Concern

I installed Ubuntu today, over my non-working Fedora install. It is, in brief, zee oh em gee easy, in comparison with every other Linux distribution I’ve ever tried.

Let’s count the obvious plusses:

• You download one CD image. Not six, and not a DVD. One CD. This took all of about an hour to bittorrent.
• You get the option of installing it as a server. I don’t even have a monitor that I’ll connect to this machine, only a borrowed LCD with very limited capabilities, and I don’t want the hassle, or even the time, it takes to start X11. It also means that it won’t automatically misconfigure X11, and then only try to boot into a graphical shell.
• It, oh wow, it created a regular user during the install! Yeah, that there is damned useful.

The only point that was a little confusing was the partitioning step, because I wanted to preserve one of the partitions. I had to learn, on the fly, how their UI worked, but that was pretty minor.

Tor is surprisingly easy to use on OS X. It could hardly get any simpler: download it, run it, point your browser at it. The only thing that could make it any easier is if it configured your browser for you, with all you having to do is flip an on/off switch. But there’s that impenetrable wall of XUL.

The site is blocked by the great Seawall, so it’s automatically one of the better things on the Internet. I’ll need to see how usable it is behind that wall next week.

I use Perforce at work, and it is a pretty good version control system, even though it’s non-free.

One of the best things about it — and this is such a simple thing, too — is that files you haven’t “checked out” aren’t writable, so there isn’t any chance of you accidentally editing a file without knowing that you’ve checked it out first. And, the changelist support is pretty neat: you can group files you are changing together, and keep them (and change notes) going as you edit the files.

I wanted something similar for CVS hacking, but wanted to expand that idea a little such that in addition to having everything read-only until you’re ready to check out files, you have to enter a change note for that file when you check it out.

I wrote a little shell script called track that does this. It gives you three commands:

• checkout: marks files as writable, and asks you to enter a change note for that file.
• checkin: marks files non-writable, and saves your change notes in “file-name.changes”.
• status: prints whether or not the file is writable (checked out), along with the current change notes.

I kind of like utilities that force me to do the right thing, because I very often forget to, or am too lazy.

This is really neat: SmackBook Pro. The short of it is that you can, with a Mac notebook that has a motion sensor, switch between virtual desktops by slapping the side of your notebook.

This does need to be liberated from relying on non-free software, and it would be better if Desktop Manager (which I used to use, but gave up on for a while) worked a bit better on Tiger and x86. But heck, you could use the same mechanism to toggle Expose. Or even make it so if you shake your laptop a bunch, the windows on screen wander a little. It is a great UI — you get feedback on your computer to physical things you do to it. Probably more practical in handheld devices, though.

Also, at some point, someone is going to have to write an etch-a-sketch emulator for OS X.