Done last week (20160403Su - 09Sa)

[mdlbear]

So.... not too bad of a week. Busy, which is good. I gave a presentation at work on Friday; it appears to have come across well despite not being nearly as smooth -- or as well-prepared -- as I would have liked. There is, of course, a strong connection between those two: I did most of the work Sunday and Monday. Still, ...

I spent most of my spare time configuring xmonad and studying Haskell. Haskell is a pure functional programming language, with a somewhat peculiar syntax. Xmonad is a lightweight tiling window manager, written in Haskell. I love it! Its use of screen space is extremely efficient, and you pretty much don't have to worry about how windows are arranged because it's automatic. (You get your choice from a wide range of possible arrangements. Configurable as heck.)

When I had to go back to gnome (while I was trying to figure out how to get a network manager applet) I found myself trying to tile windows with the mouse. Ugh. Now that it's in pretty good shape I'm going to put it on my work laptop. It's glorious on a laptop.

The latest Ubuntu upgrade seems to have done slightly weird things to html-helper-mode. At this point I'm inclined to go with the flow and stop trying to use hanging indent for paragraph tags. Not as pretty, but it actually works ok in HTML5, which gets back to human read/writeability from the strictness of XHTML.

Chaos and Rabbit are moving in. Hopefully by mid-day today. Notes & links:

0403Su
  * up 5:45ish; W=196.8
  : It seems that the xmonad configuration file in git is broken -- it apparently got
    truncated before it was pushed at some point.  I blame the cats.  Unfortunately, quite
    a lot was lost.  Fortunately, most of that came from existing sample files.
    -> Actually, not much was lost.  Putting in an end comment.
  : There are, however, serious problems running xmodmap in recent versions of Ubuntu.
    This sucks -- apparently it disables X's VT switching with C-M-F*.  IDIOTS!
  : note to self: if you run "ssh nova xterm" and forget to background it, weird things
    will happen to your keystrokes.  Maybe even if you *do* background it.
  @ Grass Alternatives - Keep Off the Grass - Bob Vila
    wooly thyme, microclover, Corsican mint
  @ Sedge Lawns: A Sustainable, Low-Maintenance Alternative to Grass - Brooklyn Botanic
    Garden "start with weed-free soil" -- um, ... no.
  * 12:27 finished Learn You a Haskell
  * Finished first draft of my work presentation.  15 slides, and I have half an hour.
    Some of the slides may go quickly, though.  Will have to time it.
  @ One Div Zero: Monads are Elephants Part 1 (also parts 2-4.  Part 5 has been
    searched for but not found.)  Finally getting the hang of monads:  the basic
    operations are flatmap and unit, and you need a zero that serves as a left and right
    identity for flatmap.  In Haskell, flatmap is >>=.   >>, which is an infix binary
    function that discards its first operand and returns its second, is basically ";".
 
0404Mo
  * up 6:10; W=196.8; laundry
    Ticia weighed exactly 10 lbs (+- the accuracy of the scale, about .2).  I am much less
    worried about her.
  : Door to the front deck partly open.  Thank the gods that we didn't lose a cat; I
    closed it just before Desti got there.  Not clear _how_ it got open; I'm guessing not
    closed completely.
  @ Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible 2016 Press Release
    The Gimli Distillery, which sits on the shores of Lake Winnipeg in central Canada, is
    the home to the Crown Royal brand. Which in Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible 2016, published
    today, has been given the coveted title of World Whisky of the Year with its special
    Northern Harvest Rye edition. 
  * paid mortgage, power.  Both pretty outrageous.  There's $100 in extra garbage, but
    that bill isn't due until the 20-somethingth.
  * Payment for your 03/15/2016 Seattle Utilities bill is due soon.

0405Tu
  * up 5:45; W=195.4; dishes
  : xmonad in its current configuration handles gnome-panel just fine, though it doesn't
    seem to be picking up the workspaces or windows, making that part of it pretty
    useless.  Probably won't be using it much.
  * 2pm Colleen - Northwest Next to emergency room.  "administration building" She has
    three bacterial UT infections; two do not respond to most oral antibiotics.  They'll
    try one that might work before going for IV.  The IV drug can be given at home (by me,
    wearing my IV nurse's hat) with a PICC or central line, so that's something.
  : My current xmonad configuration can probably use some more tweaking, but it's _highly_
    functional.  Still learning my way around the keystrokes, but even the minimal set is
    useful.  And mod-? gets you the cheat sheet.
  : Sleepy most of the afternoon and all evening.
  : G' found my missing glasses!!  Under the papers on the end table in the Rainbow Room.
    I was positive I'd lost them somewhere on the bus.

0406We
  * Up 6:15; W=195.4; laundry
  : Kat and Rabbit coming for van.  Left $20 gas money with G.
  % I seem to have gone totally old-school with xmonad.  Tiles, no decorations, TABS!
    Feels like old times.  Including a lot of the stuff I didn't like at the time.  I
    expect there will be some things that are best done in gnome, though.  Though much of
    the time I find myself tiling my smaller windows and wishing I had tabs for the big
    ones.  So...
  : Did I mention that it's fast?  Starts _instantly_

0407Th
  * up 6; W=196.2; dishes
  @ How economists rode maths to become our era’s astrologers | Aeon Essays
    (thnidu | The pseudoscience called macroeconomics )
  @ Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software | Ars Technica
    Ars thinks this will make W$ into a "development platform for everyone".  Sorry.
    There's no X,  so it's fine if you run vim, but emacs is second-rate.  None of the
    desktop management features linux devs are used to.  Forget about running an
    alternative window manager.  I've used Windows as a dev, using Eclipse (which
    is cross-platform, so the fact that W$ doesn't run X is irrelevant).  It still sucks,
    enough that I requested a Linux laptop at the first plausible opportunity.

0408Fr
  * up 6:05; W=195.4; laundry, dishes
  * Presentation at work; not nearly as smooth as I would have liked, and probably not
    really enough content, but the question session made up for that, and it seemed to go
    over well.
  : I am maxed out on vacation time.  Kind of hard to take vacation when you're panicked.
  * Kat and Rabbit moving in tomorrow.  Here tonight for dinner and picking up the van.
    They were complaining to me via email about the high cost of a rental truck; I
    suggested a trailer.  I win.
  : xmonad suffers from the lack of dbus at the moment.  It may be necessary to learn how
    to use nmcli to enable a wifi connection.  (Need to figure out how to come up with
    dbus, etc anyway.)

0409Sa
  * up 7ish; W=196.4; laundry
  : some very nice cat time with Desti on the arm of the chair, with her head on my knee.
    unfortunately had to move her to get coffee.
  * adding trayer and gnome-settings to my xmonad startup file makes things work properly
    again -- apparently gnome-settings controls things like whether the touchpad tap-to-
    click "feature" is properly disabled, and whether the network manager works.  I'll
    take it. still want xmobar for status.
  * spent altogether too much time configuring xmobar.  It is, however, quite nice.

Comments

[amaebi]

Sounds like a good week!

"Caos and Rabbit are moving in" sounds like something about a castle falling into desolation.

Apparently we missed something

[capplor.livejournal.com]

Who's Rabbit?

Re: Apparently we missed something

[mdlbear]

Kat's significant other. AKA Alex. They've been living together up in Mukilteo for several years now.

(Kat = Chaos, of course)

[tagryn]

Glad the week went well.

The stuff on sedge lawns was interesting - the pics that come up for it on Google looked better than I was expecting, and the appeal of not needing mowing is tempting. However, it seems like it would be a lot of work to get a lawn back to zero point before even getting to the sedge installation, and I suspect most HOAs wouldn't allow it since it is outside the box thinking.