EyeDeal's Blog

The day has finally come. I've put up the 1.0 release of my very own, lovingly hand-made, spanking new blog. It doesn't do much of the stuff this one does, and it certainly hasn't got the ammount of posts this blog has, but that's my new home, and a work in progress. Keep an eye out for new posts there.

This is my very last post here. I'll keep this one up for as long as the server is paid for (it will expire soonish, though). I won't try to move the posts to the new blog. It's a fresh start, and I think I'd like to let this thing die. I'll rewrite some of the older articles that I find useful, though.

In most online resources on CSS, you see a recurring theme: "Don't bloat your HTML with DIVs." For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept (please don't tell me you're still using tables!), DIVs are generic block elements which can be used to create hooks for styling your HTML document. So what is wrong with DIVs?

Well, I haven't voted for the last three or four years, I think. Maybe even longer. There have been quite a few elections lately, but I just don't believe in democratic processes. It's not just my country. It is failing everywhere.

I've already talked about Mcabber in Command Line for Dummies a few days ago. Now one thing that is different in Mcabber from most GUI software is the lack of an obvious feature, and that is audio notification. GUI jabber clients will usually have such a feature, but being a console app, Mcabber offers a far more powerful facility for doing practically any type of notification, and much, much more. Actually, it is so powerful it's ridiculous.

I'll interrupt my usually ideology-free programme, and devote some of my time to this section again. Recently, there was some major flamage between Béranger and the Arch Linux community. The post that started it is on Beranger's blog, then discussed on Arch BBS. It was regarding Arch's compliance with GPL.

Okay, so what's the deal? Is that yet another FUD, or is it for real? Yes, it is for real, and yes, it's stupid. I will explain both below.

Okay, so last time I talked a bit about what some of my close friends think about the Command Line Interface (CLI). This time, I'll try to introduce some of you Linux newbies to the art of CLI.

Until recently, I thought it was uderstandable that people are afraid of CLI, and that GUI apps were easier for most average computer users. But now I've learned a few things about some (minority of) computer users that made me change my mind.

I'm not one of those people who use organizers extensively, but I do appreciate a quick and dirty entry into a calendar. The easier it is for me to make an entry, the more effective it is. Since I'm also mostly using the "black screen" called terminal, I also wanted an app (or a collection thereof) that would allow me to do so.

While I was thinking of writing a simple Python script, I've discovered that someone's already done the dirty work for me. Someone, who obviously thinks like me.

Have you ever thought how the only time you ever use your keyboard is when you use Firefox, and how it would be nice to have a browser that could both display graphics AND be used only with keyboard? Well, you could simply use and lots of shortcuts, and Firefox will do just that. But where's the fun in that?

Vimperator, Firefox the way I like it: Vimperator is a surprisingly faithful Vim-like interface on top of Firefox. Best of two worlds!

I've used a total of four CHM viewers up to now. Although I've seen people who read it by first converting it into plain HTML or even PDF, I have one very important reason why I prefer to see a vanilla CHM. Indexes and searches. The CHM format, albeit Microsoft's child, is really a great format for reading docs. It has everything you need to quickly search through a doc file and find what you need.

Chmsee, my CHM viewer of choice: Chmesee is one of the more pleasant CHM viewers under Linux.