For about eight years, I was a very happy
WindowMaker user. It was very lightweight, aesthetically pleasing, and I had interiorized its behaviour and keybindings so much, I didn't feel I'd ever switch away. I periodically tried (forced myself even!) to use any of the other, more
en vogue environments... Experimented using Gnome for a week, KDE for a week, XFCE for a week (so I would have enough time to learn their ways)... And always came back to my good, well-known wmaker.
In 2006, when we held
DebConf6 in Mexico, I saw how other people worked with
ion3. I fell immediately in love with it. Not because it is prettier, snappier or
has nicer widgets than other window managers - but because it is enormously more
usable. Quoting Tuomo Valkonen, the ion3 author,
Ion is not perfect and certainly not for everyone, but neither is any user interface. Usability is subjective.
Using a keyboard-oriented, tiling window manager represented -for the first time in 20 years (I had my first contact with a Macintosh in 1986)- a radical user interface change. For
my way of working,
I just don't need a desktop, I don't need having a background space or overlapping windows. What I need is a way to functionally organize the windows I have open at any given time, quickly switch between them (and not depending on the mouse, please!), maximizing screen space and all that. ion3 was godsent.
Now, in 2007 there was (yet another) huge flamefest. Valkonen basically does not want distributors distributing any version of ion3 that's not the latest, and introducing changes not approved by him - He basically demands ion to be non-free. So, it was moved to the non-free section of Debian where only
Womble decided to keep giving it support. And, of course, by September 2007
Julien Danjou announced he had written another window manager: Awesome.
My main motivation for switching away from ion3 is that... I don't want to use non-free software. But I was very comfortable with ion3. It was only after I saw many other people using Awesome at
DebConf8 I decided to bite the bullet and switch. It looked at least as comfortable as ion3.
But... Well, I cannot come up with better phrasing than what
Joey said when he switched to Awesome, almost exactly a month ago. When changing between the mainstream window managers, the differences are mostly cosmetic. But with these really different window managers... I cannot but reproduce Joey's words:
I wish I had a good analogy to explain to my nontechnical readers what changing to a new window manager is about.
One way to think about it is that it's like driving a car down the road, and suddenly swapping the steering wheel and brakes out for a tiller and gear shifter. And having to downshift for braking until you learn that the brakes moved to the turn indicator lever. By trial and error.
But that's really only part of it. Another way to look at it is adopting a new philosophy. Or, in some cases a cult. (In some cases, with crazy cult leaders.) Whether they use Windows or a Mac, or Linux, most computer users are members of a big established religion, with some implicit assumptions, like "thy windows shall be overlapping, like papers on the desktop, and thou shalt move them with thy mouse".
So, changing to a new window manager is a process of being dumped into a different environment, where nothing works like you've come to expect, and trying to construct a mental model that you can use to make sense of it. But it's also a process of modifying that environment to behave the way you like.
And when done whole-heartedly, this doesn't just mean trying to make it like the environment you were used to before. It means trying to absorb the underlying philosopy of the window manager, and think up new ways of doing things, inspired by that philosopy, and modify the environment to allow doing those things.
So ideally, "I switched to a new window manager" doesn't mean "my screen has some different widgets on it now". It means "I'm looking at the screen with new eyes."
So, what's so different?
Besides learning some new keybindings (expected, of course), Awesome has several suggested layouts to help you organize your workflow, usually (although not always) consisting of a main area and a side area, tiled side by side (or one above the other, or several stranger ways). This sounds rigid, but it is incredibly comfortable - and I've only been an Awesome user for three days!
But what sets Awesome apart from basically anything else is the concept of
tags. Whey you see an Awesome session, you recognize something similar to the very well known
workspaces concept we have had in any Unix-like environment for many years, right? Well, but they are not workspaces. They are
tags. What is the difference?
When I work with workspace, each of my windows can be in a different workspace. So in one, I'll have my mail-related stuff. In another one, I might be browsing. In another one, I have my development things, and I might be following some logfiles in yet another one.
Awesome allows you to use tags for categorization in much a more flexible way.
For example: I am mostly a web-oriented developer. I usually need four things when developing a system: A browser, Emacs, the log for my development server, and a console where I can peek and poke at my objects and interactions. Of course, cramming them all into the same screen makes no sense - It would be better to follow the good ol' desktop metaphore, and just switch the focus and raise the window, right?
In Awesome, I can have them all set to the maximum screen size - _and_ use the most common combinations as well. Each of the windows can be tagged to
more than one workspace (and yes, this is immensely more flexible than the
always visible hint on traditional WMs).
To begin with, I'll give each major process a tag to itself, to work full-screen. Emacs is on tag 1, my browser on tag 2. The log and the console share a terminal (i.e. via
screen or
terminator).
This console by itself is not too useful, so I'll set it to tag 4, and we will go back to it later.
So if I'm building a view or following online documentation, I will add tag 3 to both Emacs and the browser.
I'm also setting tag 4 to the browser - That allows me to use it next to my terminal, following the results of my website-clicking.
And, of course, tag 5 will be set to Emacs and to the console, so I can quickly check any quick API-related question that does not need the documentation or look at a newly written method.
By the way, have you noticed CapsLock is the most stupid key invented, ever? Ok, I gave a good use to it: It's called Mod4. Imagine it is just an extra Ctrl, Alt or Meta key.
So, Mod4-1 gives me Emacs. Mod4-2 gives me the browser. Mod4-3 gives Emacs+browser, Mod4-4 gives browser+console, and Mod4-5 gives Emacs+console. And, of course, the handy Mod4-0 gives me all of my open windows tiled side by side.
Even this is a pattern of being a newbie, I know - I could keep 4 and 5 free, and just tag several simultaneous tags to be active. How? Switch to tag 1 exclusively (Mod4-1), and activate tag2 as well (Ctrl-Mod4-2). There, I have Emacs and browser side by side. Want to get the console instead of the browser? Simple. Ctrl-Mod4-2 (toggle off tag 2), Ctrl-Mod4-3 (toggle on tag 3).
Anyway - As you can see, I am excited at finding a very new and nice tool to help me work better. Today I was playing a bit with the Awesome widgets, but that's something to be talked about later.
In Debian, we are
at a crossing point: Awesome is just reaching ion3's popularity. And I'm adding my two main machines' votes to Awesome.
This is Awesome. Quoting (yes, one last quote) the
official Awesome site,
This gonna be LEGEN... wait for it... DARY!.
I wonder what would have happened if
Obama had put lipstick on a pitbull would there be any less of
this circus put up by the Republican monkeys? Are we back in
Kindergarten? Mom! Mom! He hit me! . Is the next thing we ll see
tears on stage? Or some sort of fake emotional outbreak? Anything
goes in America, I say
Both, Obama and McCain have used the lipstick analogy in the
past (see previously linked article, and this
AP writeup), so why are the Republican monkeys trying to nail
him on sexism?
They are (trying to) play
the gender card (thanks to Erinn Clark for the link). Sexism
surely is a word to grab attention, especially in the Excited
States of America. By shifting attention to sexism, the Republican
monkeys are not only stealing Obama s show and dragging the
short-attention-span media (and populace) away from any
Palin-related scandals, they are also covering up that they don t
have anything else to say. Finally, sexism is an emotional topic,
unlike the other political and policy crap the entertainment-hungry
television crowd has to put up with, so hooray for excitement!
I am disgusted by this American election circus. And I wish we d
get about as much coverage of American news in these times as
international news gets airtime on American TV.
Even though I hope Obama wins for no other reason than that he s
not in the same political camp as George W. International
Terrorist and War Criminal Bush, I couldn t really care less and
don t have any reason to believe that things will improve when the
Democrats move back into the White House.
And neither do lobbyists care who s sitting at the top. Idiots
exist on every level and all over the globe. The rich will still
pull the strings. The capitalist avalanche (euphemistically called
the strive for democracy ) doesn t slow down. Other countries
political monkeys have tasted totalitarianism and lost their
senses, and no US government will get them back on track. And the
media, who controls it all anyway, is just cashing in on the whole
spectacle, which is why I have to continue to be subjected to it.
Which brings us back to the rich
I wouldn t be surprised to find the likes of Haliburton in the
financial support list of the Republican monkeys.
PS: I know and respect many American citizens, and I know most
of them think like me. Nevertheless, I feel it necessary to point
out that none of the above is an attack on those of you with a
clue. I feel sympathy at the same time as I feel the rage expressed
in the above, but this rage is solely with the political monkeys,
the media, and merciless capitalists. None of those are
US-specific, it just happens that you seem to have the most
pronounced combinations.
NP:
Mogwai: Come On Die Young
As some might know, I've been working at the university for a few weeks now.
I'm very happy how it all worked out, because of the people there and the
subjects to work on. It's just great to think through some mind-bending index
structure to improve reverse-k-nearest-neighbor queries. And the professor
(who is very well known for his work on R*-Trees, the X-Tree, and the
DBSCAN and OPTICS algorithms) really manages to aggregate excellent people.(rkNN is the problem of finding those points for which a
A lot of users of mentors.debian.net have already mailed, irced and jabbered me. (Fortunately nobody rang at my door.) The service was pretty unreliable in the past weeks. If I’m not mistaken it was due to not enough RAM. Unfortunately it’s a VPS server (sponsored for that purpose by vpslink.com) that has 1 GB RAM but doesn’t allow to set up swap for the rare cases where a 100 MB more RAM would save the world. Took me a while to figure out where the infrequent “MySQL server has gone away” came from. That lead to packages either left in the incoming directory or being thrown away randomly during the import into the repository because not all database error conditions have been properly caught.
The better news is that the 
A few speakers at 
Two reasons:
Do you know this experience: A program, 
It's the X Development Summit in Edinburgh this week, so I've been hanging out with the graphics crowd. There hasn't been a huge amount of work done in the field of power management in graphics so far - Intel have framebuffer compression and there's the 
Some time ago I wrote a small shell script that counted the number of dependencies of each package. It used to take lots of time to perform such a simple operation, so today I decided to rewrite it from scratch in perl and even made it able to sort the packages according to the number of pre-/dependencies.
I don't know what it says about Debian but while the political content of my last post was ignored, I have received a steady stream of email today saying Michael Palin was in fact the lumberjack in "And Now For Something Completely Different" Obviously I am unfit to be a heartbeat away from the 
At 
While sitting on a bench in Hyde Park, watching the leaves fall from the trees, thinking that fall is just around the corner, I started to write on the back of an old receipt. One that says 108,- for a Banana Passion Split and a bottle of Coca Cola. It’s just something I do when I’m nervous, excited, lonely, happy or all of the above.
Sometimes I spend so long thinking about how to express myself, that I forget what I was going to write. I spend too long trying to find the right adjectives. And I wish I could find the right words to describe some of the best moments. My trip to London was more than just Big Ben, The London Eye, Madame Tussauds and Oxford Street. A lot more.
Another receipt says 590,- for a haircut. It’s from July 15th, 2008. My ramblings on the back, blue ink, some words crossed out, some misspelled; at least 1 of the 268 Underground stations has a staircase with 78 steps, a shop on Oxford Street sells salt from the Dead Sea, and some very big soap bubbles were seen in Camden Town.
There are some keywords at the bottom of the second receipt. Just to remember all the other things that happened. Like the time we almost got lost on the Underground, the elevator with no buttons, the Kanye West sunglasses in white and pink, and the lack of a proper breakfast - even though I don’t mind white bread and strawberry jam.
There was just one small thing I wasn’t too happy about; you can’t write on receipts from Tesco. They have THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING WITH US printed all over it. And it took me a while to find that piece of paper in my bag. This time I saw fall in London, and a white pigeon. I will make sure I have my notebook with me next time.
I was today just too lazy to do much actual work, but I spend time on
playing with something new - this time it was 
What we can see from it? Number of garbage grows very fast. Mostly it is
caused by 
First of all, I don't want to blame individual persons. This is just a note of how disappointed I'm about some parts of Debian that are not complying to licenses when it comes to distributing software.
debian-cd embedds copy of syslinux without source
A couple of years ago, I took over the maintenance of the 
Among other things, my webmaster cooperative is 