Arnoldo's Blog

wireless connection for my precious

admin — Mon, 19 May 2008 05:52:33 +0000

OK so now I have 8.04 (I decided to stick with xmonad) and my precious is running pretty well. There is a problem with the policy kit and some buttons being unlocked, so I had to find a different software for wireless management. It is called:

wlassistant

What a precious piece of software.

Wait a minute!

admin — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:50:13 +0000

You can use a toolbar in Xmonad, pretty much like the tool found in dwm…

I was busy configuring other things and I have been using Xmonad without a toolbar, no clock, no time, just me and the computer. I feel free! I realized that my eyes try to see the dwm toolbar, looking for windows open in the workspaces. That is a waste of energy, as that information should be in my mind.

I also changed dmenu so that it now appears in the middle of the string, you can do that with:

, ((modMask, xK_p ), spawn “exe=`dmenu_path | dmenu -p ‘>’ -i -y 450 -fn ‘-*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-20-*-*-*-*-*-*-*’ ` && eval \”exec $exe\”")

the number following -y should be the height of your screen divided by 2.

I’ve been thinking:

If I have X layout with lots of windows, I want to access each window directly, by number (just like ion).

Tags in Dwm and Xmonad are a way of achieving this, by trying to keep the least amount of windows, you can jump directly to them by workspace. In laptops or small displays this is the only way to go.

The conclusion is that I don’t need all the fancy layouts of Xmonad because anyway I won’t use them. In emacs is the same, I rarely have more than 2 windows.

Configuring xmonad

admin — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:38:16 +0000

Ok so I spent a while configuring Xmonad. As someone else said, it is like a framework for building your own keyboard based window manager. I really like how you can apply transformations to layouts, for example:

myLayout = noBorders Grid

Here I am applying the noBorders transform that will remove window borders on the Grid layout.

It is powerful and exciting, but configuring packages for haskell is hard and contrary to what is written in the website, building Xmonad from source requires downloading lots of dependencies. They are working on an automatic installer a la CPAN (for perl) but it is not ready yet. I tried to install it, and it asked lots of dependencies!

The cool thing is that it provides layouts per workspace and LOTS of customizations. But I can’t use it easily in ubuntu < 8.04 …

つまり, en resumen,

General, cool but very hard to port! I will check awesome and then decide if I will stay with it or DWM…

As soon as the Haskell guys polish their CPAN, Xmonad will be very easy to install.

My precious….

admin — Sun, 04 May 2008 14:41:31 +0000

I am writing from my new precious, a thinkpad T61. The keyboard is perfect and the processor speed is pretty good. I just have to reload my settings and run my customization scripts for ubuntu so that I can have the environment I always use!

Here it is:

my… own…

it’s mine…

I have a game for you

admin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:32:02 +0000

1) Look at this picture:

2) Guess when it was built and where.

3) Click here to see the answer.

OB on 8

admin — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:05:07 +0000

I am running OB on a 8GB linux box! This is the first time in my life my programs run with more than 4GB. Sensei came with a technician, he took the dimms from his suitcase and put them in the server. He didn’t even check them. Yay!

Hopefully they will behave.

City Office Housing & Other things.

admin — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:43:06 +0000

Today we had a meeting with Muroya-san, the person from city office that is in charge of our housing. We have to pay about $30 per month! As I am sharing the house with Gilberto, I only have to pay $15. Gilberto was elected president of the International student’s association.

Dreamhost is back

admin — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:45:44 +0000

Now the file server seems to be fine and Dreamhost is running fast. I hope it won’t happen again!

I am looking for some test data and a distance function to test the data. I would like to match vectors but I can’t find a decent data set. I might need to synthesize the data.

心

admin — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:18:16 +0000

女の人の心は複雑。本当に。
自分の心も
どんどん分かるようになりたい。

Executing OBSearch with TED

admin — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 05:43:39 +0000

In the next few days, I am going to run OBSearch with the tree edit distance function defined by Tai in the 70s. The fastest algorithm available is O(n^3). In sequential mode last time I ran it, it took 3 days to answer 1000 queries. With the new pivot selection strategies I added, I am hoping to reduce considerably this time. I will post the results when I complete the tests.