I dag hatar eg datamaskinar. Dei som har lyst til å vita kvifor kan prøva å få convert(1) til å konvertera ei EPS-fil til høgoppløyst PNG.
Archive for the 'The wonderful world of free software' Category
Even though ordinary pie charts are evil, this little program called Filelight is still able to be very useful and nifty. And it’s not really using pie charts, either. It just looks like it.
The point isn’t the pretty diagram it shows, of course. It’s how it lets me move around, identify disk space wastrel, peek around etc. Very nifty and intuitive, much easier than du for cleaning up a messy ~.
I noticed the other day that my old weblog had been comment-spammed. So I twisted my spamkiller scheme to it, and set it off. Boom, lose ~7K spam messages. And, accidentally, all valid comments as well. Oh dear. Well, can’t be bothered to recover them from backup.
I’ve started trying out the Gallery package to get a useful online gallery and not the five-ish crappy self-made things I’ve had so far. You can watch my progress if you like, though there’s nothing interesting there yet. Note the other username, since that user has relatively free reins regarding disk use, at least for the present time.
First impressions:
Messy to set up, but that’s no surprise for a large semi-cgi application. Whoever designed the UI needs to discuss proper font sizing with a clue-by-four. Use points, not pixels, you moron! I can barely read it!
The default skin is ugly. I found another one I quite liked. It’s buggy (black text on black, yellow text on white, etc), but I’ll survive for now.
Why do so many web designers insist on assuming that people run at low resolutions? If I set my motitor to 140 dpi (appropriate for the LCD) nearly every webpage with narrow columns breaks. End of rant. Go home now.
GNOME 2.10 is out. Since somebody were kind enough to drop a list of a thousand or so place-names into GNOME 2.8, I had quite a bit of work last time doing very uninteresting translations in order to get above 80 %. Now this time, the place-name list is expanded considerably. Someone from the Bokmål team did translate quite a lot of them, but that alone wasn’t enough to keep the Norwegian Nynorsk translation afloat above 80 %. Sadly I decided to give my master’s priority this time.
Wonder what GNOME 2.10 is like, though. Will it compile usably on a RHEL machine?
It would appear that Thunderbird is tipping over into ever so slightly better than Evolution.
The ego has landed.
The CINT C/C++ Interpreter is precisely what it sounds like. Mostly works, and has some minor syntax extensions. Not entirely useless when writing in this language, though I haven’t tested fancier features like using external compiled libraries and suchlike. It’s used in ROOT. Such a clever name for a scientific programming environment. One nifty feature is that when you load a datafile in a ROOT session (which is a CINT session with various ROOT things loaded), that datafile’s variables appear magically in the local scope. I expect C programmers to cringe, but to us users of MATLAB® and IDL it’s commonplace. And it doesn’t happen if you don’t want it to.
I’ve found an anoying thing in C++. It’d seem that vectors lack a erase(int i) method, so that I have to use the erase(iterator iter) method instead. But since I still need to count with an int in my for loops, I have to manually make i and iter point at the same element. It annoys. It’s so unneccessary. The vector understands the [i] operator. It knows how to map an integer index to an object. Why can’t the bloody thing also do so in its methods?
Have to learn C++ for this job. Looks not too bad so far, I’d say. I kinda like OOP, particularly the easy-to-grasp data structures it allows and the improved namespace segregation compared to C. Course, since I haven’t done anything remotely real in it yet, I have yet to see the real bad things.
Am reading Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel. Rather overly verbose, I would say, but it appears to serve. Just need to scroll past all the philosophical babble and stop when I see a block of Courier font.
I wonder, though. It’s C doubleplus. Is it doubleplus good or doubleplus ungood? Time may tell.
Since Movable Type is out in a new version with stricter lisence terms, I’m considering switching again. WordPress and Greymatter have nice feature-lists and licenses. But I’m not entirely sure the switch would be painless.
