astradele

While preparing a different blog entry, I realized I was spending more than a few seconds to decide what category to put the blog entry under. I could use tagging instead of a category hierarchy, but I have doubts about whether any readers (the few that there are) would really spend the effort to select one of many possible buckets.

The problem as I see it, is trying to invent a categorization scheme that:

1. Fits all my past, present, and future blog posts in an consistent, low-mental-effort way.
2. Organizes my posts in a way that visitors care about and find easy to use.

Considerations:

• Having many categories makes it worse for both of the goals above.
• My life is dominated by computer technology (work and play)
• My small audience can be split between those from my personal network, and those coming from the Internet.
• The Internet audience mostly arrives via search engines, so they already know what they want; they’re highly varied in interests.
• My personal network, for the most part, is not as interested in computers as I am.

So I think going back to a two category split: “computers” and “life” seem appropriate names.

It took me awhile to figure out how to get useful hotkeys on Linux without depending on the particular window manager I’m using, so I’ll just drop a note here. I currently use Xubuntu, which defaults to XFCE, but I may run Gnome or KDE from time to time, so I’d prefer not to relearn a new hotkey management system.

I discovered two complementary applications: wmctrl and xbindkeys.

xbindkeys is more traditional; it runs in the background and maintains a mapping of key combinations to programs. Hit the key combination and the program runs. I use it to run my most common applications: typically my browser du jour and a console.

wmctrl modifies the characterstics of existing windows, e.g. minimize, resize. I use xbindkeys to map key combinations to invocations of wmctrl to achieve a couple effects: keystroke to toggle the current window between maximized and not, and a key combination to set the size of the current window to a fixed value. This saves me time during the unavoidable resizing of my browser window for various sites that fit better for different sizes.

After a bit more experimentation, perhaps my workstation has another year to it after all, in contrast to my earlier evaluation of my workstations’ obsolescence. My basic complaint revolved around being unable to run many bittorrent downloads while watching a video.

Linux has long had problems with drivers for “cutting edge” hardware, like the latest video cards. In tinkering with my installation of Ubuntu Linux (Gutsy), I finally concluded that for my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro:

• ATI driver (fglrx) v8.42 gives good GL performance (as measured by glxgears and fgl_glgears), and terrible mplayer performance.
• ATI driver (fglrx) v8.40 gives bad GL performance and good mplayer performance.

I also noticed that using gmplayer, the GTK front-end mplayer, instead of the command line mplayer directly, used about double the CPU (30% v 15%). I use the command line version now.

Further analysis yielded that using the GUI version of bittornado used about 10% CPU per application instance (which is also per torrent due to the bittornado design). Running the console version of the same application yielded about 1% CPU usage. I ended up switching to deluge, which is a lighter application that provides comparable functionality and hosts all downloads in a single application instance (at ~2% CPU).

Watching HD videos is actually possible now!