Computers
Interfacing C and Python 3 using SWIG
I like Python, and I use it for almost all of my personal projects and whenever I can get away with it in school. Sometimes, however, (rarely, these days) you’re looking for raw speed. Python, alas, is not the fastest kid on the block, and at these times you might have to turn to a different language to give you the necessary speed. (Another option you might consider first is Psyco.) In these situations it is often the case that only particular operations or functions really have to be fast. Even if you want to write the whole piece of software in C, you might like to use Python to write the front end. There are a lot of different ways to do this, but my favorite is SWIG, because it’s easy and I’m lazy.
64-bit Flash Player!
Today Adobe is releasing an alpha version of a 64-bit Flash player for Linux. I cannot explain how happy this makes me. I have been dealing with shitty 32-bit Flash players running on 32-bit emulation in 64-bit browsers in Linux for about the past five years, and it has caused me nothing but endless annoyance and frustration. Half the time I have to refresh a page a few times because Flash keeps dying, and even when it manages to play it’s a complete coin toss as to whether there will be sound. With my current setup I basically have to close Amarok to play a Flash video if I want to hear sound. Adobe is years late to the party with this one, but better late than never, right?
Seven Document Formats Worse than Scribd
The other day while searching for some LaTeX information I came across this page on Scribd, and I was reminded once again how much I loathe this website. If you aren’t familiar with it, Scribd is a site which hosts various books, articles, and other documents. For reasons that are an impenetrable mystery to me, these people have decided that the way to bring together potentially many different formats of print media is to turn them all into shockwave flash. As in, this beautifully typeset LaTeX document, compiled to PDF, was turned into a scrollable flash…thing. Combine this with the rather sorry state of flash on Linux, and you get just about my least favorite website on the entire intertubes. Just getting it in a Google search makes me almost as mad as getting a link to Experts Exchange.
So, to keep my blood pressure down, I put things into perspective for myself by making a list of seven document formats Scribd could have chosen to use, but didn’t.
Howto: Dual Monitors with Ubuntu and NVidia
Pursuant to my previous post on using dual monitors in Linux, I decided to post a some information that would have definitely appreciated having a long time ago. This specifically covers how get two monitors working in a reasonable fashion in Ubuntu and Xubuntu, but I originally figured it out in Gentoo (and it applies to other distros).
Yet Another Wordpress User
After dealing with spam again tonight and facing the prospect of reworking my captcha and adding user registration, I completely gave up on the whole site-from-scratch thing and have replaced it with the Wordpress site you’re looking at now. I found this process to be very simple and straightforward, and I especially liked all the import options (in my case, I got the articles from my old RSS feed). After spending about an hour changing settings, adding plugins, and tweaking CSS, I think that I’ll be able to live with it.
Facebook Chat, Making My Life More Complicated
When Facebook added the chat feature a few months ago, I found it to be entirely unnecessary. All the people with whom I wished to chat were already in my MSN, AIM, and GoogleTalk contact lists, which are all tied together by Pidgin.
Dear Xinerama: Goodbye, and Good Riddance
Having used many distros of Linux with a variety of graphics cards during the past five or so years, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to get my hands dirty with xorg.conf. When I eventually got an Nvidia card and discovered nvidia-settings, it was great to not have to mess with xorg.conf any more…or not. I still had to read up on xorg.conf options whenever I wanted to do something fancy, but I found nvidia-settings to be a useful tool for generating xorg.confs that I could later modify.
A few years ago I started using two monitors with my desktop computer. In nvidia-settings I had two options for configuring the monitors: either with TwinView or Separate X servers. Separate X servers is hugely annoying, so that was out. TwinView made my window manager (Fluxbox, at the time) think that I basically had one screen. This meant that maximizing applications caused them to fill both screens. It also meant that no edge snapping occurred at the border between the monitors. I have seen experienced the same behavior with TwinView in Xfce. This means that for at least two years I’ve associated TwinView with pure suck.
Spam
I’ve had to disable comments because I’m getting spammed. Unfortunately I’m going to have to put in a captcha to prevent this, so that kind of sucks. I’ll try to do this as soon as I get a chance. Blarg.