Martin Geisler Online

I was lying on my couch, taking a nap, when I started to hear the distinct sound of water pouring down — lots of water pouring down — outside my window.

I’ve always liked it when it is raining heavily, it’s very cosy to sit indoor with some hot tea (or hot chocolate… umm!) and look out on the rain. It’s perfect weather to code in, too!

On the right you’ll see a small crop of a screenshot. I’ve been using gDesklets for some time now, and I have a great pile of them to the right on my desktop. They are nice eye-candy and also a little bit useful. If only Enlightenment would understand that the 12 little windows should be left out of my tab-list, then I would be really happy. I hope that DR16.7 has support for the hints sent out by the desklets — I haven’t tried it yet since it’s still in pre-release and nobody seems to have packaged it for [Debian][]. I’ve thought about using another window manager, but I’m very fond of Enlightenment, especially how it chooses to place new windows: I can predict fairly well where the new window will be opened because I’ve been using it for so long.

Hmm… I’ve been using Enlightenment from the very first time I installed GNU/Linux, so I must have been using it for five years now. Wow! That is one of the greatest things about GNU/Linux: you can keep using your programs for years because they are reliable — of course there has been updates to Enlightenment during the years, but basically it has just worked, just like my favorite program: [Emacs][] which quickly becomes your reliable, quick, familiar friend. You know that it wont suddenly stop working, you know that will display your files tomorrow as it did today. When I see people working in programs like MS Word I often have a hard time understanding why they put up with it? They want to move some text around in their huge report — Word decides to change the font during the move. They want take their finished report with then to their university department and print it there — Word decides to change the margins (or is it the papersize?) during the move, making all their efforts in avoiding poor page breaks irrelevant.

Anyway… enough ranting about the deficiencies of MS Word — I’m of course using [LaTeX][] which may look strange when you sees it for the first time, but will later save you huge amounts of time and spare you of many frustrations, and give your papers a very professional look.

During the storm I saw a funny coincidence: I have the PSI-Weather desklet running on top of the psi-alt-uptime desklet, and that gives the funny impression that Tux is being hit by the lightning. I didn’t do it on purpose — honest!