dmg's home page

I get tired of the little keyboards in the small devices (or lack of). Why don't hardware manufacturers use the back of the device for input?

Yes, it is not trivial. People will have to adjust to "touch type". but the real estate of the back of devices is huge (think my laptop in tablet mode). It can easily hold a small keyboard, or another new type of control device that will change the way we interact with our portable devices. The same applies to phones. Their back is usually wasted, except for a camera, in the best of cases.

Hardware manufactures, I want the back of my devices to have an input device!

--dmg

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/science/19essay.html

--dmg

Polaroiods with a Speed Graphic.

“You don’t need a lot of stuff to make a shot. You don’t need lights and tripods. Just look at your subject, look at the light and shoot. You don’t need to take a thousand pictures to get a good picture. You need one good picture. One shot."

“Most photographers don’t have a good picture of themselves,” he explained. “They think nobody can take as good a picture as they can. So, I prove them wrong. There’s good money there.”


I want my photo taken!



--dmg

@article{ 10.1109/MS.2009.10,
author = {Michael W. Godfrey and Ahmed E. Hassan and James Herbsleb and Gail C. Murphy and Martin Robillard and Prem Devanbu and Audris Mockus and Dewayne E. Perry and David Notkin},
title = {Future of Mining Software Archives: A Roundtable},
journal ={IEEE Software},
volume = {26},
number = {1},
issn = {0740-7459},
year = {2009},
pages = {67-70},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2009.10},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}

Some opinions more interesting than others. My take:

- Mike: Get the users to create data that can be stored. And to better
understand the questions that are asked.

- Ahmed: let us look at repositories as assets (I think we already do
this)... Add APIs to repositories... more advanced
repositories.... (show us the money!)

- James: visualization and better exploration tools.

- Gail. Let us store more history (which brings the question... wouldn't
that be illegal under Canadian laws...)

- Martin: Let us learn from past searches (his was the one that I liked
the most)

- Prem: social aspects (and a small plug to Peter's work)

- Audris: Models (he refers to work I have been thinking
about... ownership)

- Perry (the only person in this group I don't know): MSR is a
researchers, not a practitioners field (I have been saying this for a
long time)

- David: Causality, something that many researchers in MSR forget.

Something we should not forget: Mike, Ahmed, Gail and Martin are Canadian researchers in Canadian Universities.

--dmg

My latest modification to xournal is the ability to open the same PDF in evince, and a menu option to open the same PDF (when annotating one) in Evince. This way you can cut and paste text from the PDF (a feature that does not exist in xournal).

Available in my fork of xournal: http://github.com/dmgerman/xournal


--dmg

A day after I claimed I did not align with her reviews, she offers a piece that exudes her love for the medium, and I could not agree more.

I rarely go to the movies these days, but out of the last 4 times I did, 2 were to see Batman in Imax, and one to see Avatar in 3d (the last one to see Coraline in 3D, plus one attempt at the Imax to see Star Trek, but it was sold-out). I soo much wish one day to see Avatar in 3d in Imax. Our movie theaters are too small to properly cover
my field of view (the old rule of the width of the view should be twice my distance to the screen). Avatar will be shown in iMax in Victoria, but I don't think with 3D. I'll have to check...

--dmg

How NOT to review a paper: the tools and techniques of the adversarial reviewer
is an entertaining paper that invites for self reflection. A must-read for anybody who has to review a paper in computer science.

--dmg

I need to be able to open xournal files (and pdfs) in a given page. This is part of trying to be able to use remember and org with PDFs.
Here is my patch to do it:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2924825&group_id=163434&atid=827735

It is already committed to my own personal fork of xournal

--dmg

This is old news... but new to me...

Being the owner of one of Donald Knuth's cheques, I am sadden by the fact that he no longer writes real ones. They are not replaced by a digital certificate and a fake cheque.. His cheque is without question my geekiest memento. Yes, mine is framed.

-dmg

If you are trying to get org-protocol to work under Ubuntu, the instructions will not work.

if you have tried to enable org-protocol under Firefox you might run
into the issue that firefox does not start emacsclient, no matter what
the about:config variables say.

After spending some time I discovered that this is an issue of Firefox's
integration with Gnome. What you need is to tell Gnome that you have a
new URI protocol called org-protocol, and that emacsclient is
responsible for it. This is done with the following two commands (be
careful to indicate the correct full path of emacsclient):

gconftool -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/org-protocol/command -t string '/usr/bin/emacsclient %s'
gconftool -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/org-protocol/enabled -t boolean true

--dmg

If you use sawfish you might find my modules useful:

http://turingmachine.org/hacking/sawfishLisp

dmg-gpsy : it makes it easy to use grow/pack/shrink/yank window

dmg-iswitch-window : similar to the way to switch buffers with emacs. It provides a list of the focusable windows currently in the window manager and allows you to use a regular expression to narrow the list, and select one. Way faster window switching than any other method in any window manager. Variants allow switching by class, within class, and all windows.

dmg-quadrants : a very basic and rough set of tiling functions for your screeen.

dmg-after-rotate : provides support for autorotation. Very handy if you use sawfish with a tablet.

--dmg