The Internet Hammer Enterprise

Like, entirely. You can't see 'em and you can't make 'em. The site got devoured by comment spam because I got lazy. I'll fix it eventually. Maybe.

Viewing comments is reenabled. Posting new comments is still disabled, and that is not likely to change any time soon.

Okay, a couple weeks have gone by, what to talk about, what to talk about...

Work in the lab's busy as usual as we try to work our way through some new algorithms. Whiteboards full of diagrams and equations, and pictures of them taken digitally and pondered over for days later. Fun stuff. I wish I got to do this all the time.

On the 3rd I went with JoJo and Andy to see Beatallica, who of course rocked. I threw up the horns. For those not familiar with the band, they are basically The Beatles/Metallica satire. They play a definite metal style, but the lyrics borrow from an equal mix of Metallica and The Beatles, and the riffs and melody alternate between Metallica-heavy and Beatles-heavy. Some of the songs blend together amazingly well.

After the concert, I went to check out their website and download some tunes (due to various copyright messes, they can't release albums for profit) and noticed their downloads were MP3 and FLAC torrents. Cool, they know what they're doing there... and then I noticed the songs are licensed under a Creative Commons license. And they link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As JoJo'd said earlier that day on an unrelated note, it's amazing when dissimilar interests combine unexpectedly. So if you're not turned off to the idea, and don't mind music that's a bit tongue-in-cheek, check them out.

In KDE land, Kamefu became Gamefu. I keep on promising my friends a real live demo, but never remember to rebuild Qt with SQL support on the box I use when roaming.

Also, I'm preparing my MacBook for native KDE4 building. I have negative free time by this point in my summer, but I want to get some work done on that front (and in any event, I need to get back to my KDE4 code). Looks like it's time to start idling in another IRC channel! :)

So that's about it for the past two weeks, aside from that night I broke my brain...

For all you Exalted players out there, including of course my friends, I found a nice little Java program today called Anathema. It is a character and series manager, including a full Charm tree for reference, and export to PDF support in order to create nice looking character sheets with your details already filled in. I like the normal character sheet I found over the weekend a bit more, but the sheets generated by Anathema are pretty good too, and are inspired by the sheets I favor. So I'm pretty pleased as I hope we get the Exalted game going again soon.

I didn't try the series manager at all, but one nice feature in the character manager is how it does all the maths for you. It filled in my Willpower dots and Essence ratings, made sure that I'd used all my bonus points properly, and did other similar conveniences. I'd post the PDF generated, but I'm still filling in a couple details, and then I have to convert the character to experienced (so I may spend my experience points) and hand it in (finally). It'd be cool if the program let you enter equipment too, but it's still very impressive.

And, it's open source. :)

As I said I'd do, I decided to start writing down the things I've noticed in OS X that I think might be nice to see in KDE. Note that this is definitely merely personal preference territory. I just want to demonstrate my thoughts on the matter, nothing else.

And, as such, I am avoiding the phrase "needs", as "KDE needs this feature". For some reason, it drives me up the wall when people say "Open Source Project X needs foo", unless foo is terribly obvious (such as "to not crash every time I open it"). Right up a wall. So this is not what KDE needs. It's just one potential way to do things.

I also don't want to directly compare the two; this is not "KDE does A and OS X does B, this is why A is wrong." I am just merely taking a look at B. Of course, half the reason I'm talking about B is because B isn't in KDE, but I don't mean to criticize anyone's favorite code or call them out into the open and challenge them to implement B. This is just discussion, which I hope to see some of. :)

So, with that out of the way, it's time to get on with the festivities. (Disclaimer for the rest of this article: I am not an "interface guy" and do not profess to be.)

The OS X Menu Bar as a System Tray

Here we see the right part of the menu bar at the top of the screen. The right hand side of the bar, since it's the length of the entire monitor -- not the window it belongs to, is used as a system tray of sorts. The entries are mostly informative and not that special: temperature, battery charge, the current time, etc. These are the kinds of things one would expect to have in their system tray area, but that's not the point.

One important part in this example is the width of these elements. The battery entry, for example, is much wider than the others, to display both the icon and (optionally) the time remaining, as text. So, the entry is variable-width in that regard, and also dynamically, as sometimes OS X will need to calculate the remaining time, which is indicated by "(Calculating)", and of course that is longer text.

I happen to like this.

This is an introductory post for all those at Planet KDE, which has started aggregating me (hooray, thanks clee!). For those old readers who already know who I am, my likes, dislikes, personal fears, SSN, etc., you may skip this post. And if you know my SSN, could you email me? We need to talk...

Anywho, I'm Brian S. Stephan (bssteph on freenode and just about everywhere else). I'm a software engineering graduate student currently studying and living in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I've only been using Linux for about four years, and KDE for about three, although I broke my computing teeth on an Apple IIe. I have four computers: an AMD64 X2 desktop with more storage RAIDed than I'll ever need, two Mini-ITX boxes (one acting as a server, another is a MythTV box), and a recently-acquired MacBook.

On the KDE side of things, I answered a call from Benjamin Meyer to maintain a small bit of KDE for KDE4, the Privacy applet-turned-app which I named Sweeper. It still needs some love; I've been slacking (more on that later, I'm sure). Also, I recently started contributing to Michaël Larouche's Kamefu, which has been fun. That's it, so far, but somewhere in my ever-growing list of projects, I plan to dabble elsewhere in the source...

Although I should definitely worry about my existing stuff first. I need to finish what I intended to do for Sweeper (my KDE4 build is also woefully out of date), and I need to sneak away time for Kamefu. All this between laboratory work over summer and my last semester in my SE graduate program before moving on to other pastures. And driving four hours on the weekends to go home and roll icosahedrons doesn't help my time much...

So I uninstalled Gentoo. Too much work for something I wouldn't boot into anyway because of OS X. Between work at the lab and gaming on the weekends, I'm putting my MacBook in sleep three, four times a day, and roaming a couple wireless networks, and as I'd said, OS X's sleep capabilities are so amazingly good that they can't be avoided.

Real point of this post, though, is to aggregate a couple images:

I didn't mention it a week and a half ago, but I ordered a MacBook then. I also didn't mention that it showed up on Monday, but it did. And I've been playing with it pretty steadily since then.

There's been a lot of jesting about me making a total 180 and becoming a full-out Apple fanboy and all of that. Well, if this level of enjoyment is wrong, then baby, I don't want to be right. Or something.

It's not that I'm selling my soul to Apple or anything, but OS X has grown on me in an impressive way the past couple days. Maybe it's the slickness of new hardware, or maybe it's being able to finally use the OS in a private setting (one where I can poke all the weird configuration bits and dig deep into the filesystem without feeling like I need to stop looking like a goon), but it's beginning to feel a bit like home. And that's kind of weird.

And it feeling weird is a bit weird too, come to think of it. Because, really, OS X is just a different (and maybe more complete) version of what I already love in my other machines - a combination of a UNIX-like foundation and a nice GUI desktop environment. Linux and KDE, OS X. It's the same idea. So maybe this irrational love of the OS isn't so irrational after all.

So after all these years, I've finally done it. I've signed up at an online music store.

And no, before you go thinking this has something to do with my last entry, it's not iTunes. I will never be an iTunes Store customer.

eMusic, however, has been good to me so far. High quality MP3s (~192 kbps VBR) without any DRM restrictions, meaning once the song's been downloaded, the file's mine to do what I please with. And I can download it as many times an necessary from eMusic without paying with my hide.

So yeah. I'm buying music online and I'm pleased. The one thing that irks me is that it's subscription based, which I'm pretty bad at remembering to do something with, so I'm hoping a list of interesting things and maybe-hopefully remembering to look at it once a month will work until I've gotten what's interesting. Independent labels only on the site (the big labels being DRM patsies), but nevertheless, there's an interesting collection of popular artists from a decade ago, some great stuff now (Vienna Teng, for example), and so on and so forth. I've got a couple albums queued up, and some other artists to try a couple tracks from before deciding if I want to purchase the entire album. Not too shabby.

Oh. And I still haven't bought the Macbook yet (due to paperwork). Soon, though. Very soon...

Edit: Oh. And if you've ever said "WTF is bssteph listening to right now!?" you can visit my page on last.fm. Most of the time the weekly chart is monopolized by a couple people.

P.S. You might notice I like Joe Hisaishi.

Well, it's happened. I'm thinking of buying a Mac. Yeah. Like from Apple. I'll give you a second to verify that this is a bssteph post.

I know, I'm scared too.

It's been an uh, interesting day, and only those that know of my normal disdain for certain specific elements of OS X can comprehend the strange daze I've been in. Everything seemed abstract. Colors ebbed and flowed into a maddening array of sensory overload. Flowers cursed my name and the pavement -- the blasted pavement, it smelt of elderberries.

Apple released a new line of MacBooks today, to compliment the MacBook Pros. Actually, to practically beat them, if you're not interested in a snazzy video card. And while I've never been terribly hot and bothered over OS X's Aqua, the rest of the Unix-like operating system is good in my book, but more critically, the price is right. I spent a couple hours trying to put together a similar notebook at the evil juggernauts of the consumer PC world -- Dell and HP -- and came up unimpressed. Apple won a pricing battle? Something cannot be right.

So have I turned fanboy? Hardly. I haven't even bought the Mac yet, but that is imminent, barring some kind of intervention or crisis of finances. But, one of the first things I'll try to do will be figuring out this "Boot Camp" doodad and see how far I can get in throwing down a Linux install -- Gentoo, natch -- to please me. Because the hardware's right. Hardware. Not software. I swear it.