Archive for February, 2005

Why I’m spending more time in Linux and less in Windows XP

Thursday, February 17th, 2005
  • 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)

Posted in linux, windows | 2 Comments »

Parody, Maps, & Media

Tuesday, February 8th, 2005

If 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:

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.

Posted in general | 2 Comments »