Memo to Self: Circuit Macros

Wenn man gpar_ verwendet und im Label eines Bauelements ein Komma ist – dann muss man das zweimal Escapen aka “,”. Sonst sucht man (ich) 2h+ und wird extrem sauer.

*grmpf*

Gentoo + Xmonad

Last week, while I was having a slow evening with Mr Nicolaus, I went on to clean up my gentoo installation After a short while of trying to clean out the leftovers of the switch from KDE to Gnome, I decided to do a new clean install.

I have to admit I really liked KDE4 but it never ran smoothly on my old 2003-ish Toshiba Satellite notebook. The desktop would regularly crash, so I switched back to gnome. But still the performance was really low.

Shortly before Christmas I had a very inspiring conversation with my sister’s boyfriend: he told me about Xmonad. And he really liked everything running fastly. So after I emerged gentoo and X and finally found out that a blank screen and a 4-line-config file is perfectly normal currently, I started emerging Xmonad just moments ago.

So here’s the next question: going for a lightweight installation, I am still contemplating whether I should go for gtk+ or qt libs?

Twitter

Ok – you want to know how to get me? Give me some technical gadget, I don’t care whether it is hardware or software, whether it is new or older than me – I will play with it. To cut a long story short, I have a twitter account from today (http://twitter.com/papilio_niger), because maybe that’s something nice.

Just started playing … *happy me* 😀

Print to File

Printing documents from the Acrobat Reader can be a real pain in the rear end. My thesis has some pages at the beginning, which do not have page numbers and the Reader simply cannot handle printing those pages correctly.

But I noticed, you could print to file. Cool thing – and for free and without additional software. Nice guys over at Acrobat – at least I thought. Big BUT: the file is a page maker file. Guess what: Software to open this file is not for free – of course.

Thesis update: printing first preliminary version – still a looooooooooong way to go. Anyway, 70+ pages are 70+ pages. Could be worse.

Data security

Data security has to be improved. Yep, I’ll go with that, even if I don’t know exactly what triggered the new improvement ideas for data security. But I’m always fine with improved data security.

My supervisor wanted to show me the wiki page explaining the necessary steps. Guess what?

403 Forbidden

Of course you can also secure data by not giving it to your colleagues! 😀

Made my day!

Word 2007

… or whatever this annoying piece of software is called right now.

I never liked to use programmes associated with the Microsoft Office bundle. When I was a young and naive computer beginner, I started using Open Office. Because it was free. Because somebody said something about open source, which I did not understand, but using it was cool. That was a long time before I discovered the two big Ls (Linux and Latex).

During the last year I had to use Microsoft Word and its colleagues. Why? Because the company I worked for demanded it. So I used it. And because it was pretty close to Open Office I did not have many problems to grow accustomed to it. Most probably it is the other way round: Open Office has its look-and-feel from the pre-2007 versions of Microsoft Office.

So now on my new work pc at university there is this all shiny and glossy new office software. And what should I say? It can be as shine and glossy as it wants – I hate it. It sucks. It does not carry many reminders of its previous versions, besides still being a programme to write texts with.

The GUI has been rearranged completely. Nothing is, where it used to be. Why do people do that? I am by no means a Word-crack. But what about people, who have been using this programme for years? What about them, when even I am soooo pissed and it annoys me so much, I could bite my desk?

This is the thing, which annoyed me most (and which made me use very inappropriate language on my computer):
In Word one can display characters such as spaces and line ends and tabs. Well, once it was a button, which one clicked and everything went fine. It still is a button, but when you click it, it says “I can’t do that because macros have been disabled.” Then it offers help and such stuff. Hellohoooo? Who enables macros on a text document? So you try to find out how to enable macros, right? Right. There’s this nice ‘Help’ button in the message box. So why don’t we have a look there? Good idea, one might think. But obviously someone thought it was great to give a lecture on why macros are dangerous and how they can damage your system. Thank you.

So you start using the Microsoft help system. As long as you are working offline, there’s not much to be found. So you ask for online results – and using the internet explorer (worse than Word!) you have to confirm for every page of the Microsoft online help that you really requested it, because the internet explorer has marked these sites as non trusted! Nice to know, that not even Microsoft products trust their creators.

So for everybody thinking ‘well I don’t need to have tabs displayed – why should I care?’: Printing also requires macros to be switched on.

I’ll have some potatoes with my desk, please. And could somebody hand me some salt? Thanks.

Math Girlfriend

I found this at bash.org:

<tgr> i told my girlfriend that she’s “math girl, doer of math: unable to integrate with society, only with functions of x”
<tgr> and guys, this is why she’s my girlfriend. she said:
<tgr> “i could do a u substitution…”

😀 Made my day!

PC Blues II

I HATE WINDOWS VISTA! I fucking hate this fucking operating system!! It has no backwards compatibility and yes – to hell with its fucking compatibility mode!! It does not work! For all those nice microsoft programmers out there: it is crap, it is buggy! I have to redownload every fucking programme I am using! I have better things to do than watch this crappy operating system crash on crobat reader 7 because it is too old – but hey no problem – you may install it but you may fucking never RUN it.

Well – NICE to know, that I am supposed to have software installed just to look at fucking desktop icons!!!!

This is a fucking working pc with a business version operating system! HELLOOHOOOO! I want software which is not outdated like hell to run!

*WAAAARGHHHH*

And then you are nice and kind and download the next version. You may not fucking install it because this operating system finds the programm running and does not tell me where! It is not in my tasks, nor processes nor open nor fucking NOTHING!!!!! Who thought about that?!?

THAT’s why I  hate windows!

PC Blues

Today I had to reinstall windows on my pc. For the third time in two months. I know, people say things like ‘my windows has been running for half a year without error, I have to reinstall’, but honestly I’d prefer my windows system to work that long before crashing!

Even more, windows XP did not ‘want’ to install: Blue screen says ‘get yourself a new BIOS from your vendors homepage’. Like – HOW? Should I plug my finger into my router and save the data in my brains? Am I a shadowrun decker? No, thanks. Damnit.

So now I am running windows Vista – not better but running and fast to install.

Memo to self: after I finished my diploma thesis, I will upgrade my PC (second harddrive and stuff) and I will install Gentoo on this PC – and only some small windows for gaming.