I decided, after all of the hype and excitement and the collective Redditgasm over Portal 2, I would break down, install Steam, and play the original (in Wine, of course). Obviously, I decided to pick up the Orange Box because you can’t really beat $20 for a bunch of “new” games. I think that now [...]
Author Archives: Jack
GNOME 3.0 Final Verdict
After GNOME 3.0 was released, I gave in and decided to take the plunge. I packed up my .xinitrc and .xmonad/ and decided to give it a fair shake. I used it for about a week of real work, as well as the usual recreational activities (surfing, coding, wine). The Good Overall I was impressed [...]
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Evince: So close, yet so far.
EDIT: Suddenly my Evince 3.0.0 (according to Arch 3.0.0-3) has started naming bookmarks with the current / first new section on the page. Kudos to whoever fixed that, although the help still claims there’s no such thing as a bookmark =). 7 May 2011 Let it be known that I’m a bit of a PDF [...]
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Xmonad backed by GNOME 3.0
My previous post criticized modern desktop environments (like gnome-shell and KDE 4.6) because they lack anything resembling efficient window management. It’s not a surprising view coming from someone that’s been spoiled by Xmonad’s beautifully easy mouse-free window management and dynamic layouts. I’m not going to talk about window management today though. I installed a fresh [...]
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The Sad State of Mainstream Window Management
No doubt you’ve all been keeping (or have been kept depending on how you read the news) up on the GNOME 3.0 / gnome-shell / Unity stuff that’s been going on. In short, the new major version of the typical GNOME desktop, 3.0, has reinvented the way that you interact with your desktop. Initially I [...]
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New Machine
This is my first post for a topic not intended for a larger audience =). I’m building a new machine. I ordered the parts from Newegg and they should be here on Monday. Although… they are here in TX already (yes, I have the tracking number stats open in my browser right now, did you [...]
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Using Decorators for Flexible Prompts
As a general rule, anything that you’re going to need to do many times should be abstracted to be made easy. When you’re coding something with a prompt, adding commands definitely falls into that category. With Python introspection and decorators make a new text prompt can be as simple as writing a function and defining [...]
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Calm Down!
I’ve been ditching a lot of code lately. The first thing was my side-project Canto’s old codebase*. The second was this blog, which is now obviously a WordPress blog instead of a quirky but fun-loving git based CMS I wrote before. All together, I’ve shed thousands of lines of code and it feels great. But [...]
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