Slashdot

Adobe has released Adobe Reader for Linux, version 8.1.1. What's important is that it now fully works with GTK 2.0, so the interface is consistent with the rest of the GTK apps. It has subpixel rendering, unlike every other PDF reader out there for Linux (Poppler has an experimental patch that is very bad. Someone told me kpdf has this feature, but the one from the Feisty repository does not). Read an article about it.

The downside is that it's bloated and slow, but I would trade fast response to a slight lag for superior text rendering any day. This is wonderful for Linux users with LCD screens.

Why doesn't Fluxbox have shading on mousewheel scroll? (Yes I know there's a hack patch somewhere)

Why is the eight hour work day so commonplace? Why not six, or nine, or five? And why is it 9-5 for so many (or around this time)? I'm thinking that a hell of a lot of gasoline would be saved if there was no rush hour traffic. Think of all those idling engines. Do most people really need to be at work at a specific time for their respective corporations to function, or is it just a bunch of ridiculous overhead and stupid idiots running the place?

And don't use the argument that all fossil fuels will be used up anyway, so it doesn't matter. The rate at which fuel is burned does matter, and does affect our health.

I'm tired.

(end rants)

Linux has gotten much better now. Why? Well wireless networking was really painful before. Now it's not. Sure there was stuff like knetworkmanager, and the network-manager packages for GNOME/KDE, but those were packages that either required panel applets or lots of libraries.

Panel applets are not for me since I run Fluxbox, and the network managers were always a bit finicky anyways. Enter wicd, perhaps the best program for Linux ever. It's so simple. It just connects to networks. It allows automatic connection. It plays nice with command line apps. It doesn't require a panel applet and can connect to my WPA wireless network.

There's a time for the command line: when it's much faster and more efficient to use it. Connecting to networks is not one of those times. It's useless and irritating to have to type "sudo wpa_supplicant -Dmadwifi -c/home/blah/config/wpanetworks.conf -iath0" every time I need to connect.

The US president and friends want to update the FISA in order to make spying easier. The full article is available here. Bush said in a statement:

Protecting America is our most solemn obligation...

I'm not really questioning the validity of this bill since I have no idea what these "updates" are (not in the news bulletin), but am I the only one who thinks that Bush trying to "protect" America by increasing spy "intelligence" is like trying to protect yourself from a huge swarm of bees with a rocket launcher, instead of simply going inside your cabin?

Tired of searching your hard drive with GUI programs with too many features? Here's a handy script that will get the job done on any decent Linux setup. First type this in a terminal:

find -xdev / >> ~/dbase.txt

If you want other filesystems searched too remove -xdev. Anyways, this will output an entire list of files into a file called dbase.txt in your home directory. Put it wherever you want though if you care.

If you want even more useless junk searched put a sudo in front of that command to get some protected files (not useful).

Now that you have a static database of almost all the files on your computer, write up a script like this:

#!/bin/sh
 
if test $# -eq 1
then
      grep -E -i $1 ~/dbase.txt
else
      if test $2 = -h
      then
            grep -E -i $1 ~/dbase.txt | grep "/home/`whoami`"
      else
            echo "invalid option"
      fi
fi

Make it executable and put it in a scripts directory. Typing "isolate junk" will isolate all filenames containing "junk" (case insensitive). "isolate junk -h" will just use the home directory. Use any regular expression.

I found this kind of script very useful because I know where any of the files I use that change often are, and when I need to search I only need to find files which stay in the same place forever. The advantage is that it takes less than a second for queries and there's no space taken from a program, and of course it can be used in text-only mode.