Using a separate process for each web page and each component has been something I've always wanted a web browser to do. It's so conceptually clean and has such nice properties, and processes are so cheap in linux. Hats off to the people who made that a reality.
On the other hand, I'm guessing that chrome's guts will be tied into the google backend services so tightly that you can't really tell where the one stops and the other begins. Since I'm not interested in being a sharecropper, and would prefer to see people empowered with services they control, I have worries.
It's easy to forget how much of the modern browser's er ... chrome ... is
based on web services that could change, go away, or be DNS hijacked at any
time. I'd like to see a web proxy that takes all traffic to *.google.com
and rot-13's it, to demonstrate how many things rely on this one company.
Maybe because email is eating less of my time, I've started using instant messaging. My jabber address is the same as my email address, joey@kitenet.net. Since identi.ca integrates so nicely with jabber, I may use that too.
Ran out to Abram's falls today. Very nice. Was going to take pictures again, but again my camera battery mysteriosly died before I got to the falls. It was gorgeous.
Sitting next to the fire after heating up fajitas for dinner. Making sure that no hot coals make it over to the canvas topped yurt. Maybe I should have made the fire further off. I've gotten 1/3 of the way through Anathem, and Neal Stephenson has thoroughly hooked me now. I know I won't have enough battery power to read all I'd like to tonight. But for now, I've been enjoying the evening, which has been unusually long today. Maybe it's a remnant of Hurricane Ike that's led to such a cool, cloudy day, but it's seemed to be on the verge of dusk for hours.
Someone asked if the yurt has wifi. Nope, but I measured the distance today, and at 400 feet it's too far for cat 5 ethernet w/o a repeater.
Anyway, I seem to be in a very good frame of mind for starting Anathem, and am enjoying its take on the Long Now. Out at the falls this weekend I kept imagining how they'd change in geologic time, tracking where the water seemed to have fallen earler, downstream. And sitting up under the overhang of the falls, was briefly nervous about it coming down (as it will in oh, a few thousand years perhaps), before getting back into the present moment.
Leaving Doc Watson early, I headed up State St. in a hurry, taking the sidewalk to avoid the crowd in the road. But I had to stop to listen to a few classics from a five-piece string band, sitting under the awning of Uncle Sam's Loan Office, in front of the display of old stereos and swords. Bunch of real old-timers. Pulled myself away only to pass by an even better, six-piece band in the entrance to The Gold Man pawn shop. The fiddle was played by a girl who couldn't be older than ten. I wanted to listen to them some more, but I managed to pull myself away in time to get into the Paramount and get a good seat for the Red Stick Ramblers.
Conclusion: This town needs more pawn shops. And it's Rhythm and Roots time in Bristol.
Best bands so far: Mike Marshall's trio, Cephas and Wiggins, Larry Keel and Natural Bridge, Chatham County Line.
Just spent a good twoWthree hours trying to configure awesome 3.0 to match my awesome 2.x setup. Docs are effectively nonexistant. So far, I'm stuck on several fronts:
- I want to be able to left click on a titlebar and drag to resize.
Without pressing the modkey. But the definition for that is set deep
within
awful.lua, which is not a configuration file, and so I cannot see a good way to configure it. - Why can't I resize an xterm to 80 characters wide? It jumps between 79 and 81.
- Why is it that despite using the same font as with 2.0, enough additional vertical space is used by the title bar and status bar, that I get one less line in all my xterms? It's using only a few pixels more than before, but that's too much..
- How do I configure a textbox so that, if I click on it, a command is run?
Update: Figured this one out, for example:
mympd:mouse_add(mouse({ }, 1, function () os.execute("awesome-mpd show &") end))(Note that if the command isn't run in the background, and opens a window, it will deadlock awesome.) - Can't figure out how to use awesome-client to add a value to a graph
widget. (I'm sure this is simple, but I haven't stumbled over an
example. I'd use wicked, but it's not packaged.)
Update: Figured it out via the source:
mpgraph:plot_data_add("foo", "10") - Can't figure out how to make a textbox widget have a fixed width and
truncate the text in it. Since it's displaying the currently plaging
song, using the default dynamic width would make everything on my status
bar jump around.
Update:
mytextbox.width=100 - There's no emptybox widget aymmore, so how do I add horizontal padding between widgets? Best I've managed so far is an empty textbox with a defined width.
Anyone else hate lua, or at least build-your-own-WM-in-lua config files for window managers that used to have simple config files?
First root canal today. There were some interesting parts. I'll spare you.
If I seemed a bit annoyed with awesome 3 configuration in the last post, this has put it well in perspective.
One nice thing about awesome 3 is that it has good system tray support built in. So I've at least temporarily mainstreamed my laptop, so it's using the gnome power manager, and network manager, instead of hibernate and sleepd and my own scripts.
Just to make it a day of firsts, and perhaps because someone else spent four hours messing with wire and such in my mouth and I needed to take some control back, I also crimped my first ethernet cable today.
Plan is to see if a 400 foot out of spec cable will reach the yurt. If not, I'll cut it 100 feet back and add a hub in a can to be a repeater.