A Blog of Very Little Brain

Another test of the Bloglines, too much work for my taste, I believe I’ll let it slide.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, those are supposed to be zombies. (Got it through Wonderland who got it via leboingboing

Just trying the Blogline service, it’s quite a mess, to be honest, I get a post verbatim, which really means I have to edit like there’s no tomorrow. This is basically a PacMan game made of remote-controlled cars and suchlike. There’s a nice video if you really want to make sure it actually works. (Video here). (Link through I’m a human Inbox, who got it via Kotaku)

I seem to never get along with jEdit. For some unknown reason, I’ve installed and uninstalled it time and time again. Everytime I read something interesting about it, and do the downloading, only to give up on it about 2 days later, let it hang around my harddrive, then uninstall it.
I do my text-editoring in Vim, and use language specific IDEs for specific languages (like Eclipse for Java), so it’s not that necessary. But (and there’s always a but), I am looking for a lighter-weight application to do Java coding on my laptop, since the poor thing can’t even dream of handling Eclipse with its 64 MB of RAM. So I keep turning to jEdit for some relief, only to get flabbergasted for the nth time.
This time was no better. I’ve downloaded, only to be smacked in my face when it added a “open with jEdit” option to my context menu (aka “Right-Click menu” on Windows). A quick trip to the Regedit removed that pest, but the sour taste still lingers. I just hate it when applications decide for me what they will install and where. The next thing was the plugins download. The concept here is simple. The preliminary download gives you a full featured text editor, nothing less, but, nothing more. However, there are many user-made plugins (as expected from an open source project) which extends the software up to a full-blown IDE ability, with all the bells and whistles. It’s a bit confusing, to be honest, as you sometimes have three or four plugins that do the same thing, with minor changes, but it’s still a very good concept, and hopefully, one that demands less resources than Eclipse.
The plugin download process is also very painless. You open up the plugin menu, select a mirror, check every plugin you wish (the software will check any dependencies automatically) and click on “Install”. After about 3 minutes, jEdit starts to hammer you with “connection refused” error messages with a machine-gun speed. Once you clear them all up, the plugin download interface reset itself (losing all the marks you made) and that’s about it. Currently I’m looking through the site, trying to see whether there’s some sort of package download, as I’m not going to start hand picking them, we’re talking about 30 something plugins. I’m giving jEdit a really long rope, since I’m quite sure that failing, this will be the last change it gets from me in a long while.

From OS News, comes the knowledge that Open Office 2, the resources hog office suite has just been updated into version 2.0.1. To those without a spare gigabyte of RAM, Open Office 1.1.5 is still a very good choice, with support for OASIS Open Document format.

Also in upgrades, the Debian GNU/Linux distro was upgraded. As always, you can download the entire Debian package repository on 14 CDs, which should keep you busy until the next update.

And, speaking of office suites, this article tries to find the best applications needed to be used in book writing. I believe it was Robert A. Heinlein who said that his prescription for good book writing was “Apply one ass to one chair”.

Apple seems to be “better” because it doesn’t compete. As everyone should know by now, GNU/Linux doesn’t compete either. Who does compete? Right. Microsoft.

Got to work this morning, only to find that the Mac Mouse of much mightiness has gone AWOL. As I haven’t been born with a mouse in my hand, I sat and tried to use the keyboard. Not a good idea. For starters, choosing a desktop icon and hitting “Enter” lets you modify the shortcuts name. This is probably what Apple refer to as intuitive interface.
About 15 minutes later, I managed to delete two icons and open the Script Editor (Whatever that is). Eventually I googled this page. Action + O (‘O’pen?) does the trick. More interesting is the “close window” command: Command + W (close ‘W’indow?). I’ve no idea why they have to use different keys than the ones used at Windows or GNU/Linux.

Heh. Always wanted to say that.

Welcome all to the Blog of Very Little Brain. Prepare to be ranted out of your skulls.
I’m Erez, from Tel Aviv, Israel. And I do welcome your posts, ideas, stolen goods and phunky phishing phantasies. I work for LivePerson and also study Java at Blue Education Centre at John Bryce.

I’m probably going to use this place to either post anything that seems interesting to me at the time, or just rant about something or the other.