I've spent my last day of holidays taking advantage of having the time, disk space, memory and CPU power to install a Gnome desktop and configure it so that it looks decent. The result so far is not that bad:
Gdesklets are pretty good when it comes to eye candy, as you can see. Definitely, it's been a long path since i tried Gnome 0.30 some years ago! Not that i will stick to it for long, but it's fun to play a little and see what's in stock out there.
A coworker has just discovered my other occupation ;-)
Looks like the Emacs development team is thinking about a new icon for our beloved operating sys... er, editor. You can see some suggestions here... frankly, i hope someone comes up with a better one, or, at least that they choose my current favourite.
After finishing my trip through all my window managers of choice (i'm sticking to pekwm by now, but you know me...), i've tidied up my config files for the new laptop and put them under configuration management. My new configs archive contains categories for emacs, ion3, pekwm, sawfish, bash, and generic X11 config files. As i love to tweak my setups, expect frequent updates to some of them!. Also, i'll eventually add a category for system-level configuration (xorg.conf and the like).
I hope you'll find something useful in there.
As you probably know, this year we celebrate the 100th aniversary of Einstein's discovery of the Special Theory of Relativity. In fact, 2005 has been endorsed by the UN as the World Year of Physics. Now, Nova has created an awesome site with all you ever wanted to know about the world's most famous equation, E = mc^2. Interviews, quotes, life and miracles, layman explanation and even podcasts are waiting you there. Don't be afraid: you don't need to be an expert!
And oh, if you happen to like "@home" thingies, bring physics to your desktop and help detecting gravitiational waves with Einstein@home.
My mother told me not to rejoice with other people's trouble, but i couldn't help laughing out low while reading about Disneyland's problems with the latest w2000 worms.
Most of us weren't there, but together with the Beatles and the New Age, computers were making their appearance: some Boing Boing readers have done a little bit of archeology and recovered these computer photos from the '60s.
Of course i don't have time (i'm subscribed to too many mailing lists and newsgroups already), and of course i won't be able to follow up it, but i just couldn't resist: i've joined the new SICM reading group. SICM (which probably is read, by analogy with SICP, "seek-me") stands for Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, and amazing book by Sussman and Wisdom that explores classical mechanics from a computational point of view using Scheme. So you got it: two of passions in one, i couldn't resist!
Today (if you're in the other side of the Atlantic, that is) is Debian's twelfth birthday. On August 16th, 1993 an Murdock announced a new type of distribution and listed the goals he wanted to achieve.
Debian has always been my GNU/Linux distribution of choice, since the bo and hamm days, some nine years ago.
As a youngling, i devoted some time to playing chess. I even enrolled a club, played tournaments, studied books... that kind of things. Those were the times of the famous Karpov vs. Kasparov duels.
Andre Bjerke was a Norwegian poet which showed more constancy than myself and got hooked on chess for life after saying this problem, known as the Saavedra's study:
White moves and wins. Try to solve it, it's beautiful. Afterwards, you can check your solution, or see what other people say about it.
