My Forms for Portals project is a simple collection of forms to help you quickly access google, dictionary, wikipedia, imdb, maps, yellow pages, etc. from your own web pages. I’ve mentioned my portal before, hopefully the new article makes it all easily digestible (and yummy!). It’s a reaaally oldskool approach, yet still pretty useful IMHO.

And just so I’m eating my own dog food…

Trying out IE8 RC1, it’s listed as incompatible with URL’s like microsoft.com, including Windows Update. Meanwhile IE8 updates are only available through Windows Update. And the uninstall doesn’t work in XP SP3 – I don’t get a “remove” button at all. You can’t get rid of it, and you can’t patch it. Thanks for completely breaking Windows, Microsoft. Wow, the incompetence is staggering. Fortunately Windows is becoming more and more of a bad memory every day. The kind you can eventually completely black out, with any luck…

Meanwhile, FF3 continues as the champion workhorse, and running Google Chrome in XP is like taking a Ferrari for a spin… “soon available” on linux… and don’t miss the geeky-great chrome cartoon…

Our power flashed yesterday while we were out (I HATE it when that happens), and the Wii wouldn’t power on again. AT ALL. It seemed completely dead, and of course my first thought was that a spike smoked it to bits (even though it was plugged into a surge suppressor). My daughter remembered that her friend had the same problem (good job Wrenny!). Turns out Nintendo told them how to solve it – just UNPLUG it for 5 minutes! Sweet. It didn’t work to unplug the power cord from the back of the Wii, you have to unplug the transformer from the wall. And yes, you REALLY have to wait 5 minutes or more! Weird. Thanks Gary! Whew!

What do I want out of my linux desktop?

1. Full access to any KDE and Gnome applications I need
2. Ability to devote 100% of my real estate to what I’m working on
3. Keyboard shortcuts for every common task
4. Fast access to multiple workspaces
5. Quick access to system monitors, date and time (and perhaps rss, weather…)
6. Prettiness 😛

Fluxbox has delivered this functionality with great efficiency. That’s a mixed blessing – I haven’t had a need to shop around, so I’m not sure if there’s something I’m missing out on. Certainly compiz-fusion will be a blast to play with some day, albeit not (yet) necessary. A lot of my linux friends have defected to Macs, but that’s too rich for my blood. Go ahead and rant at me if you’re from another desktop planet. I’m eternally curious.

I’m using the following with fluxbox to keep me happy:

• YAX theme
• slit apps: gkrellm, wmsmixer, wmtop, wmweather+ (replace this!)
• a tricky fluxbox keyboard macro to allow me to pop up the “slit” sidebar – I believe you need fluxbox 1.1.1 or better to do this:

  # MDM Key to toggle autohide of slit.  Pop it!
  None F10 :ToggleCmd {MacroCmd {SetResourceValue session.screen0.slit.autoHide false} {Reconfigure}} {MacroCmd {SetResourceValue session.screen0.slit.autoHide true} {Reconfigure}}
  

• conky; really sweet looking, but sits on the desktop, which I hardly ever see; I keep it simple (date, time, machine name)
• and of course, a custom background and customized keys, menu and startup config files

UPDATE: I got Hua to play with compiz-fusion on his new laptop, so I could live vicariously. 3D cubes with windows hovered by z-order, cylinders, flipping windows stuck back-to-back… now I’m burning with desire. But it sounds like I won’t be able to use fluxbox with it, so I’ll have to save that project for a rainy day for now…

I recently discovered [mod_deflate], which compresses webserver content before sending it out – if you’re not using it you should really check it out. I turned it on and it worked flawlessly for me, with two exceptions.

1. Server-side includes
   These just did not play well together out of the box…
2. PHP and Perl “streaming” output
   I have some scripts, most notably imagescraper, that need to stream the html in the results page as it is computed, not all at once AFTER it is built, as mod_deflate requires.

Turning off [mod_deflate] is trivial. I used the no-gzip environment variable as follows:

# MDM This is to disable [mod_deflate] for imagescraper, so we don't try to compress the streaming results...

    SetEnv no-gzip 1


# MDM Drop this into a virtual host block to TURN OFF [mod_deflate], so it doesn't break SSI.
SetEnv no-gzip 1