TTK Ciar's Journal: LinkedIn, Enlightenment, and the Return of Cobalt

Getting Back Into the Swing of Things

I am happy to report that cobalt's strength is returning. She has been on the ropes for about a year now, fighting ulcerative colitis and side-effects from the drugs which fought the colitis. This weekend we dusted off the toolbox and constructed a fence around the back porch, to keep the chickens (and their slimy little poops) off of it. It was good to see her in action again -- she insisted on swinging the hammer whenever one needed to be swung, and she obviously enjoyed being out of bed and having the energy to actually do something! (And yes, I've asked her if we perhaps should just beef up the chicken run to contain the chickens better, but she said no, she wants to let them out of the run periodically anyway, so we'd still have the issue with free-roaming chickens polluting our elevated porch.)

The Remicade is definitely kicking the colitis' butt, and she's no longer on the steroids which were giving her the worse of the side effects. On the downside, she has developed some bad anemia (low red blood cell density), for which her specialist has prescribed some uber-powerful special-formulation iron supplements. If her red blood cell count drops much lower, she's going to have to get some transfusions, but hopefully we can pull her back from the brink. We're both keeping out fingers crossed. Yay modern medicine!

Professional Linkage

During my last round of job-seeking, I joined LinkedIn, one of those newfangled social networking sites. This one is optimized towards getting professionals in contact with other professionals, and it does a pretty good job. I actually got an interview out of a professional link on LinkedIn, though I actually didn't follow up on it (the NASA Archive job trumped other offers).

Looking at my list of "connections", I realized that this would potentially be a powerful tool for someone seeking to start up a new business. Many of the people I know are right there in my connection list, with their skills laid out for easy browsing. Were I to found (another) startup, it would be the easiest thing to run down that list saying "I need one of those, one of those, and one of those as new employees" and send them messages to that effect. Associates who were not interested but knew someone who might could then easily "link" me to someone in their own connection network. Nifty!

Enlightenment

For several years now I have enjoyed using the Enlightenment Window Manager to organize my computer workspace. It has precisely the features and behavior I need to manage a very large (200+) number of open windows. In particular, I have found its notion of "virtual desktops" very useful. A "virtual desktop" looks exactly like what you see when you sit down and use your computer -- a screenful of windows, icons, etc. Under Enlightenment, one can have many virtual desktops, like having many computers sharing the same screen. If I have Firefox, Xterm, and XPaint open in one virtual desktop, then I can switch to a different (empty) desktop, open a bunch of other windows, and then pop over the the other virtual desktop and there's my Firefox, Xterm, and XPaint again, exactly as they were before.

Enlightenment16 supports a 3D array of virtual desktops, multiple 3x3 "grids" of desktops which can be easily switched and shared. I have used Alt-F1, Alt-F2, etc to switch between different grids, and alt-arrow to navigate around the grid of desktops. This has enabled me to partition my workspace according to application.

Banks 1 and 2 (of 2D grids of virtual desktops) are for xterms related to programming, email, and system administration. These eighteen virtual desktops tend to be the most crowded. Bank 3 is for firefox windows (one full-screen firefox window per virtual desktop, for a total of nine firefox windows). Bank 4 is for realtime chat sessions and other "fun" stuff. This arrangement makes it easy for me to find the instance of the application I need with minimum fuss. If I want to find the open text editor window I was just using, I can just press Alt-F2 to switch to the second grid, and maybe navigate up/down, left/right one virtual desktop's worth to find the xterm I was looking for. Similarly, if I want a firefox window, Alt-F3 will get me to whichever one I was using most recently (though I tend to reserve the middle and bottom rows of virtual desktops for work-related firefox windows, and the top row for "fun" browsing).

Enlightenment16 has been getting harder and harder to install in newer systems, unfortunately (not Enlightenment itself, but rather some of the libraries Enlightenment depends on .. some of the older libraries are particularly problematic on 64-bit systems). Getting Enlightenment16 installed on my new work desktop system (replacing workstation20) proved very difficult. I eventually gave up and switched to Enlightenment17.

Enlightenment17 has dropped support for the 3rd dimension of virtual desktops, limiting me to a 2D grid of virtual desktops only. Alt-F1 through Alt-F12 now switch me between the first 12 virtual desktops, rather than between banks of grids of virtual desktops. Needless to say, after five years of using Enlightenment16, this is tripping me up and making me cranky.

At first I tried using a 5x4 grid of virtual desktops, with the first two rows reserved for xterms, the third row for firefox, and the fourth row for fun (thus corresponding the y-axis of the grid to the z-axis of the array I was using under E16), but this proved quite unsatisfactory -- lots of keypresses were necessary to navigate around and find my stuff, and I quickly became "cramped" with only five virtual desktops per category (whereas before I had nine).

As of today I am taking a different approach, turning my partitions ninety degrees into a 4x7 grid of virtual desktops, with each column of 7 virtual desktops representing an application category (columns 1 and 2 for xterms, 3 for firefox, and 4 for fun). This allows me to continue using my Alt-F1/Alt-F2/etc "muscle memory" to switch between categories (since Alt-F1 will take me to the top of column 1, Alt-F3 to the top of column 3, etc) and gives me seven virtual desktops per category.

To further facilitate navigation, I am going to try to start new tasks in a row corresponding to the day of the week, with Monday corresponding to the first row, Tuesday to the second row, etc. Thus on a Friday if I wanted to start writing a new program, I would hit Alt-F2 to go to the top of my second column, then alt-downarrow four times to the row corresponding to Friday. In that virtual desktop I would open all of my xterms related to that new programming project. Since I keep written notes about my daily operations and keep them annotated by date, finding that programming project should be even easier than it was under E16.

However, I have also gotten in touch with the Enlightenment developers, and asked why the feature was dropped from E17. Depending on how they respond, some or all of the following options may be feasible for moving forward: (1) Talk them into porting this feature back into future versions of Enlightenment; (2) Convince them to port this feature into E17 by ways of monetary donation; (3) Port the feature to E17 myself; (4) Perform the necessary coding/hackery myself to get E16 working on modern operating systems and abandon E17; (5) Suck it up and put up with E17 and its less-useful virtual desktop management featureset; or (6) Abandon Enlightenment altogether and try to make FVWM2 (another window manager) do what I want.

For now I await the Enlightenment developers' response to my emails. Perhaps in the meantime this new arrangement will grow on me. Time will tell!

-- TTK