- The ProMepis Linux distribution automatically installs a hardware accelerated OpenGL driver on my laptop
- While the GUI is slower and less polished, I can tweak it to my heart’s content.
- While Firefox is slower, it’s getting faster, and via the magic of Debian packages it’s automagically upgraded to the latest version on a regular basis (along with the rest of the software on my system). For example the HTML rendering component in my current Firefox browser is from February 10th, a mere 7 days ago.
- The following software has become crucial to my project work: Objective Caml, Coin3D, Cairo, LablGL, LablGTK2 (with native code & GtkGLArea support), and MPICH
Each can be installed on a Debian Linux system like ProMepis with one line (“apt-get install [packagename]“). Compare that to how long it would take to get them all installed under Windows XP (hint: I’ve spent many hours trying to get just lablgtk2 working right under either Visual Studio or MingW, to no avail)
Archive for February, 2005
Why I’m spending more time in Linux and less in Windows XP
Thursday, February 17th, 2005Parody, Maps, & Media
Tuesday, February 8th, 2005If you read Paul Graham’s Essays, check out a parody of his writings called Taste For The Web. It’s done so well that it actually took me until halfway through the article to realize it was a parody.
The parody led me to Google Maps, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s rough around the edges, but really nice. Here’s what comes up if you search for all of my remote office locations near my apartment with the query: “starbucks near paulina and chicago, chicago”. Try zooming in and panning around — it’s hands down the nicest interface I’ve seen for maps on the web.
A few quality pieces of media I’ve encountered lately:
- Richard Feynman’s Nova Interview. If you have any interest in science you owe it to yourself to watch this.
- PBS’s Evolution Series
- Dancing Naked In The Mind Field by Kary Mullis
And speaking of science, I’d been tempted to subscribe to New Scientist for years but was put off by the subscription price. I finally went ahead and got a subscription for myself for Christmas and am so happy I did. I’ve never looked forward to having a magazine arrive every week before, but I look forward every week to this one.