blog.ccharles.ca

Apparently SCO isn’t quite dead yet. This is like a really bad horror movie.

My beloved ASUS W7J is dying. It’s been dying a slow death for a while now, but more and more I’m wondering if it’s time to put it out to pasture.

The GigE NIC has only connected at 100 meg for about a year. It’s running a lot hotter than it used to. The webcam never worked, but that’s a driver issue. Suspend and resume don’t work reliably anymore, and the DVD writer makes coaster after coaster at anything faster than its lowest speed.

As a result I’m in the market to replace it.

This past weekend Lenovo, makers of the legendary ThinkPad, had a sale. I spec’d out a sweet little number that would probably be my ideal notebook: an X200 with 12″ widescreen at 1280×800, Core 2 Duo at 2.4 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, Bluetooth, 802.11b/g/n draft wireless, GigE wired ethernet, a webcam, 160 GB 7200 RPM hard disk, 5-in-1 card reader, 9-cell battery.

Really, really nice.

Even with a $500 discount it came in at $1750 before taxes, and it doesn’t have an optical drive. If this was a business purchase I’d get it without thinking twice, but as a super-portable personal machine it seems a bit much.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the so-called netbook market ever since ASUS introduced their original Eee PC. Some of these machines are getting pretty beefy, and a 10″ screen might just be big enough.

I’m test-driving an ASUS Eee PC 1000HE from Staples (they accept returns on laptops for 14 days). For $450 I got an Atom processor at 1.6 GHz, 1 GB of memory, a 160 GB hard disk, 802.11a/b/g/draft n wireless, Bluetooth, a 1.3 megapixel webcam and an SD/MMC card reader. At 10″ and 3 lbs and change it’s smaller than the ThinkPad, but maybe a little bit heavier.

It claims 9.5 hours of battery life. I’m sure that’s an exaggeration, but even 5 hours would be twice what I get with my current laptop.

So far it’s a really nice little machine. The screen resolution is very low (1024×600) but I knew that going in. I think I can live with it. The big surprise so far is that the wireless card doesn’t work very well under Ubuntu 9.04. Everything else that I’ve tested appears to work just fine, including the webcam.

If I decide to keep it I’ll upgrade the memory to 2 GB and buy an external USB DVD writer from NCIX. These two upgrades will cost less than $100. I’d be giving up the Core 2 Duo CPU, half the memory, a better screen, the GigE ethernet and the ThinkPad case badge, but I’d be paying a third as much as Lenovo’s sale price. I’d also be getting the external DVD writer and wicked-long battery life.

Sounds like a pretty good compromise.

I’ve been interested in tiling window managers for some time.

I find this type of interface to be great for programming. It helps me focus by keeping everything that’s important in front of me while making efficient use of my screen. There’s nothing extraneous to distract me, and being able to do everything via the keyboard can be a huge time-saver. (Think about how much time you waste each time you reach for the mouse, move it around a little to find your pointer, click around, and then find your way back to home row.)

While writing code I normally have an Emacs window and a few terminals open, and I periodically launch, close, or or refer to other windows (e.g. PDF viewer, web browser). I like to have Emacs take up the full height of the left half of my screen, and to divide my terminals and stuff up vertically on the right half.

I’ve used GNU Screen at the console (or even in a full-screen terminal emulator) for this in the past, but Screen only splits vertically and it only supports text-based applications.

I’ve used Emacs itself for this in the past, too, but there are some tasks to which Emacs is not suited, despite what the folks at the Free Software Foundation might want you to believe. Emacs is not a window manager, and whatever external applications I may be using are not subject to Emacs splits.

To have proper tiling I really need to find a good tiling window manager. But what makes a particular tiling window manager good?

For me to use it, any tiling window manager must

• be somewhat lightweight (this is deliberately vague),
• provide efficient tiling,
• be stable, and
• run on Linux.

My ideal window manager would also

• be able to temporarily fullscreen any window and then revert back to the previous layout,
• support floating windows, because I occasionally use programs that don’t behave very well in a tiled configuration (e.g. the GIMP, Skype),
• provide a system tray, because some useful programs like to hang out there (e.g. Skype again, Klipper),
• be reasonably configurable, and
• be easily hackable.

The contenders

Tiling window managers are actually quite common. The idea has been around for a long time (the first window managers only supported tiling) and many people have implemented their own version.

I am mostly interested in the new tiling window managers that are starting to appear. They still implement the tiling window paradigm, but they tend to offer support for modern desktop features (e.g. D-Bus, multiple desktops, multiple displays) as well. Also, many of them are being actively developed which is always a bonus.

At the very least, I’m planning to play with

• the Stump Window Manager,
• awesome, and
• xmonad.

I’ll post details about each one as I try it out.

My father has always been a bit of a tech geek. That’s a big part of the reason that I got into computers in the first place—I grew up with an computer in the house. I have early memories of playing Rampage, Choplifter and Lode Runner on my dad’s Apple IIc. When I got older I used that same machine to write reports for school, and I used The Print Shop to make cards for every birthday party that I attended.

As I grew up so did our computers. Each one had a little bit more processing power, a little bit more memory. I got to use newer software and play newer games. I’m not sure exactly when I first logged onto the Internet, but I’m pretty sure that it was before any of my friends did.

As soon as broadband was available in our neighbourhood my dad got on board. By this time everybody was connected, but while all of my friends had to wait endless hours for pages to load via their dialup connections, I was busy exploring the web. I’ve gotten used to this type of performance, and since cable or DSL is available everywhere these days I never have to worry about load times.

At least, it’s available almost everywhere. Laura and I are currently house- and cat-sitting for some friends, and their house is a little bit out of town. Around here, broadband either isn’t available or is ludicrously overpriced.

It’s 2009 and I’m writing a blog post over a 48 Kbps dialup connection.

It’s slow, but not nearly as bad as I expected. Like many modern online applications, WordPress makes heavy use of JavaScript. The fact that so much work can be done client-side makes for a half-decent responsiveness within the UI, at least after the initial page load. This, coupled with a modern browser that lets me read one page while loading others in background tabs, makes me feel amost at home.

Maybe dialup isn’t so bad.