Posts by Halloween Jack

Death and taxis: Windows has had enough of clinging to a cab rooftop in the London rain

Re: IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

This. The number of times I've seen code where a preprocessor token has a negative in it ('ndebug' being the obvious one, but things like "DONT_WANT_FOO" and "NO_BAR" have been common enough). The difference between grokking "#ifdef BAR" vs "#ifndef NO_BAR" (or even "#ifdef NO_BAR" for that matter), for me, is huge. I mean, it's not difficult - I can work it out easily enough, but because there's a little bit of 'tripping up' involved in the mental comprehension, I do need to stop and double-check that I definitely have it the right way around. That really does NOT help when scanning through code, because by the time you've convinced yourself that you got it right, your mental model of where you are in the code overall has been lost.

Trump tramples US Constitution by blocking Twitter critics – lawsuit

"The plaintiffs allege that Trump and his aides have used the account to carry out official communications, but I don't recall anyone saying that before now,"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMb3GbwbApY

Stanford boffins find 'correlation between caffeine consumption and longevity'

Re: COFFEEEEE!!!!!

> I'll sleep when I'm dead...

Or as the great David Bowie once said (as part of his revelation that in his later years, his only vice was a good cup of coffee or three) - "The benefit is that I'll still be awake when I'm dead".

And I suspect he probably is.

Baby Ubuntus toddle forth into the big scary world of beta

Give the NEW Unity a try! Was: Re: Give Unity a try!

This. I suspect that most people that hate Unity tried it in the early days and have disregarded it ever since as unusable. Yes, there was a LOT wrong with it back in the day, but it has come on a lot since then.

Back when it was first released, I found it unusable for a day-to-day coding environment (my preference is 2-3 80 column terminal windows side-by-side with focus-follows-mouse and no auto-raise) - mainly due to the menu-in-screen-titlebar thing (which made FFM a ridiculous option to even have) and its preference for opening everything fullscreen.

HOWEVER, it is so much better these days as they have gradually added these developer-friendly features back. I think it is now a very good balance between a developer environment (I have no problem using it day-to-day as the features I mentioned before now work as I like) and a "consumer" environment (my wife uses it and likes it that the icons on the menu bar for the things she uses most - email, browsing, libre - switch between full-screen versions of those applications so she's not forever rearranging windows).

Another thing I don't understand is when people diss the menu-column-on-the-left thing. It has been so long since I had a display that wasn't 16:9. It has more horizontal space than vertical. Why would you sacrifice even more vertical space by putting a taskbar along the bottom of the screen? I prefer this so much, that on my work Win7 laptop I have the taskbar pinned to the left hand edge of the screen (and it looks not unlike Unity ...). Unity's support for in-window-menus actually shares the same space with the title bar/window furniture to further maximise the use of vertical resolution (traditional desktops - and Win7 included, I don't know about MATE/Cinnamon) have two rows - one for the title and furniture and a second for the menu. Both of which are mostly empty ...

I would urge people who haven't tried it for a while to give it a go again with this new LTS.

Not sure about Mir though .... ;)

Microsoft quits giving us the silent treatment on Windows 10 updates

Re: Mint

> Are you sure your doing it right? For starters, are they even on v17.3? I know older, or even some ~slightly older~ versions loose their sh-- when the repos eventually get the yank.

When I installed Mint for them, my "customer" wanted something that looked and behaved like what they were used to (*). As the unpaid sysadmin, _I_ wanted something relatively modern that was supported (which is why I needed to upgrade them from the old version of Ubuntu they were already running).

My point was that while Mint seemed to be the "Ubuntu without Unity" holy-grail at the time (either Cinnamon or Mate - to my end users either was fine), I ended up in a position that I could either install something that looked different but the core update mechanisms worked (Ubuntu) or that looked similar but had a broken updates (Mint). Of course, I didn't KNOW that the update mechanism was borked until much later and so "looks the same" won that argument.

It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but knowing what I know now - and yes, perhaps it was one specific version that was broken - it has just turned me off of Mint. They changed and then didn't test that basic, important functionality properly. Hence my current swing towards Xubuntu which seems to do the same job with the desktop (for my personal use-case, anyway) without touching other parts of the system.

Yes, I'm sure I'm doing it right ;)

(*) Actually, I'm grateful to Microsoft a bit for the whole Win8.x, WinX thing - I no longer get people _specifically_ asking for a Windows install because "Windows is Windows". Now, it's not - they have fragmented the UX. However, with Linux, it's entirely possibly to choose a particular flavour of a distro that is close enough to what someone is used to that it's actually a shallower learning curve to go to a carefully selected Linux distro than it is to update to the latest Windows. If you're going to have to deal with a change anyway, then why not try the free option ...

Mint

I'm interested in why so many people specifically mention the Mint distro.

I've used many distros over the years (RedHat, then SuSE, then Ubuntu, then Mint - and I'm occasionally still forced to suffer Fedora for certain toolchains that I have to use). But, when I get the choice I'm generally back on Ubuntu (Unity these days is really quite good - though I suspect it will pain the future me that they are going with 'Mir' rather than sticking with Wayland - why??). When I want a "traditional" WIMP environment (for a development box or VM), I go with Xubuntu.

Anyway, back to my question - the problem I found with Mint (after I'd installed it on several "customer sites" [elder family members' PCs]) is that the update mechanism was screwed. I would have to do a manual "apt-get update" periodically to ensure that new stuff was actually picked up (it's like the GUI tool did just the 'apt-get upgrade' part without the update first and Mint changed things often enough that it kept breaking - often silently). It turned out that one "customer" PC was unpatched for many months because of that and the GUI tool was reporting that all was well.

Maybe it was a bad install somehow. Or maybe there are lots of Mint installs that are actually out of date. I didn't have the time or inclination to work that out.

Anyway, for F&F installs (usually on less than stellar hardware), I opt for Xubuntu or just stock Ubuntu these days. Switch off the Amazon search stuff, obvs ;)