Updates

Well, I eventually got tired of my blog looking almost identical to all other WordPress 1.5 blogs, so I updated it with a new header image! W00p! I spent a ridiculous amount of time screwing around with the Gimp to finally end up with that. All photo content stolen from my diving trip in Japan. Oh, good times. About a year ago, this day, too! That’s almost freaky.

Other stuff (some kinda old, all very geeky)

Novel Presentation:

[0:45:00] Miguel demos Mono

[1:05:00] Nat Friedman demos a bunch of cool things

Microsoft Presentation:

Mainly about 64 bits being better better than 32. The thing I found most interesting was the new Metro document format; kind of like Microsoft’s own PDF. They’re making it open and want viewing them to be application independent, giving the example of distributhing PowerPoint presentations on them. The demo of the document organization was pretty cool, too.

Speaking of PDFs…

Amen, Mr. Nielson.

I recently installed Evince. It’s quite nice, but it’s still alpha software (if that). I found it a little slow, and there’s no rotation, yet! (I needed PDF rotation when I was studying.) Apparently, the latest CVS version already speeds up page rendering a huge amount, and other progress is being made quite fast. Cool.

Oh yeah, I finally moved into the Gnome 2.10 world. Actually, I tried doing a bunch of things at once: Gnome 2.10, Beagle (requires DBUS, which requires INOTIFY, which requires a newer kernel, so….), and the latest kernel. Needless to say, it was not a smooth process. At first, I tried kernel 2.6.11, but I could not connect my Zaurus. No good. So, apparently, a bug was introduced into the 2.6.11 kernel at some point. Downgrade to 2.6.10. More config’ing. Building. Finally, it works. Unfortunately, my tablet is now acting funky. I just can’t win.

For anyone else using a tablet on Xorg, this is something I was not aware of:

Currently (as of release 6.7), the XOrg server does not support any form of hotplug for input devices. The server knows about those devices that were present and configured at the time it was started, but it is not possible to add or remove devices during the lifetime of the server. The Linux platform supports hotplugging for mice and keyboards in an ad-hoc way by aggregating events from all mice into a special device (/dev/input/mice) and events from all keyboards are routed to the console driver.

My tablet was actually working on my previous kernel, but I didn’t realize it for a long time because you have to have the tablet plugged in when starting X.

Oh, right; Beagle. Beagle’s pretty cool. Beagle is actually just a daemon, and what most people think of when they see a picture of “Beagle” is actually “Best,” a graphical client that interacts with Beagle. Best has a command-line equivalent. It’s made me remember things I’d forgotten, just by entering random words. It’s fun, but I wouldn’t say it’s useful, quite yet. Next on the to-try list: Dashboard. heheheh

Whew! I’m spent.