{"id":81,"date":"2006-11-04T11:14:34","date_gmt":"2006-11-04T16:14:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dilettantes.code4lib.org\/2006\/11\/04\/upgrading-my-environment\/"},"modified":"2006-11-04T11:14:34","modified_gmt":"2006-11-04T16:14:34","slug":"upgrading-my-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/2006\/11\/upgrading-my-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"Upgrading my environment"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been trying out some new technologies, both at work and at home.\u00a0 Now, this is unusual for me.\u00a0 I don’t generally like environmental change in my workspace– I get hung up on it and have a difficult time focusing.<\/p>\n

This all started with getting set up with Synergy 2<\/a>.\u00a0 For a while, my desk has had three computers on it:\u00a0 my main desktop running Ubuntu<\/span> 64, a headless XP<\/span> machine that I would remote desktop into, and an older iMac<\/span> sitting on the corner of my desk.\u00a0 By adding a surplused<\/span> 17″ lcd<\/span> monitor to the XP<\/span> machine and sliding my iMac<\/span> over, I now have a three window\/3 OS monster with a shared keyboard and mouse.\u00a0 Synergy is pretty freaking awesome in that it allows you to move from one screen to the next and cut and paste between machines pretty fluidly.\u00a0 So now my desktop looks like:<\/p>\n

iMac<\/span> (OSX<\/span>.4)\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 Ubuntu<\/span> 64\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 XP<\/span>
\n17″ widescreen<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 21″ LCD\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 17″ LCD
\nLCD
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 keyboard\u00a0\u00a0 mouse\n<\/p>\n

It hasn’t taken me long to get used to this.\u00a0 I’m doing tasks on each machine that best suit it although I’m having some problems remembering that I can’t drag my applications across windows (something I got pretty used to at Emory).<\/p>\n

My next update wasn’t so successful.\u00a0 I tried to (and right now I’m not sure why) update the window manager on my Ubuntu<\/span> box to use Compiz<\/a><\/span> or Beryl<\/a> (first one unsuccessfully, then the other).\u00a0 This was just a huge mistake.\u00a0 In the effort to gain a little whiz-bang eye candy (I guess I got drunk with my successes with Synergy), I’ve managed to screw up my window manager so that it doesn’t refresh properly anymore (panes will frequently look blank until I mouse over them).\u00a0 \n<\/p>\n

I also figured I needed to get the IE7 update on my XP<\/span> box.\u00a0 I have to say, it’s pretty nice, but I have two complaints about it:\n<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Where are the menus?\u00a0 It’s going to take some getting used to that they’re all nested under one icon<\/li>\n
  2. Those ‘warning’ screens (like if you go to a site without a trusted certificate) are just horrible.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I really like the OpenSearch<\/span> integration, though, and besides having to update our security certs (ugh!), it seems like all of our services work fine with it.<\/p>\n

    While I was at it, I also upgraded Firefox<\/span> to 2.0 on my XP<\/span> machine.\u00a0 Also really slick!\u00a0 The only downside I see to it <\/i>is that OpenSearch<\/span> requires the ‘searching’ site to have an extension.\u00a0 I also grabbed Zotero<\/a><\/span> and updated the Umlaut to make it ‘Zotero<\/span> compliant’.\n<\/p>\n

    So now I’m mainly using my XP<\/span> “window” for web browsing and Last.fm<\/span> (there is basically no plugin<\/span> support for Firefox<\/span> on 64 bit Linux and Last.fm<\/span> is kind of slick on Windows — plus sound is better).\u00a0 I’ve also moved to XP<\/span> for Skype<\/span> when I do Library Geeks<\/a> because:\n<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Skype<\/span> for Linux sucks.<\/li>\n
    2. My iMac<\/span> (which I had previously used) refuses to mute the built-in mic<\/span><\/li>\n
    3. I’ve just flat out had the best luck with it and XP<\/span>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      I still use Firefox<\/span> 1.5.x on Ubuntu<\/span> because I’ve gotta have my Web Developer Extension somewhere.<\/p>\n

      At home we have a not terribly new desktop (AMD<\/span> 2400 or something) and two 1.0Ghz<\/span> iBook<\/span> G4s.\u00a0 On the desktop, we have our own web browser setups by using different browsers:\u00a0 Selena uses Mozilla<\/span> and I use Firefox<\/span>.\u00a0 I’ve updated Firefox<\/span> to 2.0 but I felt bad that Selena is using Mozilla<\/span> (of course, she doesn’t really care).\u00a0 I’m trying her out on Flock, since she’s getting all into our blog<\/span> for Che and Flickr<\/span> and whatnot.\u00a0 We’ll see how that works.\u00a0 I’ve also got my eye on switching the desktop to Ubuntu<\/span>.\u00a0 Selena’s not sold on that.\n<\/p>\n

      The iBooks<\/span> are trickier.\u00a0 First of all, they’re pretty slow.\u00a0 I had to give up on Firefox<\/span> and start using Safari because I couldn’t deal with the performance.\u00a0 The problem is that we run OS 10.3.9, so it’s an older, completely unhip<\/span>, Safari.\u00a0 This makes me constantly on the lookout for something better.\u00a0 I’ve tried Camino (no), Opera (probably not), Firefox 2.0 (seems better) and now I’m trying Flock (in fact, I’m writing this post in Flock).\u00a0 Flock is extremely sexy-cool (I’ve got Art Rhyno’s<\/span> Flickr<\/span> stream across the top and my bookmarks are from del<\/span>.icio<\/span>.us), but if I thought Firefox<\/span> was slow, this will probably kill me.<\/p>\n

      I’ve also been kicking around the idea of Ubuntu<\/span> on my iBook<\/span> \ud83d\ude42\n<\/p>\n

      Blogged with Flock<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      I have been trying out some new technologies, both at work and at home.\u00a0 Now, this is unusual for me.\u00a0 I don’t generally like environmental change in my workspace– I get hung up on it and have a difficult time focusing. This all started with getting set up with Synergy 2.\u00a0 For a while, my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-me","category-two-point-oh-no"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}