite passages in Quicksilver:

Souls were created somehow, and placed in bodies, which lived for more or fewer years, and after that all was faith and speculation. Perhaps after death was nothing. But if there was something, then Daniel couldn't believe it had anything to do with the earthly things that the body had done—the children it had spawned, the gold it had hoarded—except insofar as those things altered one's soul, one's state of consciousness.

Thus he convinced himself that having lived a bleak spare life had left his soul no worse off than anyone else's. Having children, for example, might have changed him, but only by providing insights that would have made it easier, or more likely, to have accomplished some internal change, some transfiguration of the spirit. Whatever growth or change occurred in one's soul had to be internal, like the metamorphoses that went on inside of cocoons, seeds and eggs. External conditions might help or hinder those changes, but could not be strictly necessary. Otherwise it simply was not fair, did not make sense. Because in the end every soul, be it never so engaged in the world, was like Daniel Waterhouse, alone in a round room in a stone tower, and receiving impressions from the world through a few narrow embrasures.

(p. 795)

"It's like it stopped raining in my head."

OMG

The Baroque Cycle

I finally finished Quicksilver, volume one of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle series. At 944 pages, I expected it to take a while to finish. Nevertheless, the pace was pleasant: more relaxed than some of his other novels. I certainly enjoyed it, and will be reading The Confusion and The System of the World in the future.

I haven't decided what to read next. I've got Broken Angels (by Richard K. Morgan), The Big U (another by Stephenson), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (by William Gibson) in the queue.

OMGWATER

We finally got water back at the house yesterday, after almost two weeks without it.

Ubuntu Linux

I decided to try Ubuntu Linux, a new Debian-based distribution, in VMware.

Ubuntu gets a lot of things right. Its default configuration targets desktop computers, with a full GNOME 2.8 desktop. It comes with Gaim for instant messaging, Evolution for email and calendars, and OpenOffice.org for working with business documents. I like the theme, the TrashApplet, and the way that the GNOME menus are organized (big improvement over GNOME 2.6). Also, it uses udev and HAL to manage hardware. (It's amazing how far Linux has come.)

In the screenshot, I'm updating Ubuntu with Synaptic. To update my entire system, I had to click like three buttons - Refresh, Mark All Upgrades, and Apply. Granted, it's not as easy as Mac OS X's Software Update or even Red Hat's up2date, but it's still pretty nice.

I still prefer Gentoo for my needs, but for people wanting to try Linux, Ubuntu is probably a good choice.

(More screenshots, from LinuxBeta.com.)

One More Thing

Thunderbird needs some nonintrusive way of notifying me of new mail. Toaster popups don't count - they are too distracting. Apple Mail has a little red badge on its dock icon which gives the number of unread messages, which I really like.

IMAP

Since I've been away from my computers at home, I've decided to try a couple of IMAP clients. At work, I'm trying Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8. On my laptop, I'm trying Apple Mail 1.3.9 (v619).

Normally, I use fetchmail, procmail, and mutt. I probably get close to 200 messages a day (mostly mailing lists), so automatic filtering and proper threading is a must.

Thunderbird manages to get threading mostly correct, but it sometimes places replies in the wrong place in the tree. It looks like the threading code is basing much of its decisions on the Subject: header, when it really should be using References: and In-Reply-To:. It also has filtering, but I haven't tried it because I want everything to stay in my inbox so I can download my mail easily.

Apple Mail has very lame threading support. When you select a message, it highlights messages in the same thread. It doesn't, by default, group threads or let you collapse them. There is an option to group "discussions", but it only threads one level deep. A reply to a reply appears at the same level as the first reply. Mail also has filtering, but I haven't tried it.

One feature of Apple Mail that I really like is the ability to combine your IMAP folders across different accounts into one. The contents of my overall inbox is the union of the contents of each account's inbox. The same applies for my Sent folder and my Trash folder. The only place you notice the fact you have multiple accounts is when composing an email, and normally the program chooses the right account for the From: line.

Thunderbird doesn't really make any effort to hide the fact you have multiple accounts. You can't (as far as I can tell) combine mailboxes so they act sensibly. You can't set a default signature for all accounts; you have to specify one for each account.

I guess if I had to use a graphical email client, I'd probably choose Apple Mail. But it really needs better threading support - maybe that will come in the next version of Mac OS X.

When there's nothing to lose, there is peace of the mind

Utilities

We have power at the house, but still no water. The plumbers can't do their work until the trees are cleared from the yard. :-(