Two task organizers

I came across two organizers of sorts the other day, one for the console and one for the QT toolkit. One is rather impressive, while the other has the potential.

beeswax, as I understand it, is intended to follow the style of Lotus Agenda, which I must admit I hadn’t heard of. beeswax itself has a rather conventional look about it.

But it might just look conventional because it’s patterned after an application that had its last stable release in 1992. Anything established that far back is probably the standard for everything since.

I like the idea though. Rather than confining yourself to particular types of information, you have a blank slate in the way you organize and categories your tasks or tables. It appears very flexible, the structure is easy to pick up and learn, and for what I have seen it’s quick and speedy, like a console application should be.

I made a lot of qualifications in that last paragraph though, because it’s likewise obvious that beeswax is a work in progress. A lot of the core functions, like categorizing and demoting and promoting items, didn’t work for me. Even the “q” key, which is supposed to quit the program, didn’t work.

I tried it in both Arch and Crux, and had the same halfway-functional results. I could add and edit items and arrange them vertically, but beyond that, beeswax didn’t really seem ready for prime-time.

It has the potential though. The last update to the home page was around a year ago, so perhaps that potential has already fizzled. And coupled with the fact that the last version of the original Lotus Agenda is available for free, it might be that waiting for beeswax to mature is an unattractive option, compared to perhaps running the original thing in an emulator.

After looking at beeswax though, I found a link for TreeLine, which is much the opposite of beeswax, though no less interesting.

TreeLine has a very polished and complete look about it, with lots of cute buttons and smiley faces in the right places. I’ll admit I don’t cross paths with QT applications very often — not by choice but by circumstance really. So this was rather fun to try.

Where beeswax (and Agenda) espouse a free-form approach, TreeLine requires you to pick a style at the outset. Your list and the items on it are labeled, structured and displayed according to that style. That might sound confining, but there are plenty of templates to pick from, and they are all something you are probably aiming at anyway (like a to-do list, or a contact list).

After that, it becomes a simple matter to start entering information into the tree, arranging it however is appropriate. Right-click for full action menus, or use keystrokes to speed things up. To-do lists or checklists have special options in the information panels, which allow you to tick off or prioritize, depending.

I like TreeLine for having a polished interface and a structured feel to it, but neither it nor beeswax (or Agenda, to be honest) is likely to dethrone hnb for me any time soon. TreeLine is clever and attractive, but seems unnecessarily mouse-driven, or overcomplicated for things like checklists. And like I said, beeswax doesn’t really feel like it’s finished.

So hnb by comparison is just too fast and easy. Right arrow makes a new branch. Start typing and a new item is added. You can embed checklists in standard hierarchies. Copy and paste throughout the tree. Export into several different formats, including HTML.

Maybe I’m biased, but hnb is still the champ for me. Try all three though, and take your pick. This is all about choice.

I, for one, am glad

That’s right, you heard me: I’m glad. I’m glad someone put together a subversive script, packaged it as a deb file, and released it on gnome-look.org. Cheers, I say.

Sure, it’s unfortunate that some Ubuntu users installed it thinking it was a screensaver, and then discovered it was grabbing something bad from some faraway site, and implanting it in their system. And yes, it’s completely unethical and therefore a Very Bad Thing to do that, but to be honest, we need to get past the “I use Linux, I am therefore bulletproof” mentality.

I’m not calling anyone dumb. I merely want to make a point. I’m glad because every list of reasons to use Linux includes that “no viruses, no malware” clause. But truth be told, most Windows systems that are properly maintained and carefully managed can go quite some time making the same claim.

And part of “carefully managed” is the idea that you don’t arbitrarily install software from untrusted sources or repositories, no matter what OS you run. I can remember a few years ago when someone set up an Ubuntu repository that included an update to the wallpaper for the standard Gnome desktop — and the image that was installed was a giant warning not to install software from unreliable repositories. No harm done, and the lesson was learned.

My point is that somebody still has to press the buttons before the machine becomes a threat to itself. Let’s face it, the real danger to a computer system isn’t the hardware and usually isn’t the software. It’s the human on the other side of the screen who poses a real threat. Left alone with no interference and a computer — any computer, regardless of operating system — will likely continue to idle for decades, or until its components finally stop working or someone accidentally unplugs the thing.

But insert a human into the equation, and suddenly all bets are off. Security be damned, the fact of the matter is that you, and I, are the weakest link.

So let’s move past the idea that a Linux system is able to walk on water, or that you and I are both somehow impervious to human fallacy because we chose a superior operating system. As long as we sit behind at the keyboard, the risk remains that one of us, you or I, will delude ourselves into thinking the machine is unsinkable, and suddenly prove ourselves wrong.

And the day someone finally puts together a virus with some real teeth in it, and dumps it on the Linux public? Well, that will be a happy day too. But for different reasons.

A fool not to

It has been a good experience, watching a family member adopt Ubuntu. I had forgotten a lot of the excitement and intrigue that comes with discovering everything there is and how things work.

Or maybe it’s just been so long since I adopted it myself that I had taken for granted the emotional rush that accompanies it. I’m getting e-mails now saying things like, “How could I have wasted so much time?” or “Why couldn’t see all this before?” or “I was a fool not to try this years ago.”

It’s also good, because hearing (or reading) those reactions is fueling my own sense of indignation again. Only a month ago I had reached a point where I really didn’t care whose side you were on, as long as you were content with using your computer.

But coaching someone through their own transition has exposed me to all the vitriol, and rekindled my own amazement. How is it possible to dump a broken, incomplete product on the public, at such a huge individual cost? Why not share the code at the lowest level, so everyone can use the software as they need? Why force people to use — or worse, to buy — your product, rather than give them a choice? And how is it, for decades, that a faulty, clunky, bland and inferior operating system has been the de facto industry standard?

So perhaps I’m back in the fight. Maybe now I can borrow some of the adrenaline I see in my relative, and elsewhere on the Internet, and restart my own crusade against Bug No. 1. I’d be a fool not to.

Going over covered ground

I spent most of yesterday playing damage control, trying to trim back on the dead images which now pepper my site, thanks to a image hosting service that prefers to dump ads in here, instead of the pictures they agreed to provide. I should be bitter, but most of those were at least a year old, and I ask too much when so many options are available.

The only good side of weeding out pages and pages of someone else’s ads … is that I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of the material that I posted as far back as two years ago, and reviewing some of the ideas and reviews I posted. I’ve already made a few notes of things that I want to try again, or build again, or do again. And it has helped me remember the things I’ve covered and discussed already, and hopefully run less risk of repeating myself.

Which is sometimes a possibility. I fawned over Tiny Core Linux once already, and I’d love to do it again because recent versions are even more powerful than the ones I first discussed. And its sister project, Micro Core, is likewise impressive, compressing a working, booting console system into a package that is only a bewildering 6Mb in size.

And Slitaz, which continues to embarrass me by working perfectly (albeit a little slowly) as a full graphical desktop on my 100Mhz laptop … and setting up in a mere splinter of the time it takes to install a full-blown customized Crux system. And working better in the process … sometimes.

And to be honest, although I don’t use Ubuntu on a daily basis, I am starting to wonder if it’s worth revisiting some of my roots and working with minimal systems at the outset, and building up into a graphical system again. A lot has changed in the past year or year and a half, and it is probably worth trying out some old tools and seeing how they’ve improved. Even the screenshots I see in the nearly-bulletproof “post your conky screenshot thread” are showing some mind-blowing eye candy from an application that I never considered more than a floating system profile.

This doesn’t mean I’ll be putting Ubuntu on my Pentium, but it does mean that there are plenty of machines around here that may see new desktop or screen arrangement before the new year. And hopefully, a lot less outdated posts with ads plastered on them.

stali: What’s the next step, I wonder?

I have been a fan of the Suckless team for quite some time, not in the least because of fantastic software like dmenu or dwm, but just because their philosophy seems to mesh — sorta-kinda, more or less, in a roundabout way — with mine. Granted, they are far more talented and have a better grasp on why things work, but if I extrapolate the ideas they describe into a larger, user-oriented sense, I agree in principle.

So I have been watching (if one can “watch” a Web page) the sta.li home page to see how stali works out; the idea of starting from an exceptionally svelte chrooted environment and building up is something I would enjoy trying. And the idea of statically linked software is strangely interesting.

As it is now though, I can download the compressed file system, chroot into it, but to be honest, where I go after that is a little of a mystery. If I have a host system running and I have a network connection, it seems like the next step would be to build a kernel or install bash, or perhaps something like that.

This is what I am used to when installing Crux, where a network connection carries over into the chrooted environment, and from there you build a kernel or software or update the system or etc., etc. But with stali, my network doesn’t seem to respond, I am not sure if I should be building into the same “i686″ file image, or if that should be somehow scribbled onto the drive in a different way. Call me timid — or perhaps just myopic — but the next step isn’t quite clear.

I’ll have to see if I can find someone else’s experience with stali, and try to duplicate it. Either way, this is one of those little projects that tends to be very interesting at first, then challenging, then addictive, and then I’m a sworn patriot waving a new flag. I am so predictable that way.

A new mini keyboard

It’s rare that I buy “new” things, because they’re a drudge on the planet and there are usually more than enough leftover secondhand things to stem any urge I might have for shrink-wrapped goods.

But I picked up a new mini keyboard yesterday, at the rough cost of US$30 at a brand-name electronics shop, mostly because it fit the physical dimensions I wanted, and also because, as some people have noted, having an external keyboard is a useful troubleshooting tool.

The context (or should I say reason? or rationale?) was the Inspiron 600m, which I have trundled out of the closet and set up on the desk next to the Thinkpad, while it continues in its role as torrent slave and network storage point. I have no real aspirations for the machine, mostly because it has a long history of hardware errors and one or two current problems that I have no desire to monkey with.

One of those is a row of faulty keys — an issue I circumvent with a little ssh and a whole lot of patience. Lately though, it’s been clear that I would gain a little more use of the machine if I were to actually break down and buy a proper external keyboard.

When I finally buckled, I made one stipulation: Any keyboard I bought would have to sit neatly on the palmrest, so as to not take up any more desktop space. One of the reasons I don’t deal in desktops (aside from shunting them off to new owners) is because they are large and bulky, and that offends my sense of minimalism.

So I measured the palmrest and took those dimensions to the recycling shop, and dug around in a junk bin for a while. The smallest one there would have hung over the edge by about 4 centimeters, and looked like it had been used to wash a dog. So rather than go the secondhand route, I checked a big-name electronics shop in my area, and found this:

That’s a Sanwa SKB-SL10BK, an 83-key Japanese keyboard with USB (and PS/2 overplug) connection, measuring a whopping 225mm x 99mm x 23.5mm. (That’s about 8.9in x 3.9in x 0.9in, for those who need that measuring system.) As you can see, it’s no more obtrusive than an A4-size business envelope, and best of all, doesn’t require extra desk space for a machine that’s already something of a curmudgeon.

As far as typing goes, it’s a bit cramped, but I’m not going to be writing any epic poetry on this thing, so I have no complaints about that. Keys feel good, and I doubt the size makes it any more unusable than the netbooks I saw on sale in the same shop.

And this might be dumb, but now I have the opportunity to use a Japanese keyboard on a machine that only has a US keymap. Bonus.

I still use ssh to manhandle the machine, just because it’s easier to swap terminal windows with a keypress than it is to wriggle around in my chair and bring myself to bear on a separate screen, hunt down the mouse, open a terminal emulator and type in the same command. I am still a slave to convenience.

But this makes things a little easier, if I need to do something directly and quickly. That’s not always, but it is sometimes.

nginx makes it easy

I thought for a bit the other day and realized that while I had nfs access between machines, and I had ssh control of one over the other, there was nothing akin to http access between the two. And while it’s rather like setting up a model train set — I can see the fun in it, but it doesn’t really interest me so the novelty wears off quickly — I poked around and set up nginx on an Arch machine.

My previous experiences with setting up Web servers were limited almost exclusively to Ubuntu-driven machines with Apache and so forth, which I only remember as taking quite a while to set up, and being quite educational in the process. In that sense I’m glad I didn’t start with nginx.

Because it barely took a second before the entire business was up and running … so I would have missed out on all that delightful educational value. I installed the nginx package, started the service, created a rudimentary index page, and bang, the entire experience was over. I typed in the address on a second machine, and the page sprung into view like it had been injected into browser with a nail gun.

I know next to nothing about Web servers and php and MySQL and so forth, and I know that installing nginx by itself is hardly more than a baby step toward a full-blown setup, but I was taken aback that it was so easy. I don’t remember what all goes into a LAMP server, but I seem to remember quite a lot more configuration than that.

All that being said it’s hardly my place to make any kind of endorsement, but I can tell you that if I ever have to work with http access in the future, I’m going to probably start with nginx and build on to that. Quick and painless sounds like a good place to start from.

A note of improvement for ath5k

I like it when I can report something improving, as opposed to just making notes about things that don’t work.

And even better this time, it’s a rather cranky piece of hardware that I wanted very badly to be able to use about six months ago, but was having next to no luck — the sassy Corega wireless card that was spewing forth “noise floor calibration errors” at every turn.

I never really did find out what the error was, or if it was something I was doing, but I can say that since I moved up with kernels — I’m running 2.6.31.5 at the moment — the errors and dropped connections and spooling messages have all disappeared without sending a postcard.

And good riddance. “Annoying” would be an understatement, given that I couldn’t figure out what to do to shut it up. I do remember tracking down a developer’s note about those messages, that they were somehow enabled or triggered at the code level and ought to be turned off. But I did nothing (that I am aware of) other than install newer kernels, and I haven’t seen a complaint from it in the week I’ve been testing it, so probably somebody else, somewhere on the planet, commented out the code that was making it chatter at me.

Yes, I plugged it in sometime a week ago, when I wanted to use the WPC11 card as a crutch for installing the Broadcom-based wireless in the 600m. So basically, sometime while I was playing musical chairs with my spare networking connections, the Atheros 5K-based card suddenly started behaving itself.

And since it sat quiet and polite for a week without giving me any issue, I’m content to call it “improved.” Of course, now that I’ve typed those words, it will probably start hiccupping again. That’s how these things work, you know.