Willy the Worm!

I’m up late working again, and while I’m waiting for some scripts to run, I googled “Willy the Worm,” a game that was about the only thing my first computer (an IBM PC jr) was capable of running.  Eventually, the 5 inch floppy that stored the game was corrupted, and that was basically the end of my relationship with computers until I went to college 8 or so years later.  But behold:

Willy is back!  I used DosBox to run it on Linux — the first time I ever used DosBox, but it seems cool so far.  At first the game went crazy fast (I guess it was not designed to run on a 1.8 GHz Processor?), but it was easy to adjust the rate.

It is a pretty lame game by any modern standard, but it amuses me to be able to play it again after all these years.  Oliver is sitting next to me, and he keeps giving me these looks like “can we please please please go to bed already?”

 

New WordPress.com + Linux = Problems

A few hours ago, wordpress.com changed their user interface. I wrote my last post with it, and for the most part it seems nice, but there is one big problem: I can’t upload pictures anymore. An upload status bar appears and makes it about 1/100th of the way through and stalls

I told my boyfriend about the problem and he tried uploading a picture to his blog using Windows Vista+Firefox and had no problems. I’m running Ubuntu Linux Gutsy+Firefox. Image uploading works for me if I use Wine, but Wine is slow and clunky and annoying. I hope this problem is fixed soon — I like wordpress.com and I like Linux. It would be lovely if I could use them together.

UPDATE: If you are having similar problems uploading stuff to your wordpress blog, try updating your version of flash. After doing this, I still find the interface buggy and icky, but I am able to upload pictures.

 

Fun with Emacs: Tramp and the Emacs Psychiatrist

Although I’m technically a particle physicist, most of my day is spent trying to figure out why some bit of C++ code I’ve written doesn’t work. My chosen text editor for writing code is Emacs. There are people in this world who are willing to spend hours comparing and contrasting the merits of various text editors; I am not one of them. I’ve always used emacs and it has always been good to me.

Lately I have been using it remotely quite a bit, e.g. running emacs on my machine at work via my laptop at home or in a cafe. This can be annoyingly slow, since every time I do anything (typing text, scrolling, moving the window, opening menus), information has to be sent across the internet. One solution to this is to avoid X forwarding, but that results in a version of emacs without a lot of the features I like.

I googled some variations on “remote emacs slow” and got a few suggestions. One person suggested editing files locally and transferring them with TRAMP. I’d never heard of TRAMP and feared that it would be one of these poorly documented programs only usable by ubergeeks. It turns out to be incredibly easy to install and use. It comes with any version of emacs after 2.0. I have an older version, but was able to install TRAMP via Ubuntu’s Synaptic Package Manager. After I did that, all I had to do was open a file the usual way (ctrl+x ctrl+f) and where I would normally type the file name type /username@myremotehost:path/to/remote/file .  After that, anytime I save the file, it’s saved to the remote disk (although autosaves are done in a local temporary folder). It does ask for my password an annoying number of times, but is pretty smooth other than that. Once I’ve logged in once, it even has tab completion for finding files, which is great because I’m not sure I could live in a world without tab completion.

While I was was fiddling with emacs to solve this problem, I discovered that “emacs psychiatrist,” with whom I had the following conversation:

I am the psychotherapist.  Please, describe your problems.  Each time
you are finished talking, type RET twice.

   I'm finding X11 forwarding of Emacs very slow.

Emacs?  Hah!  I would appreciate it if you would continue.

   It is really annoying.

Why do you say it is really annoying?

   Because it takes me 10 years to do a simple task!

Is it because it takes you 10 years to do a simple task that you came
to me?

   Yes

I see...  Well, what makes you believe this is so?

   It just is.

Earlier you said it takes you 10 years to do a simple task?

   Yes!

Yes, hmmm... so, are you sure that this is so?

   Yes you dumb fuck

Perhaps you could watch your tongue!

 

I love Picasa

As I have mentioned here before, I got a new camera for my birthday in October. My trusty old Nikon point-and-shoot from the early days of digital cameras was dying, and my very generous boyfriend bought me the a new Nikon S200. Though it is tiny, beautiful and red, I think Nikon definitely went for form over function on this one. I am not great photographer; I don’t have a fancy SLR and don’t expect fancy results from a basic camera. But I thought the whole point of point-and-shoots was that, for example, you can hand such a camera to your dog training instructor in a well lit store and get a photo of your dog’s graduation from puppy class that, while not a stunning photograph, will at least not be blurry:

But apparently I was wrong. The camera has about a billion settings, and if you are willing to fiddle with them for 20 minutes, you can usually find one that works okay. Most of my photographic subjects (cats, dogs and boyfriends) are sadly not willing to stay in cute poses for 20 minutes while I experiment with the bewildering array of settings.

So I have been experimenting with touching up photos after the fact. I use GIMP sometimes, and it is very powerful, but that’s another case of a bewildering array of settings. The other day, I wanted to make a collage of photos for my webpage, and a little googling told me that collage-making is not really what GIMP is made out for. One webpage suggested using Picasa, image organizing/editing software made by Google, that is available for Linux (and Windows, if you are into that sort of thing) and is capable of making collages.

It turns out Picasa is good for a lot of stuff other than making collages (which it occurs to me now I could have just done with open office or some such). When I first opened it, it found and chronologically organized all the photos on my computer (which included a lot of crap that comes with the operating system or other programs… but you can pretty simply select which folders you want it to consider), which is way cool all by itself. It also has some pretty handy image alteration options. It is not as powerful as Photoshop or GIMP, but it is way simpler. One awesome feature is the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that will automatically adjust various features of your photo for you. Most of the time, I think it improves the photo. But, like googling, you can usually do a little better without the “I’m feeling lucky” button. For example, take this photo of two of the men in my life playing in the snow:

I think when I first took this picture, I thought it looked pretty cute. But now it looks like crap compared to the new and improved version:

There is a soft-focus feature that gives this kind of blah photo of me and Oliver:

The look of an Olan-Mills school photo:

Not that that is really a good thing.

 

It’s Ass Cold Outside

This is what my Ubuntu toolbar displayed this morning. And this is actually AFTER the sun came out. About 20 minutes before, it read a whopping 3 degrees F!

Not only does Ubuntu provide me with this handy little application which keeps me informed of the weather on my desktop, but it also has a really handy little screenshot utility that allowed me to capture this. I also used GIMP to crop the image. Can your windows machine do that? Probably it can, but I was proud of myself, and my little Ubuntu installation.