…in IceWM:

That was the “Tile Vertically”, “Tile Horizontally” and “Cascade” set of options present in Microsoft Windows and absent from all the Linux/BSD/Unices window managers… except for IceWM!

Cool. (The screenshot is from AntiX, which is less cool and a mess IMHO, although it’s very functional and rich in preinstalled software.)

P.S.: Of course, the so-called “tiling window managers” would do that too, but they usually do only that, i.e. tiling.

Sam Varghese: Australia introduces licences for internet users. This was possible only because of the timezone

OTOH, Wosl’d Besu Saodwici is a real thing

P.S.: Yes, the koala speaks with the left ear, I noticed that.

Măi băieţi, mai amintiţi-mi şi mie să mă abonez la fluxul omului, ori să-i vizitez pagina. Am menţionat mai deunăzi blogul numit Conştiinţa Unui Liberal de Stânga, doar că am uitat să-l mai citesc!

Şi aş fi avut ce:
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I was looking for it since ages, but only today I’ve tried with the right keywords. And here’s the outrageous secret of the lack of security of your door locks, unveiled in 2006 and revisited in 2007:

• The Lockdown: Locked, but not secure (Part I)
• The Lockdown: Locked, but not secure (Part II)
• The Lockdown: Locked, but maybe secure (Part 1)
• The Lockdown: Locked, but maybe secure (Part 2)

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The story posted by Just Whatever has now propagated to dozens and dozens of sites, in English or in translations (Spanish, Dutch, some Central European languages, etc.): Paid To Do It 72 Times.

Since the story is supposed to have happened in Stuttgart, have you ever thought of using a web search engine to look for pages in German that contain the original version of the story that refers to Demetrius Soupolos, Traute, and Frank Maus?

I have found exactly ZERO stories in German!

Therefore, no matter from what newspaper has Just Whatever taken the story, I’m 99% sure it’s a hoax! (Or it happened before the Internet age.)

Iconoclast as he seems to be, Bjørn Lomborg is right in the syndicated column Climate Change Posers, to have been printed in several international newspapers. (In Romanian, here: Activişti de faţadă.)
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Că atât mă duce mintea. Recunosc, nu mi-a plăcut sportul în şcoală, pentru că nu era cu adevărat “educaţie fizică”, ci era o sumă de activităţi sportive. Da, sportul foloseşte sănătăţii, dar normele alea, nu. Poţi să dai unui om o notă la o materie unde-şi foloseşte inteligenţa, sârguinţa, conştiinciozitatea, abilităţile intelectuale prezente în mai toată specia (în cantităţi diferite, dar totuşi), pe când notarea unor daturi fizice mi se pare o mârşăvie. Poate ai colegi obezi. Poate ai colegi cu te miri ce probleme care nu sunt totuşi o boală, dar afectează performanţele sportive. Ce faci, le aduci certificat medical? Orele de educaţie fizică ar trebui să-i înveţe pe copii cum pot beneficia de binefacerile unor activităţi fizice, dar nu ar trebui în nici un caz să măsoare elemente concrete, în metri, secunde, şi coşuri nimerite!
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Ciudat lucru, dar puţin oameni au în ziua de astăzi suficiente coaie (scuzaţi, sânge în instalaţie) ca să spună lucrurilor pe nume. Printre puţinii care o fac, Ilie Şerbănescu (este totuşi economist), şi Ion Cristoiu (autodeclarat “comunist”).

Ilie Şerbănescu, în Populaţia plăteşte la FMI ravagiile capitalului străin:
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It’s not that early, but my biological clock is not happy with the DST. Besides, I’m the evening type of person. In all, quite good reasons to have (rhetorical) questions to ask.

I see that all the major distros have updated to Firefox 3.0.8 (well, Debian has Iceweasel 3.0.7). I wonder why has Red Hat chosen (RHSA-2009:0397-1) to only update XULRunner, and leave Firefox at 3.0.7?! Psychologically speaking, the users of RHEL & clones might feel slightly uneasy, don’t you think so?
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I suppose Linus is right, or at least reading about this issue was funny: Linus Torvalds Upset over Ext3 and Ext4. So, he must be right when saying:

Doesn’t at least ext4 default to the insane model of ‘data is less important than metadata, and it doesn’t get journalled’? And ext3 with ‘data=writeback’ does the same, no? Both of which are — as far as I can tell — total brain damage. At least with ext3 it’s not the default mode.

[...] if you write your metadata earlier (say, every 5 sec) and the real data later (say, every 30 sec), you’re actually more likely to see corrupt files than if you try to write them together… This is why I absolutely detest the idiotic ext3 writeback behavior. It literally does everything the wrong way around — writing data later than the metadata that points to it. Whoever came up with that solution was a moron. No ifs, buts, or maybes about it.

If I am not wrong, both JFS and XFS only journal the metadata, not the data. Still, I normally prefer them for the sake of performance. In some regards, they might be considered even more idiotic than ext3 with “writeback”, but they’re not:

• they don’t pretend to be doing what they are not doing;
• they are consistent in behavior;
• they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing very well;
• I take that fsync() flushes on disk exactly the specified file and not everything that’s dirty, because it was only for ext3 with “writeback” to experience serious performance issues (system freezes with Firefox 3.0 RC1), not JFS, nor XFS.

The childish quarrels around Linus Torvalds are disqualifying for the whole Linux kernel team.

No, this doesn’t mean that FreeBSD is any better: whereas Linus is calling some kernel developer a “moron”, some FreeBSD committers were calling some users (including myself) “morons”.

But I agree, it’s quite expensive to use an OS whose developers didn’t insult each other, nor the users…

In the last 72 hours, I have read a lot of annoying things, and this exactly why I’ll skip 98% of them. They’re boring, if not depressing. Today’s late mini-crop:
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Recently, I have expressed some kind of renewed interest for Linux on my desktop/laptop. This does not mean I am “going back to Linux”, at least not under the current conditions.

What happened is that I managed to make my old HP Omnibook XE3 (Celeron-128k, 850 MHz, 256 MB PC-100, 10 GB HDD 4200rpm) something more usable because of an improved responsiveness, not because it would benefit of more useful software.

But my newer Acer (Celeron M520, 1 GB RAM DDR2-533) is still on XP SP3, and I’m afraid it will stay so for quite some time.

Why is this happening so?

First of all, I’ve tried the WINE version 1.0.1 from EPEL5, and it doesn’t display correctly the Ribbon-like window decorations of Rybka 3 Aquarium, so there is at least one software I’ve bought that can’t be used satisfactorily under Linux. I’m sure there are some others too.
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Bubulii, reptilienii, Bill Gates şi cu Intel vor să distrugă civilizaţia. Windows trebuie interzis prin lege, iar un nou tip de computer trebuie creat, cu sistemul de operare fără GUI (ca să încapă în EPROM), cu “eventualele detalii” citite de pe CD-ROM, cu două hard-discuri din care unul Read-Only, şi în genere cerul albastru este inutil.

“Joaquin Murieta”comentează astfel la articolul Sistemul imunitar al internetului:
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This is an installed version of SL5.3 (from an unreleased mini_livecd), with a hacked Clearlooks-like IceWM theme, and a few added applications.
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What is more serious, and which one is proving that nowadays browsers are insecure by design, and so are our computers?

• Firefox fix due next week after attack is published. A high-priority 3.0.8 Firefox release will patch the issue, says Mozilla.
• New measures against IE 8 exploits.
• Or maybe, since hardware is not hardwired anymore, we’re all wholeheartedly welcoming the CIH-style of rootkits because this is how we design our hardware, i.e. vulnerable by design? (You know, a jumper to disable the writability is rocket science.) Rootkits in a PC’s BIOS — they’re back.

Which of these news prove the best that XFCE is a mature and a rightly-headed project?

• Bruce Byfield thinks of switching to XFCE 4.6: Xfce Has Polish, Simplicity, and Speed — Better Than Gnome and KDE? (That’s old news, I agree.)
• To fix the classical crucial dilemma “why is gnome-screenshot less elaborate than KSnapshot?”, the XFCE devs are focusing on their own tool: Xfce4 Screenshooter news. (Now that a screenshot can be saved to a remote location via SFTP, XFCE is going to be perfect. In a future version, available in your distro after at least 1 year. With Thunar still not knowing of SFTP and SMB. But the main activity in XFCE is capturing the screen, right?)
• Another XFCE dev, speaking of Clipboard Managers Done Right, proves to be less omniscient than many regular users: “I just had a look at the screenshots of Parcellite, a GTK+ clipboard manager, mainly because I didn’t know what it is.” (It used to be a flying saucer, but not anymore.)

Băi, sunt obosit de secărismele astea. Am dat din întâmplare peste pagina asta, şi m-am étonnat: Note de lansare pentru Lenny specifice pentru utilizatorii limbii române.

Simplu şi clar ca “…tu-te-n cur”. Ce nu vor să priceapă ipochimenii ăştia este că:

• Tot schimbând denumirile mapărilor, n-o să mai înţeleagă nimeni nimic, pentru că sunt în uz diverse versiuni de X.Org în diverse distribuţii. De pildă, clonele de RHEL5 sunt “pe stil vechi”, Ubuntu şi Fedora ar trebui să fie “pe stil nou”, iar majoritatea… de la caz la caz. (Singura chestie care-mi place “pe stil nou” este faza văzută în Ubuntu, că acum pot să aleg direct “US International (AltGr dead keys)”, iar imbecilitatea aia cu taste moarte în permanenţă se cheamă “U.S. English - Alternative international (former us_intl)”. Nu ştiu care este situaţia în Debian Lenny, căci sculele n-au binevoit să precizeze, deşi ar fi o schimbare importantă şi asta.)
• Numai idioţii pot scrie o pagină întreagă de sugestii despre “how to fix the world” şi “how to fix the Internet”, cu sfaturi gen “contactaţi Google” (şi mai ce? s-o sun pe Angelina Jolie s-o invit la un ceai? să-l invit pe Steve Ballmer la o şeptică?), când situaţia este simplă: majoritatea calculatoarelor încă rulează XP, şi majoritatea conţinutului web în româneşte este scris “greşit”, şi uite de-aia eu prefer diacriticele “incorecte”, din raţiuni de compatibilitate!

Grow up, you guys. Be real. Auzi tu, “pentru a nu perpetua propagarea textelor cu diacritice incorecte”…

I’ve just read Jim Whitehurst saying:

“First of all, I don’t know how to make money on it,” Whitehurst said. “Very few people are running a desktop that’s mission-critical,” so they do not want to pay the company for a desktop OS, he said.

There is some money in the Linux desktop, but not much, Whitehurst said. “We do have a desktop [version of Linux], but we typically sell it to big server customers who want some desktops.” Red Hat offers its Red Hat Enterprise Desktop product, but Whitehurst added he was uncertain how relevant the desktop itself will be in five years, with the advent of concepts such as cloud-based and smartphone computing and VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).

“The concept of a desktop is kind of ridiculous in this day and age,” said Whitehurst. “I’d rather think about skating to where the puck is gong to be than where it is now,” he said, using a hockey analogy.

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I do, really! It’s not because of Xkcd!
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I could not focus very well on the subject, however I wrote a post on scientific-linux-users: SL 5.3 with IceWM from SL 5.2 mini_livecd (long post).

I posted from their web form, and it screwed the lines. A more readable version is here.

We’ll see what gets. I tend to be too “romantic” and impetuous at times…

I’m sick of politics, yet I can’t avoid reading about it. I’m tired of the Linux mess, yet I still sniff around…

Today’s crop of marginally readable stuff:
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