Monthly Archive for March, 2008

But I digress

Published on March 25, 2008 in Life. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , .

This is a quick online follow-up to a conversation I had last night about the portuguese language. Me and some friends were discussing how dull it can sound. In fact, we agreed that it sounds a lot duller and sadder than a lot of other languages, even latin ones. It can be beautiful, really poetic and emotive, and powerful in literature, but on our day to day “happy” conversations, it always comes up as a bit rough and cold.

Whether you like it or not, even the smallest things end up influencing people throughout their lives, and the culture of a country is unified by a lot of small things, being unique because of that. I couldn’t help but wonder that if we could grow into something completely different by exposing ourselves to more positive influences then shouldn’t we try? It strengthened my wish to go study abroad. Portugal can be so depressing and I think it shows in the general attitude of the population. And besides, if you never try, you’ll never know, right?

Edit: I realized just now I really did digress a lot(!), but I think it’s interesting food for thought.

Going Mouseless

Published on March 25, 2008 in Linux. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

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Recently I’ve been trying out alternative ways to interact with the computer. As I am now using linux as my main OS (Arch Linux136 FTW!), it’s really easy to try out alternative window managers (WMs). I tried some dynamic tiling WMs at first, including wmii137 and awesome138. They both work by auto arranging the windows so that they don’t overlap showing you your current working window in a bigger frame and the others in smaller frames. Check out their sites for more details and screenshots. I kinda liked the “non-overlapness” of it, but all of them lacked some flexibility in the creation of panes, and tried to be “too smart” in the placement and sizing of frames, so I couldn’t have absolute control on the tiling if I wanted to.rnI then decided to try a “dumber” WM, namely ratpoison. In this one, you only have one frame to begin with and swap the current application which is displayed fullscreen. If you want to use a more elaborate layout, you can split your screen horizontally or vertically and resize the resulting frames (much like emacs or vi). If you have ever used screen (which by the way, is the best CLI app ever, so go try it!) you will feel instantly at home as the functionality and keybindings are both similar.

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