Back to our sporadically scheduled Linux ruminations.
Another update (sigh) of Gentoo has robbed me of a graphical environment (that is to say, xorg-x11 stopped working). I have a feeling that if I were to stop using the nvidia module, or stop using OpenGL, that it would work again… however, I’m not really willing to do without 3d graphics acceleration on my main desktop PC, so this isn’t really a solution. So far I’m unsure if it was the actual nvidia driver update or the udev update that did it; if I decide to go ahead and troubleshoot and fix it, this is something I’ll need to determine.
I’m edging ever closer to switching to Ubuntu, though I keep reminding myself that every other time I’ve done this I’ve eventually returned to Gentoo Linux. I’ll have to mull over it and try to decide whether or not I have time to upgrade this week.
If I do switch, it will be with a certain amount of sadness. Gentoo has been the distribution that I used to really dig into Linux and learn how it works. On the other hand, Ubuntu is Debian based, and I’d welcome the chance to spend some time working with that system for awhile, too. Decisions, decisions.
For the long run, I think I will eventually make the jump to a Mac OS X; I’ll just have to wait until the budget allows.
I don’t want to give the impression that Gentoo is necessarily an unstable system; Gentoo can be very stable. I have some fairly bleeding-edge software installed, and several packages in their unstable versions, to it isn’t too surprising that something would eventually just break. In my case, as things get busier, I’m just getting tired of things breaking when I don’t really have the time to troubleshoot them; more and more, I want things to just work.
The New York Times is running a list they call A Selection of the Most Blogged-About Books of 2005.
There are going to be (there already are) a lot of these “best/worst/most [whatever] of 2005″ for a few weeks, here.
IBM DeveloperWorks has a cool article on GTK+: GTK+ fundamentals, Part 1: Why use GTK+?
Via Slashdot
I’m increasingly obsessed with being organized. This is certainly partly attributable to David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and the recent rash of geek-centric organization/”life hacking”sites/blogs/online material. I think it also has to do with the plain practical reality of budgeting money each month, and ending each month wishing you had been just a little more organized. You can get away with being unorganized in many areas; money is one where lack of organization can have serious and immediate consequences. (No financial catastrophes, just wanting to be a little more organized….)
Anyways, getting to the point: Grisbi is a fine piece of free, open source financial management software. Having your money organized is a good thing.
If you’re a regular reader (in which case, thanks!) you’ll have noticed that I haven’t written much in a few days. I’ve been with family.
It’s been a merry Christmas. Hope yours was, too!
Paul Graham has a new essay up about procrastination. He argues that rather than attempting to eliminate procrastination, you should concentrate on “how to procrastinate well.”
Sharp.
Okay, now I can’t stop writing Greasemonkey scripts. I was about to write one for using keyboard navigation in O’Reilly’s safari bookshelf, when I noticed that there already is one.
It’s disarmingly simple; I already modified it to add a keyboard shortcut for adding new bookmarks as well; if you use Safari Bookshelf, Firefox, and Greasemonkey, you can find my new script here: safariaccesskeysPlus.
I’ve been using Greasemonkey for awhile, but I’ve never written any Greasemonkey scripts before today. I decided to write a couple scripts to re-style Slashdot.
It turns out that this is not so hard; then again, I’ve only styled the bare bones. There’s already a script which removes the sidebars, and I liked how that worked, so I incorporated it. I also changed it to be a fixed-width, centered page, and changed the colors (though I left it green overall, for hysterical raisins).
I wound up with three different scripts: one just changes the width of the page, nothing else, the second changes the width and the styles I selected, and the third does both of those as well as remove the sidebars (if you think you might want to turn sidebars off and on, you may just want to use one of the first two scripts and this script (nosidebar).
The scripts:
The code used to replace the CSS is from the O’Reilly book Greasemonkey Hacks. Again, my restyling is minimal; this is meant to be extended. Have fun.
NOTE: Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension.
The You Are Beautiful website chronicles, in pictures and a few comments, an experiment wherein these individuals wrote “You are beautiful” on a chain link fence using white disposable cups. Over time, the message was edited and re-edited several times.
Interesting.
X.Org Foundation releases new, modular, version of X-windows.
