Since we’re talking about YCombinator startups today, I was fooling with YouOS for a bit.
It’s pretty cool, actually. Not too much more to say than that, so far.
What I do want to say is that I still don’t understand why systems like this (eyeOS, etc) always seem to feature a web browser… which sits on your “desktop” inside… a web browser. I mean, in this day and age of tabbed browsing, do we really need a browser inside another browser?
The only explanation I can think of is that the developer(s) thought, why not? That’s as good a reason as any, so I’ll stop complaining. Instead, I decided to lookup YouOS inside YouOS.
And then keep doing it.
Continue reading ‘Fun with web-based desktops’
Okay, I haven’t kept up my post “schedule” very well; I did, however, write something about a small, informative misadventure with Scheme over at the thoftware blog.
A couple thoughts:
- Some languages have reserved words that it is impossible to use. Scheme does not. You could think of the builtin functions as “reserved words” but they aren’t — though, it is highly recommended that you not redefine define, or… lambda… or anything else. But you can. ;-)
- I’m sure this has been remarked on many times, but the aforementioned ability you have in Scheme is in stark contrast to the constrictions placed on you by, say, Java. Java assumes that you will make innumerable mistakes, and tries to make it impossible for you to do so. Scheme assumes you will write everything perfectly, that you mean exactly what you say, and lets you do whatever you like.
- Also, Infogami is very cool and getting cooler by the day.
Interesting experience using the Gentoo Live CD the other night. The executive summary is that it didn’t work.
The slightly longer version, is that it didn’t work, then it seemed to be working, and then it didn’t work.
That might not make sense; perhaps I should go on.
Continue reading ‘The Gentoo Installer’
You know, it’s great and all, but with all the songs they have, why don’t they have the ones I want? I don’t ask for much; I wanted to pend my hard earned $0.99 on Swinging on a star as sung by Frank Sinatra. Do they have it, in their vast catalogue of music? No, they don’t. They have about 30 versions of Swinging on a star, none by Frank Sinatra, and none (judging from the sound clips) really comparable. The Bing Crosby version, which clearly pre-dates the Sinatra version, sounded interesting, but the sound was a little older in style, not really what I was looking for.
I was surprised today, my first time really looking for songs on iTunes (I got a $15 card for Christmas) how much of what I was looking for was not there. They don’t have Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz. They only seem to have one Naked City album. sigh. Oh well. Back to the search…
UPDATE: They don’t have anything from Anthrax’s Sound of White Noise album either. The cads.
Gnome 2.14 was released yesterday, which means that it’s probably time I put Linux back up in my second partition. It has Arch Linux loaded right now, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t installed any other software… it’s basically only there to administrate GRUB so I can dual boot.
Well, it’s been long enough. I plan to reinstall Gentoo Linux, the bright shiny 2006.0 version, with the new installer if possible (if I understand correctly, the new Gentoo graphical installer is present on the Live CD).
Of course, Gnome 2.14 will still be masked in the portage tree… which means that if I’m going to install it, I’ll be fiddling with possibly unstable software right from the word go.
….
All right, I’m okay with that. ;-)
Okay, I haven’t written in a couple days. If, for some strange reason, you need to read something, I did start a new infogami page called thoftware. I just wanted to explore what infogami could do (I realize they’re still adding features, it’s in alpha, etc) — and it turns out, you could do quite a bit. If I want to put images up there, it seems I’ll still need to host them elsewhere, but that’s not too big of a deal.
Infogami is pretty interesting — nice and simple, but still lets you do a lot… nice.
In what promises to be an interesting discussion thread, Slashdot asks, What Would You Demand From Your IT Department?
There are already some interesting comments. Worth perusing.
Have an NT PC which you need to get into, but for which you don’t have the password? Any password?
Life just got easier.
Continue reading ‘Reset Windows NT Passwords’
Via Reddit; the book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates has some entertaining reviews over at Amazon. Funny stuff.
I hear the book has a surprise ending.
