Adventures As Me

Linux 15 years on

This month marks the 15th anniversary of my foray into Linux. It all began with the mention of the word Linux on a BBS I frequented in Bisbee, Arizona (I lived in Douglas, AZ at the time). Not long after that I chanced upon a book entitled “Using Linux.[*]” I bought the book and installed my first Linux distro: Slackware.

Over the years I’ve used many distros, and other operating systems. My current distro of choice is openSUSE, mainly because I prefer the KDE desktop and none of the Debian-derived distros have a KDE implementation I like.

One thing I still recall from 1994: my dial-up Internet connection was much faster in Linux than in Windows 3.11 or DOS (faster than in Windows 95 when I installed it the following year).

My chief problems with Linux in 1994? Drivers for my proprietary Sony CD-ROM drive. Lackluster performance of my video card in X Window.

My chief problems with Linux in 2010? Usability problems with setting up my mouse the way I want it. Inability to run OS X applications† on Linux like I can with Windows Applications using wine. No one can decide on how sound should be handled.

* I’m actually not certain that was the title. All I really recall is the book was:

Very think
Published by QUE

† There’s really only one application I want to run: omnifocus

Application Focus Amock

Applications that steal focus are the bane of my computer experience. Particularly egregious are the ‘sudo’ type authentication dialogs on the OS X platform. On a multi-monitor setup ( which I have at work ) these dialogs remove the focus to a place where one is not looking. It is too easy to continue type and depress the enter key, thereby submitting an incorrect password.

Stealing focus should be prevented and preventable.

Posting from within

Just a simple post. Emacs is still my main editor. The real question is: how much have I edited? Answer: very little.

Posting From Emacs

Today marks at least my 10th attempt at making Emacs my main editor. I’m trying harder this time however. For example, this entire post was composed and submitted directly from Emacs.
A co-worker has been using Emacs exclusively for 1 year and I’m drawing on his knowledge and experience to improve my conversion.
One element that was always off-putting in the past is my non-conventional typing skills. Largely self-taught, I don’t use the typical layout and maneuvers, which makes certain keystrokes Emacs is fond of rather annoying. However in the last 3 years I have done far more consistent typing which improved my speed, accuracy and flexibility.

I give myself one month :)

Obtuse error messages: git

The error message:

To ssh://user@host/path/to/repository
   c441eb7..a5705cd  master -> master
error: failed to push some refs to 'ssh://user@host/path/to/repository'

The error condition:

A hook script that does nothing. Either the script is empty or contains only comments.

Apparently git does not like useless hook scripts. Took me a good 10-15 minutes to deduce that was the problem ( thank you for pointing me in the proper direction with the error message!) :P