Back to the Windows
onsdag, mars 17, 2004
I admit it. I gave up. I resorted back to Windows after trying a myriad of Linux versions. Why?
Every Linux was way to slow on my pii300 machine. Lastly I ran Debian woody with nothing installed except Xfree86 and WindowMaker besides the 'base system'. - And Opera, just to try if it would help things out. But no, Opera was as slow on Debian as on Suse as on Fedora. Windows XP pro is a dream come through. Really.
The only thing that was faster on linux was running multiple applications at once. No matter how many apps I had running, 20'ish on each virtual desktop, nothing seemed to slow down, except it was really slow to begin with.
So what is the minimum requirements for any given kernel? Do I have to compile it myself to make things better? I guess that would help. But for any given default kernel on any given distribution it seems like you need at least 700 electrical horsepowers.
Now I can print to our network printer as well; Canon i550 officially has no support in cups. Shame on Canon.
Funky radio
lørdag, mars 13, 2004
Wefunk is one of the best radios on the net.. It does old-school Rap, good rap and good funk and absolutely no talking. Check out their archives!
Besides their HTML and CSS is also pretty tidy.
WML, the real RSS?
lørdag, mars 13, 2004
RSS is, like many point out, and I agree, brilliant for retreiving content quickly. (It was built for content, no surprise there).
But as RSS catches on, organizations will probably start putting images, html formatting, ads and whatnot in it too. Which means we're back to where html is now: at XHTML. So whats the point then? Why not simply use XHTML if you want to convey images and push ads? Why destroy the brilliance of RSS with you eager to make money of it; the point of RSS for any operation, it should seem, is to lure people to your site with as little bandwith and management costs as possible.
Enter WML, the original mobile markup language. I've long used WAP on my aging Siemens c/m35 mobile, and WML is OK for its purpose. Its all about content, and you can't throw much unrelated content in it before it starts lagging seriously with the normal mobile modem connections and frustrated users start looking elsewhere.
Like RSS, it's an XML dialect, but it has more options to it even though its not modular like RSS(?). It lets the user navigate in it through cards, which can be hidden elements until they're requested. Much like using DOM I suppose, except somewhat limited. It is an application, when thinking about it I get a microsoft feeling where I'm somehow tied into the webpage without control over what I see or not. But decks are very suited on WAP, because of mobile display's limited resolution. Of course it also makes it somehow interactive, which is nice sometimes...
So why isn't WAP used more 'on the web', in common programs, for quick and easy reading? Google has a decent(?) search-engine for the 'mobile web', so finding stuff shoulnd't be too hard. The only place I know you can actually use it is in Opera, which added a WAP reader in version 4.0. The image on the right shows an Opera panel (aka hotlist tab) with Ananova in it (using my customized stylesheet for Opera). Nice isn't it? Remember the decks? Perfect for a panel. You can easily browse a wap page, and it takes almost no bandwith, and no extra work on the provider side to get you the info you need.
With WML 2.0, it essentially became XHTML .. Take whats out there, you may not need RSS at all. (duck).
Crashing Gimp
torsdag, mars 11, 2004
I hate creating gif's for transparancy, because of the stupid unisys patent. Besides, png always look better, and is almost always smaller too. And it's a bloody free standard, and I love those.
- I use the Gimp for image-creation, and it started crashing when both saving and opening png's a few weeks back.
I have no idea why, but after deleting zlib.dll in the PATH of my system (this was windows\system32 here), it worked fine. It was what they call 'ancient', dated 1998, so I copied over the zlib.dll from the gtk folder. I hope no other programs start crashing now.
Torrents in Opera, with Suse
fredag, mars 05, 2004
I don't know about you, but I love bittorrent. It's just so efficient and so plain simple to use.
I've lately been struggling uphill to understand Linux, and I think I'm getting to grips with it, albeit slowly. Coming from the windows world, I'm in effect handicapped by all the glamour and flashing lights (although they often fusk).
I wanted bittorrent to work in my Suse 9.0 installation, and so I set out to find a client that could do the downloading for me. I went straight for the source, the bittorrent official client is by far the simplest around. I found an rpm for suse 9.0, called bittorrent-3.3-2.noarch.rpm.
What intimidated me at first with this client was that it required command-line arguments for operation. Not that I don't like that, but under windows, I just couldn't get it to work. Guess what, I made it work under Linux. Linux IS easy like they tell you! Its just windows that has terrible command-line tools and syntax, which varies from windows version to windows version. Not so with Linux or Unix, and there's a LOT of documentation out there too. And there's the man pages as well, which give you the jump into understanding what the creators of a program were thinking, and how to operate it..
Installing it
Anywho.... This post was supposed to be about how I got bittorrent working in Opera, and that rather elegant too if I may say so;
Download that rpm I mentioned, and just install it with yast (that is, open it in Konqueror and press the "install with yast" button; you can also use yast package-name.rpm, or the original rpm -i package-name.rpm from the command-line. I used the Konqueror Yast option, it installed some additional packages I needed as well; python, for instance. Not sure if rpm does that...)
Now that it's installed, its time to set up Opera. Since I didn't install the GUI version, I needed to latch out the konsole to work it so I could see it (it is possible to run it directly, but then you'll never see whats happening). You need to set up a file-type entry in Opera, with the mime-type application/x-bittorrent, and file-type torrent. The elegant part is the command-line you put in "Open with other application".
konsole --nomenubar --noscrollbar --notoolbar --noclose --workdir /home/toman/btdls --vt_sz 70x9 -T Bittorrent -e btdownloadheadless.py --max_uploads 9 --max_upload_rate 29 --minport 6900
Open konsole, with no menubar, no scrollbar, no toolbar, dont close when the program is finished, set the working directory to /home/[user]/btdls (eg save the torrent here), with a size of 70 columns x 9 lines, Call the window Bittorrent; In that konsole, Execute the command-line bittorrent client with max uploads of 9, max upload rate of 29kbps, listening at port 6900 and above.
09 march: I've updated this and set the working directory for the konsole instead of telling the bittorrent client where to save it with --saveas. It didn't work if the torrent was set to be saved in no folder of its own
It looks like this:
I love it when I can control how apps work. :-)
Opera's search function
Opera is just lovely when it comes to modification. One of it's lovelies is that you can add and/or edit the search engines it already comes with. So why not make one for torrents? You can actually use google for that, and its very simple. You probably know google can search for exclusive types of documents, but those that are listed at the advanced search page are not interesting here. You can add file type:torrent to the query, and it will find torrents only!
Now.. You can add a search engine to Opera with the nice Search.ini editor for windows. But on Linux, the manual way is by adding the below to ~/.opera/search.ini, minding the number, it needs to be 'next in line':
[Search Engine 40] Name=Google Bittorrent URL=http://www.google.com/search?q=%s+filetype:torrent&sourceid=opera&num=%i&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 Query= Key=bt Is post=0 Has endseparator=0 Encoding=utf-8 Search Type=0 Verbtext=17063 Position=-1 Nameid=0
Compiling fun
tirsdag, mars 02, 2004
Yay, I've compiled my first programs!
It started with PSI, which went smooth as butter. But when I wanted to check out Qtella, I got into trouble.
It complained I didn't have the kde-include files, or rather, that I may have installed KDE in an odd place asking me to provide the --with-kde-includes= option to ./configure. Little did I know that I had to install kdelibs-devel. So if you have a relatively default suse 9.0 installation, install that.. Its compiling as I write.
