Virtualbox + xfce

Virtualbox runs Ubuntu very well, especially with Guest Additions installed.

However, one thing that won’t work on it is Compiz. This is because Compiz cannot support the graphics card from Virtualbox.
This means that if you want any sort of desktop effects, you can’t use Compiz, Beryl, or Compiz-fusion.

However, if you only need basic desktop effects, there is a workaround–xfce.

xfce is a lightweight desktop environment that is designed with older or less powerful hardware in mind.

For Ubuntu, the easiest way to install xfce is to go into Synaptics Package Manager, search for xfce, and install the main xfce package from there.

After you do so, log out.  When your login screen appears, click “sessions” and select the “xfce” option.  Log in as normal.

When you finish logging in and xfce finishes loading, right-click the desktop, go to the “Settings” menu, and click “Settings Manager”.  You will then be presented with a grid of options.

To enable desktop composition, click on “Window Manager Tweaks”.  Click on the “Compositor” tab.  Check the box that says “Enable display compositing”.  You can then play around with its options, like making inactive windows translucent, etc.

You can also play around with the other options in the Settings Manager.

Why would you want a compositor besides having some shadows and transparency?

A compositor is often a dependency for many eye candy things.

For example, Avant Window Navigator (AWN), which is a dock (in the style of the Mac OS X one), requires a compositor to work.  AWN can do stacks, reflections, and a whole lot of cool stuff.

Here is a screenshot of my computer.  You can roll up a window to show only its title bar, add transparency to inactive windows, change your theme (I’m using a Mac-like one), arrange the titlebar buttons, make windows snap to each other, and do lots of other cool things.  The screenshot also has a heavily customized AWN bar.

Click for the full size screenshot.

Microhoot Buyout Bid Rejected

STOCKHOLDERS! STOCKHOLDERS! STOCKHOLDERS!

ROT13 and 1337key

EBG13 vf n sbez bs fhofgvghgvba pvcure.  Onfvpnyyl, bar fhofgvghgrf rnpu yrggre bs n jbeq jvgu gur yrggre 13 yrggref qbja.  Orpnhfr bs gur angher bs 13 naq gur ahzore bs yrggref va gur nycunorg, lbh pna qrpbqr EBG13 zrffntrf ol rvgure zbivat sbejneq be onpxjneqf 13 yrggref.  Sbe rknzcyr, “sbegl-gjb” genafyngrf gb “forty-two” va EBG13.

Here’s the translation for those of you not familiar with ROT13:

ROT13 is a form of substitution cipher.  Basically, one substitutes each letter of a word with the letter 13 letters down.  Because of the nature of 13 and the number of letters in the alphabet, you can decode ROT13 messages by either moving forward or backwards 13 letters.  For example, “forty-two” translates to “sbegl-gjb” in ROT13.

Anyway, leetkey is a really cool extension for Firefox.

It allows you to encode and decode in a number of different methods:

1337-speak: f0r7y 7w0

ROT13: sbegl gjb

URL (but it’s not usually very impressive): forty+two

Base64: Zm9ydHkgdHdvoA0=

Hexadecimal: 66 6f 72 74 79 20 74 77 6f a0

ASCII binary: 01100110 01101111 01110010 01110100 01111001 00100000 01110100 01110111 01101111 10100000

Morse code: ..-. — .-. – -.– – .– —

To upper case (not actually encryption): FORTY TWO

To lower case: forty two

Capitalize words: Forty Two

Reverse (as in type backwards):  owt ytrof

DES Encryption (example is encoding with “8bytekey” as the key): Bpg7BTfhroq8ApYx0edomg==

AES Encryption (example is encoding with “8bytekey” as the key): cIT3zRcBITAhITAhLYJVBSWrboDM7co=

As you can see, I really don’t have anything to write about.

Wi-Fi Stealer

Microsoft Office Live

Microsoft sent me a link to a free Microsoft Office Live Basic something something.
Link: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/officelive/FX102436781033.aspx?xid=53F1E29E-6B3C-473E-8938-A2E45DF39F19&ofcresset=1
It’s like a web small business hosting, one free domain (!), and email-thing. Their web site hosting thing has Just like Google Apps for Small Business (Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Page Creator, and Gmail with a special domain).
Roadblocks (for me):
1. Microsoft requires the use of IE. I don’t know what’s up with that.
2. A credit card is required, but is not used; uh-oh. I don’t have a credit card.
3. Address, phone number, birth year, and name are required. The instructions didn’t say that I have to write real information (My sense of ethics allows me to decide when to use my sense of ethics). Phone number: digits of pi.
4. I didn’t get past credit card information, but it says that organization information is needed and a disclosure agreement is at the end. Maybe it will be risky for me to set up a blog or personal website there.

Microsoft Office Live also has this web app for normal users that lets you edit Office (or is it just Word?) documents on the web. Just like Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Did I mention Microsoft Live Maps (with a Streetview-type navigator),
Oh Microsoft, you are so subtle.

In other Google-related factoids, I realized that if you look down in Google Maps Streetview, you can see the top of the Google van that takes the camera around.

Wired

1. Yay! Today, school ended!

2. Today I finished watching all the current Wired Science episodes! In retrospect, the PBS Wired Science podcast (go look it up on iTunes) has all the segments. Therefore, you don’t have to buy the season pass; you can just download it off of iTunes as a vodcast.

3. And now for a complaint about Windows Vista.

I don’t like how Vista “Basic”izes its theme.  For example, in IE 7, the tab bar is made into a blue plastic gradient instead of a black glassy bar.  And in Windows Explorer, the menu bar has that same ugly blue plastic gradient.  And I HATE the fact that the menu bar comes below the top bar.  If they hadn’t made the menu bar so ugly, it never would have had to be so UGLY.  In other applications which use the Windows menu bar type, it is JUST AS UGLY!

This rant was brought to you by Microsoft.  The gratuitous use of the Caps Lock key was brought to you by IBM.

A More Detailed Review of the Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet (Part 1)

This is a more thorough review than my preliminary review.

Okay. I’ve been using my tablet for about two months.

There are a few gripes, a few concerns, and a few great things.

Let’s begin at the beginning.

1. The Thinkpad X61 Tablet is, you guessed it, a tablet. This means that it is more expensive than regular laptops.

2. a. Lenovo bought the Thinkpad division from IBM. This means that you get what was inherited from IBM’s style.

b.Thinkpads are very black. They are relatively minimalistic in terms of color and in terms of business computers. I still prefer the style of the Mac laptops, but that’s just me.

3. The tablet uses an active digitizer stylus. This means that you can have the stylus hover over the screen, and the mouse pointer will follow if the stylus is close enough to the screen.

4. a. All new tablets also have multi-touch. I got an old (August era) tablet. Since

b. The screen is about 12 inches,

c. I got a laptop with ultra-high (1400*1050) resolution monitor without multi-touch.

d. I read that multi-touch screens on the Thinkpad tablet require use of fingernails. One of my classmates has an HP tablet with multi-touch. He requires fingernails. This is not like what you see in the iPhone commercials. I’m also not sure about the type of stylus the new tablet uses. It may be like the Palm Pilot styli (I take Latin, okay?), so you might have to get used to it. The disadvantage of the multi-touch screen is that you don’t get as high of a resolution, if that’s your thing. My resolution makes everything very small.

5. Fingerprint reader! ‘Nuff said.

6. Ports on the left side of the computer:

a. 1 Ethernet port

b. 1 external display or projector

c. 1 USB port

d. 1 PCMCIA card slot

e. 1 SD card reader. Very convenient.

f. 1 place to store the stylus.

7. Ports on the right side of the computer:

a. 1. Power port (obviously!)

b. 1 cable modem (read: dial-up)/phone jack port

c. 1 microphone port

d. 1 headset port

e. 2 USB ports

f. 1 Firewire/IEEE 1394 port (note: this is the small type).

8. I got an 8-cell battery. It is big and heavy compared to the rest of the laptop, but

a. I can hold the computer with one hand using it (it’d be like holding a book by its spine, but the spine is sticking out by a a few centimeters)

b. I can get longer battery life.

8 (cont.). If you want ultra-portable with minimal weight and don’t care about taking your power cord with you (which, mind you, is inconvenient for me), get a 4-cell. Otherwise, get an 8-cell.

9. The built-in speakers are bad. Mono. Tinny-ish. Facing down, which means you can’t decently listen to music with a lap-top.

10. Fan: not the quietest, but much quieter than those awful Dell fans.

11. Touch pad (or lack thereof). No touchpad. Get over it.  Instead, you get a Trackpoint.

12. Screen. It smudges extremely. If you don’t want any smudges, I’d recommend that you not use the touch functionality of this computer. Smudges are also hard to remove.

13. Weight. It weighs about 4 pounds. Ultraportable!!!!!

14. No CD drive. CD drive was taken out to allow for #13. You can buy a $100 dock and put a drive with some other unneeded stuff in there. I’d just get an external cd drive (if you can get a firewire drive, all the better).

15. Keyboard. It’s not as firm as the Dell keyboards. You can wiggle the keys by a millimeter or two. It has great tactile response, though. Very snappy.

16. Tablet buttons. The tablet has a power button, a lock switch for the power button, a screen rotation button, an escape button, a tablet shortcut menu, and a ctrl+alt+delete button. All buttons (except the power button) are configurable, courtesy of Windows Vista. To the right is the fingerprint scanner, which works in both directions. There is also an up/down/left/right/enter keypad-thing, which is good for reading ebooks.

to be continued…

Running Linux on a Windows PC without rebooting

a.k.a. “virtualization”

Look it up on wikipedia.

Instead of installing Linux on an old PC, it is possible to run Linux on Windows.

So, there are two major names out there, and a minor one that I really like (and use).

The first one is VMware. VMware is a company that makes proprietary (read: non-open-source) virtualization software. Two of them are free; the rest are aimed at “enterprises”. The first free one is VMware Player. It’s simple to use. You can’t make virtual machines. In other words, you have to download them. However, there are places that let you make virtual machines. The second free software offering from VMware is VMware Server. This is more complicated, but lets you make virtual machines. I would like to note that VMware does make some modifications to your “my network places” or equivalent.

The second major name is QEMU. It is open source. It works well, and is very simple to use. However, it does not have full support for Windows machines as hosts. I have had problems with this running virtual machines. This is highly configurable, and can achieve some of the functionality of the software I’m going to mention next.

My favorite one is innotek VirtualBox. It comes as open source, though there are some addons (which I REALLY like) that are proprietary. All of this is free, though. Unless you’re one of those Debian types who only uses open-source software, I would recommend downloading the one that’s not “Open Source Edition (OSE)”. (A binary is just a program that’s compiled and ready for you to use). If you’re running it on Windows, make sure you download the version for Windows, not the version for the Linux distribution that you will be using. There are a few things that I really like about VirtualBox:

• It supports using a virtual hard disk. This means that you can install Linux onto a virtual hard drive and not have to “run” it off a .iso file.
• Using “Guest Additions” (available for Linux), you don’t have to have the mouse trapping thing. You can also have shared folders and copying and pasting between the different OSes.
• The network connection goes through your computer’s connection, so you don’t have to worry about proxies and network authentication, especially if your school uses Cisco Clean Access (which is very annoying).

I would like to note that I get BSODs from this.

UPDATE: As of version 1.5.2, I no longer get BSODs from this.

Google Flight Simulator

Google Flight Simulator.

Obviously stepping on Microsoft’s Flight Simulator’s doorstep.

So, what is this thing?

Google flight simulator is an “easter egg” (not really; google’s help site gives controls on how to use it) in Google Earth.

First, you need to download the latest version of Google Earth.

Click on the Earth. Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+A.

This will bring up a dialog box. Choose the plane (currently there are two) you want and choose the runway you want to start on.

The basics:

PgUp is speed up

PgDn is slow down (equivalent to letting the gas pedal in a car come back a little).

The up arrow key is to aim down.

The down arrow key is to aim up.

Left and right keys are really hard to use; they tilt the plane left and right, and it’s impossible to “renormalize”.

I just use Shift+left and Shift+right. They don’t work as well, but they turn the plane.

For explanation of these key shortcuts, go to the Google Earth controls help page (my second link).

What if you found the perfect place to fly (such as Chicago with 3D buildings enabled), but it’s far away from the nearest supported runway?

In the dialog box, you can select “Current position” to fly at that spot. Note that if you’re facing down, the airplane will start out going down.

No, I am not dead.

I’m just very busy.

NEVER try to run Windows Vista on a computer with just 1 GB of RAM.

In other news, I will recommend Terragen as the best (read: the only one I know of) terrain generator and renderer. I’m using it to create backgrounds for my computer.

And no, the rest of those Chicago pictures are not back up yet.