Mile high : Mile deep menus

MACOS GUI sucks.

MAC fans think it looks nice, and thats a nice opinion but it doesn’t compare to windows for usability.

The only good thing I have heard said about the MAC GUI is the famed Mile High Menu. And thats a good thing if you don’t plan on learning to use a mouse well.

Does anybody seriously claim that all these MAC users can’t position a mouse in 16 pixels vertically but can position it in 16 pixels horizontally? How do they ever manage to click on buttons, or hyperlinks? How do they manage to drag their clipart about?

When you have one mile high menu, you gain something tiny for those who can’t use a mouse. What do you lose? You lose the mile-deep menu.

With GNOME or windows I can see the menu bars multiple windows at the same time, and even click directly on the menu bar of a non-focused window! MAC uses would have to first select the NOT-mile-high title bar and then move to the mile high menu bar. I get just one click.

Maybe MAC GUI has something to recommend it besides the dubiously and only slightly helpful mile high menu?

do { break; } while (0);

I just came up with this C construc, using break to jump out of a block;

do {
  if (! seems_suitable(a,b)) break;
  c=check_even_harder(a,b,);
  if (! c) break;
    be_tricky();
  return;
  } while (0);

do_it_the_old_way(a,b);

I was adding a code block before an existing block whose purpose was to filter out certain conditions to handle especially, and trying to avoid lots of nested if/else blocks. Without this foul trick the code would read:

if (seems_suitable(a,b)) {
  c=check_even_harder(a,b,);
  if (c) {
    be_tricky();
    return;
  }
}

do_it_the_old_way(a,b);

it works for me anyway .

Stem cell hoo-hah

Based on The Register’s report I don’t understand why Professor Hwang Woo-Suk resigned.

As I read it two students donated ova under and assumed name without his knowledge and not in breach of contemporary law or ethical guidelines.

So what's the real reason he had to resign?

Perhaps I’ve missed something but that's how it reads to me.

Flash hangs in firefox

Since upgrading from Hoary, firefox hangs badly on pages that contain flash.

Google reveals that lots of users are having this trouble; many of them relate it to sound access.

Well, I think I pinned it down to an ALSA problem.

Strangely sending a SIGSTOP and SIGCONT recovers it briefly. Hope fully I submitted enough debugging for it to be fixed now.

Apart from the above bug, I do wish Ubuntu would do ASLA device sharing out of the box and configure everything to use ALSA, and do ESD sharing out of the box and configure everything else to use ESD, and ESD to use ALSA.

Here is my config to do that:

/etc/asound.conf - this lets multiple ALSA clients use the audio device at once

# Example /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc file showing how
# to configure ALSA so that a dmix plugin is used by default
#
# The writing of alsa-lib configuration files is explained in
# /usr/share/doc/libasound2-doc/html/index.html, provided by the
# libasound2-doc package.
#
# Make ALSA apps default to using dmix plugin instead of hw plugin
# (Exclamation point is needed in order to override the assignment to
# pcm.default in /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.)

pcm.!default {
  type plug
  slave.pcm "dmix"
}

#
# Make OSS apps default to using dmix plugin too

pcm.dsp0 {
  type plug
  slave.pcm "dmix"
}

#

ctl.mixer0 {
  type hw
  card 0
}


/etc/esound/esd.conf - (I use libesd-alsa0)

I use tcp mode because my family have multiple console logins at the same time, and that way they can each use each-others esd if it is running, or start one if needed.


[esd]
auto_spawn=1
spawn_options=-terminate -nobeeps -as 1
spawn_wait_ms=100

# default options are used in spawned and non-spawned mode
default_options=-as 5 -tcp

Installing SUN Java on Ununtu

One of the uses of a blog is to make notes for myself to follow later. I often ending up doing the job multiple times and forgetting how I did it.

From these notes I install SUN Java on Ubuntu Breezy Badger.

sudo apt-get install fakeroot java-package java-common

fakeroot make-jpkg --full-name "My Name" --email "me@example.com" jdk-1_5_0_05-linux-i586.bin

sudo dpkg -i sun-j2sdk1.5_1.5.0+update05_i386.deb

sudo update-alternatives --config java

One good thing

Specialisation is something that troubles me; it makes it easy to have one good thing, but not two!

ToplogiLinux reminded me of this. I used to freak Mepis so that I could boot native or run it with a coLinux under windows (before I made the switch total).

I tried this with Ubuntu recently but had to freak about with a runlevel 4 which I set up to miss out a load of AGP and PCI stuff that crashed the thing.

It looks like TopilogiLinux is going to make that sort of stuff easier - but it means not having Ubuntu (linux for human beings). What if I want both? I can make Ubuntu work under coLinux but that means ignoring TopilogiLinux… can’t have both…

ulog-acctd

ulog-acctd seems pretty nifty for aggregating network flow statistics.

I’ve submitted some patches so it can build as a redhat package, and also dump the stats when it receives a signal. it’s nice for a stats processor to be able to signal to ulog-acctd to dump the stats now! type of thing.

No much seems to be going with the mailing list apart from eastern spam.