Peter's Blog

I was going to Twitter this but realized it would need more than two sentences.

I've realized recently that my perception of windows has hardened into a feeling that windows and apps for it are only developed to exploit people. I put this down to two things:

• using lots of good free linux software, some of it so lovely it puts me in awe.
• this year most of the time I have spent in windows seems to gave been disinfecting other peoples pcs. They seem to get infected with Trojans and viruses that impersonate windows anti-virus, drive enhancers and similar crap that has left me with a deep distrust of anything other than sophos's disinfecting procedure.

I still wouldn't recommend anyone to move to Linux for anything more than a platform to run firefox. Openoffice for example is definitely not compatible enough if you have to deal commercially with clients who use microsoft word: ooo WILL bugger up the formatting of their word documents.

What conclusion can I draw? It's this, the current state of software is imperfect.

I'm tempted to buy a mac.

I gave up on KDE 4.1 for a number of reasons:

• The new style kicker menu had annoyances like the overall appearance was lacking polish for a next generation glassy desktop and all applications were listed by function rather than application name. This means I had three entries labelled in some variation of 'Remote Desktop Viewer' but two were slow and buggy and I kept having to work out which one.
• I preferred the old style menu but can only add favourites to it by switching to the new style menu and right clicking.
• It appears that any java app (netbeans, openoffice) causes the buttons in the taskbar to disappear and I have to mouse over them to see them again.
• I was fiddling around and found the 'plasma desktop' (?) which is supposed to be a place to put your widgets. You then bang a key to have a quick look at all the widgets, a kind of status update. I tried the twitter widget on this but it kept crashing. The view is also very sensitive to misplaced clicks which will hide the desktop again.
• There aren't a lot of useful widgets
• The 'Folder View' on the desktop can only show the icon view beloved by people who also like crayons.

I went into the KDE forums to see what the deal with the openoffice flickering was and came across a religious dispute about the KDE 4 'cashew nuts' that appear in corners everywhere. The idea of these nuts seems to be that people can click on them to adjust the window settings, the settings aren't hidden under right clicks or something. I got the impression from the thread that some visionary developer called Aaron is insistent that there is no little checkbox to hide these and he somehow has kde by the balls so nobody else can remove them.

KDE seems to be going down the gnome route that says people are either:

• dumb and configuration options will confuse them
• smart enough to patch the source and rebuild

I digress.

Given that KDE 4.1's glassy look is pretty but it really needs more interesting widgets and more maturity, how could I glitz up my desktop. I came across various things and have got it going a treat:

Cairo Dock

Here we have:

• compiz fusion for the shadowy effects. I particularly like the 'burn' effect that makes windows close in a burst of flame. I've turned off wobbly movement because I couldn't fine-tune window position to my satisfaction and sometimes windows would start wobbling incessantly.
• Emerald theme manager for the theme. I downloaded a mac-like theme and changed the title bars from boring grey to blue, tweeked transparency and put the minimise/maximise/close buttons on the right rather than the left (is it like that on the mac? ug).
• Cairo Dock for taskbar. I keep a dull vanilla gnome panel on the second monitor but the primary taskbar is an OS-Xy animated thing. I tried a avant-window-navigator but cairo dock is much nicer. One small tiny thing I like about it is how I created a launcher for a terminal and somehow (magic) the terminal it launches does not get a task bar entry but the launcher itself behaves like a taskbar entry and I can click on it to get back to the terminal.
• screenlets for desktop widgets. These work nicely with compiz so they get the flashy glassy effects. There is also gdesktop widgets but that seems a little dated (sooo 2006).

The only reason I went to KDE was krusader and konsole but krusader works under gnome anyway and gnome-terminal seems to be good enough.

I'm not sure I like having 11 python processes running all the time but it sure is pretty. AND nothing flashes when netbeans/openoffice are open apart from the caret.

I've had my iPhone for over a month and we are totally inseperable. Previous mobiles were left in my coat when I got home from work but never the iPhone. We are a single entity apart from shower time, where the idea of moisture touching it is too terrible to contemplate.

But what do i use it for? After the five minute wonders have fallen into neglect, what is left?

• phone. Well duh
• texting
• email, google mail via IMAP to be precise. I do some blog posts with this, the ones where I have a v's instead ofvspaces.
• google reader. I spend most time here.
• app store. When I run out of rss I browse the app store for new toys. Most only amuse for a few minutes. I still haven't found any compelling games.
• Twitter. I use twitterific lite as it does all I need and the ads don't bother me. GPRS is plenty good enough for Twitter.
• iPod/iplayer/last.fm, although not that often as I'm always watching the battery level which spoils it. A full battery might give me two hours of iplayer, although the stream will probably freeze after 30 minutes.
• wikipedia: another app I have simplifies the formatting for iPhone very nicely.
• camera, although the pictures are usually disappointing: blurry or noisy.