neorants » geekery

An update on dual monitors

Neo — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:05:36 +0000

So, it almost pains me to say it, but I’m actually getting used to them, now that I’ve made some space on my desk to shift their position a bit. So long as one monitor is directly in front of me instead of the gap between the two screens, I can cope, and am growing to appreciate the extra space. However, I still miss the extra height, and would have much preferred two 24″ monitors to avoid going below 1200px vertical resolution.

In any case, it’s certainly not the end of the world, and it’s pretty nifty to fire up a full-screen Ubuntu VM in VirtualBox on the second monitor, to work with a real OS for any serious development.

New Setup at Work

Neo — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:14:39 +0000

So, my employer recently gave me a new laptop, which is great. They talked about getting us “a couple of monitors” to hook up, as well. At the time, I mentioned that I would much prefer one large widescreen to two monitors. A couple weeks went by, no new monitors, I was happily working away in my 20″, 1600×1200 world. Until today. Below, see my new setup. Now I have two 1680×1050 desktops instead. I feel like some poor lab rat in an experiment where they’re trying to induce a split personality or something. The multiple desktop thing always has annoyed me. I never grew fond of virtual desktops in *nix, either. I just don’t work that way. I’ve promised myself to give it a few days to see if I can adjust, but so far, it’s not looking good. As you can see in the photo, I’m still gravitating toward one display.

And yes, before anyone says anything, I know that’s insane.

New Work Setup

[Update: I'm coping.]

An amusing bug report

Neo — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:57:00 +0000

So I’m in the process of installing software on the new notebook my employer just provided me, and as I’m installing Ruby, I’m browsing the bug tracker for the one-click installer for Windows. I’m glad I did, because I came across this gem of a bug report, captured here for posterity.

More than one click.

LOL @ Oracle

Neo — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:29:30 +0000

This… is… ENTERPRISE-CLASS!

Oracle.com as of 8:28 AM 10/15/08

Air Sharing

Neo — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:10:30 +0000

If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user, you should really get Air Sharing while it’s still free. I just happened to stumble upon it at the top of the “Free Apps” listing on the App Store, and I see why it was at the top now. It’s this app that lets you set up a shared folder on your iPhone or iPod touch, which you can access from a Mac, PC, or Linux box, or via the web. It lets you view the files on your device (with syntax highlighting for code!), or you can of course use it as a much slicker version of a USB key drive.

A few screenshots, so you can see what I mean:

Folder Listing

Viewing Source Code

Web View

In Explorer

Very cool.

Yeah, this’ll end well.

Neo — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:31:16 +0000

This article about the new Sidetaker web site makes me wonder what kind of couple would actually trust the collective “intelligence” of the Internet to solve their relationship issues.

IM of the Day

Neo — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:50:48 +0000

With the infamous joni51, whose computer is acting up:

joni51: can u try to fix this thing?????
Neo: what, like come over and putz around on it?
joni51: it ust doesn’t work
joni51: yea and the j keeps missing
Neo: lol

The Death of MySpace

Neo — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:10:45 +0000

This article was written almost 2 years ago, and was pretty darn prophetic, if you ask me (which you didn’t). Sums up a lot of the problems I always had with MySpace, and why I can actually tolerate Facebook.

Insane Facial Animation Tech

Neo — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:18:36 +0000

Image Metrics has some pretty amazing facial animation tech on their hands. There’s another demo at the link. In case it’s not clear, the face on the woman in the video isn’t real, until they remove the overlay at 1:30.

Site update

Neo — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:38:24 +0000

So I got tired of the old layout, wanted something cleaner and… bluer. Switched from post categories to tags, as well, and implemented Gravatar support for comments. If you don’t have a gravatar account, check them out. A lot of blogs support them, they let you attach a little avatar like you might see on a web discussion forum to your e-mail address, and your comments at any blogs which support them will have the avatar attached. Pretty neat.