Topic: Posts

Aside from doing semi-perverse things with my email retrieval system, one of my most recent technical/digital obsessions has been with a X11-based window manager called awesome. It’s a tiling window manager, and it’s designed to decrease reliance on the mouse for most computer interaction/system navigation purposes.

Unless you’re in the choir, your first question is probably “What’s a tiling window manager?” Basically the idea is that awesome takes your entire screen and divides all of it into windows that are a lot like the windows that OS X, Windows, GNOME, and KDE users are the same. Awesome also has the possibility for what it calls “tags,” but which are akin to virtual desktops (and I think of as slates) which make it possible to have a great number of windows open and accessible which maximizes screen efficiency and multi-tasking while minimizing distractions and squinting.

The second question you might have, given the prevalence of the mouse-pointer paradigm in computing lo these 30 years, why would you want a system that’s not dependent on the mouse? Long time readers of the ‘blag might remember some blogging I did earlier this year about the second coming of the command line interface. The basic idea is that the more you can avoid switching between the mouse and the keyboard, the more efficient you can be. Keystrokes take fractions of seconds, mouse clicks take many seconds, and this adds up. The more complex idea is that text-based environments tend to be more scriptable than GUIs and coded more efficiently with less mess in between you and your data/task. After all, coding visual effects into your text/word processing application is probably a sign that someone is doing their job horribly wrong.

One of my largest complaints about using GNOME is that it’s terribly inefficient with regards to how it uses screen space. Maybe this is the symptom of using a laptop and not having a lot of space to go around, but most applications don’t need a menu bar at they top of every window, and a status bar at the bottom of every window, and a nice 5 pixel border. I want to use my computer to read and write words, not look at window padding (I suppose I should gripe about GNOME at some point, this is an entry onto itself.) Awesome fixes this problem.

I’m not jumping in to Awesome full time, but I am starting to use it more and learn about it’s subtleties, and hopefully I’ll be able to contribute to the documentation of the project (it needs something at any rate). For a long time I’ve flirted with Linux, but haven’t ever really felt that it offered something that I couldn’t get with OS X, and this changes that pretty significantly.

One of the things that I need to do first is explore Linux equivalents to my remaining OS X-only apps. The most crucial is the news reader, I’m a big fan of NetNewsWire, and I’ve never used a news reader which can top it. As it turns out, between vim and Cream, I’m pretty set in the text editor department (though I need to port over the most important of my scripts and snippets to vim), and although Adium is a port of Pidgin, using Pidgin is painful by comparison, particularly in awesome.

But I have time. I’m doing this becasue it’s interesting interested and weirdly enough, it’s kind of fun.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, I’ll be posting more on the subject as I learn more.

Today was the first day that my regular blog post/essay didn’t get crossposted to my livejournal. This is one of the cool things that I can do now that I’ve redone tychoish.com. So LJ-land if you want to read about a really cool linux/open source thing click the above link.

In other news, I’ve been toying around with identi.ca which is the flagship of an open source federated twitter clone called laconica. (You can join/follow my “dents” here if you use any Laconica site.)

Now I’m a really big fan of the twitter except that my prefered method of interacting with twitter is via the IM/jabber interface, which hasn’t worked for months. While I’d love to jump ships to another platform (like identi.ca or jaiku), twitter has too many people that wouldn’t jump ship with me. So until Laconica can import tweets a little better, I’m going to be in a couple of different worlds for a while. Anyway…

I listened to an interview with the author the other day, and I think I’ll be writing some blog posts on this subject very soon, but its mightily cool, conceptually (because it gives everyone a lot of control over their microblogging life.)

A while back I wrote a post--after identi.ca started up, actually--about how microblogging needed to be thought of as an evolution of IRC and IM rather than an evolution of blogging. Not so much in terms of database structure (though I hear that would help,) but in terms of user interface and interaction.

I still think this is the case. Just FYI. And I still want to use something that really works. And better access control would be good.

Ok, blathering over.

Onward and Upward!

So, while it might seem like all I do on the interent is write wordy personal narratives or lengthy informal essays, I do in fact visit other websites and participate in other discussions. Here are a few recent tycho sightings and other bits of news (related to this site):

• Most obviously, we have a new design and a new sub-blog, coda. I initially described it as a long-form twitter site. And it is. Right now there’s a syndication feed for coda (and a separate one for just the essays), if this is more your speed. I’m not 100% happy with all of the display options, but this is a good start. I’d really like to know what you think, or if you find any bugs. At the moment I know about the archiving of the coda entries, and the inclusion some pages at the bottom of the coda display on some views. I’m also just assuming that it works on IE, because I don’t have access to this browser, help (screenshots?) would be much appreciated.
• I’ve been working on updating and cleaning up the static pages of this site to make tychoish.com a little bit more of a website and a little bit less of a plain old blog. This includes a contact page and a page about open source. I also wrote up a “support *critical futures*” page. Working on more…
• In Rewriting the Bases, Caroline (who calls/links to me as sam because she’s that good of a friend) outlines a mostly sarcastic commentary I made on gay male sexuality. I was mostly kidding, but I think it was sort of entertaining. Unfortunately, Caroline has used this as ammunition against my cynicism, making the claim that I do have a heart. Bah! ;)
• There’s been a lot of ongoing debate in the SF blogosphere, about media-tie-in fiction. Like Star Wars and Star Trek books, which I remember fondly, but haven’t mustered the will or the time to really get into recently (in part I think, because there’s more lower grade stuff/stuff that isn’t indented for the audience group I belong to now.) In any case, I commented on this at jonathan Strahan’s blog and on the sf signal mind meld.
• I’ve started posting a lot of the writing related stuff that I used to post here, over on my sf writing list, which is 8 years old now. Wow! Anyway, its generally sort of an interesting thing, and if you’re prone to writing SF
• I’ve also started a more concerted effort to return to and become active in the ravelry community. I’d lapsed for a while for a lot of reasons in addition to the great knitting malaise of 08, but also because I wasn’t (and am still not) keeping my projects updated, and I don’t much knit other people’s patterns, and I’m boring/not hip enough in someways, but it’s a great community, and it’s good for me (and the blog) when I’m more active, so… I’m back.

More news as it develops.

I generally am not a fan hand lotions as they tend to make my hands feel all greasy, and I’d prefer chapped hands to feeling oily.

I discovered Udder Cream the other day. I guess we’ve had a tub of it around for a while, but given my aforementioned aversion, I’ve not been keen on trying it. I did, and I like it, as it’s sort of “fast acting,” and not particularly oily.

I will admit that having hands that are neither oily nor dry is a sort of odd sensation, but not unwelcome. I do have a two observations however:

The tub has splotches on it and looks like a cow. This is endearing.

Despite the fact that this stuff is commonly sold in stores like Target, the instructions are all about applying it to your cow, and how you should wash “udder and teat parts” before milking first and then moisturize their udders/teats, so as to avoid contaminating the milk.

Thanks Udder Cream for that advice.

We, as a family, talk to the cats in Chez Garen. Not a lot, and not seriously, but it seems like the thing to do. Maybe we just have loud mewing cats, but it’s awkward after a point to not talk to them, and they out number us and can exact retribution on our sleep schedules, so we’re just playing it safe.

Most of my conversations with them are along the lines of “you’re pretty fuzzy there, kip/merlin/montana/nash,” but other members of the household who shall remain nameless have been known to have much longer and more involved conversations with the family pets.

Right. Earlier today, I heard from my perch in my office, someone say:

“Come to the light, Kip!”

Presumably said person was trying to get the cat to follow them out of the room, or come up from the basement.

Not being able to help myself, I said (in a cartoonish voice meant to imitate the cat/lolcats,) “Nooo George Fox, I likes the dark.”

Quaker puns are highly under appreciated in today’s world.

I think we have our work cut out for us.

I’m editing a story for `Critical Futures <http://criticalfutures.com/>`_ this week, and I’m re-encountering an old problem with this novella.

There are some characters without specified genders, it’s important to their characterization, and I’m pretty wed to it, though I did slip up and use some he/she in the first drafts, which I’ve since edited out.

Interestingly, or maybe not, the real effect of doing this is that the characters don’t really relate to each other’s bodies. Maybe I’m just a n00b, but I from a theoretical place it makes sense.

In any case it’s really interesting, and also damn frustrating.

That is all.

Periscope down.

I just finished spinning the Corriedale Cross (basic plain wool) that I’ve been spinning for months. I had 2 pounds (900 grams) which is my standard amount, and I have 9 skeins. I think I was less that pleased with two of them, but they’re fine, and all the other ones are great.

I started spinning some dark brown blue faced leicester (this stuff, in fact).

Wow, in a word.

It spins like butter. Only better, because it’s an interesting color the picture doesn’t quite capture it (and it’s reasonably priced to boot!)

I’m going for a lighter and loftier aran weight (as opposed to a more tightly spun Guernsey-style yarn.) Very pleased.

In other news, as of Monday, after a week of scaling back on the caffeine in an attempt to de/resensitize my body to the stuff, I’m going back full bore, because I can’t live on 16oz of tea a day. I might not get a headache but I’m too scattered and I drag too much midday without more. Hopefully I’ll be able to scale up in a healthful/productive manner.

One of the best things that happened to me during college was that I discovered and got involved in the Women’s and Gender Studies program at my school. Though I went to college very interested in gender and sexuality stuff I’m not sure that I ever really intended to come out of the experience with a second major in Women’s Studies, but I did, and I think it was a really great thing.

Making sense of that experience, since graduation has been more difficult, as I’m probably not directly going to go work “in the field” (if there is even a thing there,) and I find my academic interests¹ taking me elsewhere.

The thing that the bright eyed 18-year old tycho found so intriguing about women’s studies is that on the first (or second) day of the first class, the professor handed us a packet of readings photo-copied from her books. And the readings weren’t just “clever parsing of the literature in a forum even undergraduates could handle,” but the key (or parts of the key) documents themselves. From the beginning I felt like a participant in a larger discussion, which is something that I didn’t get from my other classes.

While in the end I learned that participating in these discourses is something that you sort of have to fight your way into, I also came to the conclusion that I didn’t much want to be involved in a field that didn’t value thought and participation of its students. And so I dove into Women’s Studies and I don’t regret it for an instant.

While I don’t tend to buy into the software-is-freedom argument,² I think there is something very freeing about open source in the same way that I found Women’s Studies so academically freeing. The invitation to participate in the software development progress that open source represents is really powerful and even if you’re not a programer in the traditional sense, the invitation to participate in a serious discussion about the shape of the tools that we use is pretty powerful.

At least I think so.