Archive for the 'Link' Category

Tech Things (I Know) I Don’t Understand

Published
by
thadk
on 2007/7/5
in General, Life and Link
. 0 Comments

  • Lisp and Functional Programming - Reddit collectively says it’s so great
  • Semantic Web - I just finished my entire senior project at University on processing websites and I have had the sneaking suspicion that Semantic Web might be The Proper Way to accomplish my goals. That said, no tools from that camp presented themselves in research. More on that project later perhaps.
  • “Web Services” - Mashups are one thing, but where do you draw the line? I love dapper which makes RSS/XML from bloody ugly old fashioned sites!
  • Unix (not Linux) - It always feels wrong. Props to Stallman and GNU, there is something to those tools.
  • YouTube

I do get:

  • Twitter (I like the Group Instant Messaging idea)
  • Google Reader (Podcasts, News, Blogs)
  • IMAP - Store email on the server so it is always in the cloud, Gmail works too, less personal with the benefit of free backups.
  • Google Desktop- Google for my mind. Now on Linux, Mac AND Windows. I hope that they have porting tools to move the data files between platforms!?
  • Greasemonkey - I should do one of those cliched posts where I list all the scripts I use.

Further explore and accept:

  • RAW camera formats - Here I come Nikon D80.
  • FreeBSD - Installed but it’s still not me. Gentoo makes more sense.
  • Grandcentral.com - Route all your calls through one number? Google just bought them.

Facebook might be like AOL but College students have free audiences there, more than can be said for most blogs.

How to Optimize Gestures in Firefox

Published
by
thadk
on 2005/7/29
in General, Link, Linux, etc. and Tabletries
. 0 Comments

Why Bother?

It is nice to be able to flick your wrist to do all the common tasks in a browser without touching menus, reaching for toolbars, or the keyboard. Personally, I’ve got a tablet so the pen is often the most convenient interface. Back, Forward, Next (in series), Previous (in series), new tab, close tab, minimize and maximize all in two mouse moves or less.

I used to use “All-In-One Gestures”:http://perso.wanadoo.fr/marc.boullet/index.html which is a fork of the “Optimoz Mouse Gestures” extension. It was forked before reliable diagonal gestures were implemented though and it has stayed san diagonals for years. Optimoz was broken in Firefox for a time with no maintainers so I had to move to All-in-One, I got used to a few of the bit features and didn’t check back on Optimoz.

I sorely missed diagonal gestures, instead of 4 gestures with one move (Up, Down, Left, Right) I could do eight!, but I tolerated AIO. Two gestures which were especially handy as one move-gestures but don’t fit into the UDLR orientations were Grow Image and Shrink Image. Did I mention the loss was a tad annoying?

A new extension has come about though which adds two more amazingly useful one move gestures into the mixin’s though–”NextPlease”:https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=390 . This extension adds interfaces for Next and Previous page, filling out and in my opinion, fully justifying the diagonals as legit gestures, if there was any question. All-In-One supports these gestures but only for the non-diagonal gestures–Up (Link-in-new-tab), Down (Link-in-new-window or Scroll Down) , Left (back), Right (forward) are already taken with important moves. No flick to next page for you there.

So, how can you flick to the next page?

  2. Install the “Optimoz Mouse Gestures extension”:http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/installation.html
  3. After you restart firefox, click the links below to add the NextPlease gestures to Optimoz:

The other two classic diagonals are all enabled by default–Grow Image is Down and Right, Shrink Image is Up and Left.

Gimp, Wine & Mono for RSSBandit

Published
by
thadk
on 2004/7/7
in General, Link and Linux, etc.
. 0 Comments

Wonderfully, the Gimp devs have fixed the b0rked Wacom Tablet support under Windows. Now it can be recommended much more easily and when I’m in Windows on the tablet pc I can use it.

I found a post which suggests a fix for the unstable debian libwine-cil package to get .Net/Windows software running (or closer to running) on Mono. I’ve installed the packages from the mono-for-debian site too.

+4. When trying to run a SWF application I get the
+System.DllNotFoundException:user32.dll exception. What's wrong?
+
+In order for SWF and winelib to operate properly you need to have
+symbolic links for the wine dlls in the <prefix>/lib directory. While
+the rpm should install those automatically as part of the postinstall
+script you can also manually create those with the following command:
+
+cd <prefix>/lib
+for i in <wine_dll_dir>/*dll.so; do ln -s $i lib`basename $i`; done
+
+<prefix> is the base directory where mono is installed under (ie. /usr
+or /usr/local) and <wine_dll_dir> is the directory where the wine dlls
+(user32.dll.so, gdi32.dll.so, etc) can be found (ie. /usr/lib/wine or
+/usr/local/lib/wine)

In my case I’m trying to get RssBandit running as a curiousity and due to the fact I haven’t found a comperable RSS reader for Linux yet–and I’d like to use the session syncing capabilites of RssBandit which are currently unstandard. (It appears that they’re cooking something on the back burner in the way of standards though, which is laudable. IMAP&Webmail combo is wonderous, I’d love to duplicate it in my agreggator.)

You also have to run the wineserver manually. Of course to get that error you’d have already of had to know that. So /usr/lib/wine/wineserver.

I get an error right away:
Unhandled Exception: System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Array index is out of range.
in <0×001e9> System.Resources.ResourceReader:ResourceValue (int)
in <0×00076> ResourceEnumerator:get_Value ()
in <0×000da> System.Resources.ResourceSet:ReadResources ()
in <0×00088> System.Resources.ResourceSet:GetObject (string,bool)
in <0×0001f> System.Resources.ResourceSet:GetString (string,bool)
in <0×00125> System.Resources.ResourceManager:GetString (string,System.Globalization.CultureInfo)
in <0×00014> System.Resources.ResourceManager:GetString (string)
in <0×00047> RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.SplashScreen:InitializeComponent ()
in <0×000f7> RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.SplashScreen:.ctor ()
in <0×0004f> (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.SplashScreen:.ctor ()
in <0×0001e> RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.Splash:ShowThread ()
in <0×0005f> (wrapper delegate-invoke) System.MulticastDelegate:invoke_void ()

The K5Diary2RSS screen scraper app I mentioned in an earlier post creates very mangled output. I’m not sure what to think of this with respect to Mono. Shouldn’t it run identially? It seems the compilers generate the same output, or at least generate the same output on either platform which they are run on (.NET CLR or Mono CLR) respectfully.

RSSBandit is Open Source so theoretically I could go in there and bugger around with it. Hmm.

Edit: I take back the not having a linux feedreader app statement. Liferea is nice and very fast compared to RSS Bandit’s weighty .NET baggage. The typically underpowered gtkhtml is a perfect fit for a RSS newsreader and tabs are probably overkill in Bandit as I use Firefox’s tabs & gestures to navigate the sites anyway. I would love to see syncronization added though.