Katze mit Wut

After all those years of trying to make my synthesizers sound like a guitar, I ended up making my guitar sound like a synthesizer. :-D

(Strat knockoff played through Fender amp with overdrive, then souped up in audacity, totally love its speaker sim. Sounds like Carter USM or Armageddon Dildos, I reckon. That said, anything music is still a major pain on Linux; for instance, that's not quite how the riff goes, but play-through doesn't work right so I couldn't hear myself while playing. (For the non-musicians among my readers, playing without a monitor is like painting in the dark.) Also, don't read too much into it, this is just something that happened while jamming, I doubt it's going to be my new sound. But I'm busy explaining a joke, ain't I? Anyway, I'm half-tempted to go out and buy a Mac, as an appliance only, put Cubase or Logic on it (which I keep calling Live for some reason), and have at it.)

It started out pretty simple. And with a real world case, too. I'm debating a new keyboard, as this one starts to act up — I'm sick of wireless, I'm sick of batteries, I'm sick of PS/2-to-USB adapters, and it seems the hardware starts failing me, too. That said, I was very happy with the ergonomic ("split keyboard") Logi — it was good to my wrists, it held up for ten years, and it certainly is one gorgeous keyboard —, and if the SafeType doesn't do the trick for me, I'll be looking to get a variant of the Logi that's not wireless. Anyway, the SafeType is also a split keyboard, but they mean it. It's like hacking a typewriter in two in the middle, and then putting both halves of the keyboard upright so they keyboards aren't horizontal, they're vertical. When you type, your hand are not parallel to your desk, but orthogonal to it. It did wonders for me when I tried the "upright mouse", so I think the keyboard may be beneficial, too. The rub is, you don't have cursor keys that way. So I needed to find a way to put the cursor keys on the main keyboard.

Markus Fisch must really love pie-menus. Not only did he give us the excellent PieDock, he also has a JavaScript in-browser demo for it! : ) Naturally, I couldn't resist another pie-menu, especially not such a good-looking one, so of course I installed it — and hacked it up!

So, I figured (Open-) Solaris and VirtualBox are both owned by Sun now, they should go together splendidly.

I opted for the Sun-offering rather than Nexenta etc. since I intend to test some things in a "Sun environment", that is, make sure things work with the on-board facilities. Otherwise "Sun-kernel and GNU userland" would likely have been my preference.

Now, there are two different offerings, mind. The freely available download of OpenSolaris "Indiana", for a start. At 686 MB, this comes without a compiler, any compiler, it seems, and that means, no Sun compiler and no GNU compiler. It seems nice enough otherwise. However if I wanted to install the Virtual Box additions so I could move the mouse-pointer in and out of the VirtualBox window (or even integrate the Solaris instance's windows with my linux host's), the keyboard went berserk (in the guest only, and in X only), so I had to click Install … to mount the image, and then kill X to cd /media/V*; pkgadd -d *.pkg really quickly. On the upside, it came with some sort of graphical package-manager (which possibly allows you to pull the GNU compiler collection).
Addendum: It seems like the keyboard situation can be avoided by connecting using RDP, see below.

Anyway, I needed the Sun compilers, so I had to opt for the Developer Express something offering (what's with these names?), which in theory requires you to register before download. The good news is, if you're already on the Sun payroll, your normal log-in credentials will do the trick. This image weighs 3.7 GB; the minimum disk requirements are in the region of 8 GB, with 20 GB recommended. It includes the compilers (and auto-tools) of course, but it's not just the other image, plus devel. GNOME looks subtly different, I had no trouble installing the VirtualBox additions, and if there is a graphical package manager I haven't found it so far. But then I haven't looked very hard since so far all I needed was to go to sunfreeware.com (or blastwave, whichever you prefer — blastwave and pkg-get actually handle dependencies, so that's probably what you want, more on that later) to install screen "so the pain will stop." Seriously, that should be their tagline. "Screen. So the pain will stop." But I digress.

Addendum: Since I was only changing config-files at first, I only used vim in the first hour. Yes, you know what's coming. Once you try to do real work, you'll find there is no emacs. No, no xemacs either. So I guess I want to install pkg-get after all. But seriously. A "developer-edition" with no emacs? WTH?? So pkg-get (or pkgadm, but PBA that there is another pkgadm in $PATH!) it is! pkg-get -i xemacs, add /opt/csw/xemacs/bin to PATH, then let the configuring begin!

Radial menus, affectionately called pie menus, are like mouse gestures with cheat sheets. They're good-looking, and for menus that never change, they're incredibly fast, thanks to Fitts' law and muscle memory — you just shove the mouse in the general direction, rather than having to hit an entry only one text-line high, like you do in a traditional ("linear") menu.

This makes pie-menus extremely suitable for browser navigation, and consequently, there are several implementations for Firefox and Mozilla; RadialContext and easyGestures. To keep the number of slices down in each pie so they're easy to hit, both solutions work with multiple pies — easyGestures lets you switch to the "next" menu by mouse-button, while RadialContext's menus are connected — each pie-menu has one or more slices that lead to other pies. This is beautifully thought out, but may leave the beginner bewildered as the menu keeps changing on him if he moves the mouse wrong, leaving him disoriented.

easyGestures is practically safe from these mis-invocations. But since one or many of the pies can have a magic top slice that opens another arc of extra slices, with the ability to freely combine any of the main pies that has a magic slice with any of the three extras, there certainly is potential for confusion there, as well. Add to that the fact that you get extra context-menus for hyperlinks, images, text-fields and text-selections, not to mention that sometimes something is both, for instance an image that is also a hyperlink, and you can easily confuse the living daylights out of yourself.

On top of that, this very powerful tool is organized not so much by logical grouping, like RadialContext is, but by efficiency, you get a menu very confusing to the beginner.

Fortunately, it can be configured relatively freely. Below the fold, we shall try to create a compromise that features a more mnemonic layout, but is still fast, curling up your navigation bar like a kitten so we may turn off the old one, gaining screen estate and speed both.

Did you notice how speech things are always cat content? With LiONS for speech output (TTS, text-to-speech), and sphinx and SpeechLion for speech input (speech recognition)? Couldn't forego that, could I. So let's see how to use speech I/O with linux, with all free components, how to avoid some common pitfalls that are not in the manual, and how to get desktop control, look at where emacs, KDE, beryl, and others come in, the works. It's not for the squeamish though, so here's the linux speech how-to (aka, the parts that aren't in the manual)!

• I updated the weblog (but not all of the existing articles yet) to use tags rather than categories. English, German, and French remain as categories (as people are actually using them). Uh, speaking of which, s9y always requires an entry in the "default language" for multi-lingual entries? (If not, tell me how — it's certainly not something that is intuitively obvious at one in the morning, especially if you use the multi-lingual plug-in in conjunction with the multi-version plug-in.) And it uses the browser default language for setting the interface language, but not for selecting the entries? You gotta be kidding me. (And yes, it works here, duh. No need to write a comment. I mean seriously, what did you expect from me?) On a related note, am I the only one who found it much easier to do make the change to tags over in the mysql client, rather than in s9y's UI?

Below the fold: gripes about web-boards, web-shops, Mozilla Thunderbird, and new old plug-ins for the Beryl window-manager.

Und wo ich gerade dabei bin: für KDE gilt ähnliches wie für den iPod — schlechter als andere ist es wahrscheinlich auch nicht, aber es sind doch noch deutlich mehr Ecken und Kanten dran, als man von einem "Produkt" erwarten würde, das solche Lobgesänge erfahren hat und seit so langer Zeit mit soviel personpower beharkt wird.

My new work machine arrived last week, a Dell Latitude D820. Let's take a look at the adventures of setting it up for work (Windows, Linux, Windows running on linux (thanks to Xen), and assorted other fu).

It's the Chinese Year of the Mouse. First my beloved logitech mouse died. All I could get on short notice at the time was an IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 (see there for installation) though I'd have preferred another logi, the size and shape of which suit me better. Now I mucked up my lower arms and wrists — no, not typing those 200 line poses on MUSH: I was stupidly carrying home my groceries when I should have sent a man. Let's face it, at BMI 18 you don't have the muscle, and you shouldn't and needn't be without a strong guy to serve and to protect, anyway. : )

So much for being ecologically minded. Next time I'll take the beamer. Or something. Anyway, my arms hurt, a little when typing, and a lot when using the mouse. Untwisting them into the vertical (handshake position) immediately relieved the pain, so I went looking for a mouse that would work in that position.

My beloved logitech mouse died. For reasons that have no bearing here, I ended up with the titular IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 (though I'd have preferred another logi, the size and shape suit me better). If for some reason you too gave Microsoft money (well, don't! It's bad enough I did it!), here's how you use it with linux.

An introduction to the normalisation of databases that requires no prior knowledge and serves as an excuse to sneak in some cat content!

The front-page of a serendipity-powered blog offers you a link to the next page at its bottom. But is it, really? Because arguably, it's the previous page. Wordpress seems to think so. So instead of the ever-confusing previous and next (chronologically? counting from the cover-page? or what?), could we just have older and more recent entries instead? Older and newer, maybe? Please? : )

Monkey Island Outtakes — 6 clips + 4 hidden bonus.

Introducing MySQL-dump, my weblog about my experiences with MySQL software.