Thought bucket

The author describes an improvement to window splitting in Emacs

Alan explores the art and adventure of setting up a Linux-based system for young people.

The story so far… Back around 2005 I took my first leap into the world of writing useful programs armed only with my laptop, a Pentium II running Debian, and a fat book on PHP5. Though I’d taken a few classes on C++ and tinkered with BASIC on a few different platforms over the years, [...]

Alan explores the art and adventure of setting up a Linux-based system for young people.

The word processor has been a part of computing platforms since the earliest days of the home computer; I’ve used a number them over the years, including PFS-write on the Apple IIc, WordPerfect (both DOS and Windows versions), Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, and AbiWord. A couple years ago, though, I got frustrated with the whole word [...]

I’ve been doing a lot of tinkering on my KiLauncher project over the last week or so, and it’s not only shaping up into a nice useful little application, but an educational opportunity as well My goals for KiLauncher were to make it both theme-able, and configurable with plain-text files.  The natural mechanism for this [...]

So often with Linux distributions, the choice is between running a bleeding-edge system, or sticking with stable (and sometimes stale) software.  Most of us settle in to a distro that balances both to our liking, but there are times when you just have to have a little newer version of a package than the default [...]

It’s no secret that many people’s first Linux experience these days is on Ubuntu; yet as they — for one reason or another — find themselves needing to branch out into the wider Free OS world, Debian is often the next stop along the road.  Having introduced a few Ubuntu users (in real life or [...]

Following on the heels of my google search hotkey in awesome, I decided to tackle expanding the functionality of the run prompt.  Awesome’s run prompt, by default, is basically a command-launcher; it chokes on any input that doesn’t represent an executable file. I wanted it to behave more like the run prompt in other desktops, [...]

It’s a little unfortunate how much we rely on something as unreliable as a computer.  There you are, working along, happily doing your thing, and suddenly Windows (or OSX, or Linux, or BEOS, or whatever it is that sits between your hardware and your web browser) pukes up some error and refuses to boot, work, [...]