Technophile Monkey

I like simple editors and use Kate a lot. It’s like Kdevelop, but without all the additional baggage. It does syntax highlighting and indentation just fine, and it has code folding and can comment and uncomment entire text blocks. If an editor has all of that, it’s already making me very happy.

I was curious to see what will change with Kate in KDE 4, so I installed the KDE 4 version today on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), since it’s nicely packaged there. The screenshot above is from that version. Just wow. Text display is crisp and look at those code folding depth indicators (the gradually greener line on the side). When I took the screenshot, I was hovering my mouse over the greenest part, which highlights the block at this depth. The triangles let you fold code, of course.

Beautiful, isn’t it? And they must have done something to text rendering in Qt4, because the text elsewhere in the window looks sharp enough to cut entire horses in half. I can’t wait for KDE 4.1: maybe that’ll be a reason to switch the whole desktop like Shane is currently trying. The least I will do is switch to the KDE 4 version of Kate already

I’ve tried the Xbox Media Center, I’ve tried hooking up a full PC to my TV, but nothing beats the tiny little Popcorn Hour A-100 I just received. It’s silent, only wants 12V of power, has a BitTorrent downloader built-in and can access an internal hard drive if you mount one. It plays Full HD 1080p video smooth as butter in XviD, H.264 (even in Matroska containers), WMV — whatever you toss at it. And it costs less than USD 200.

I have no computer that is fast enough to play 1080p video properly when it’s high-bitrate H.264, but this thing chews through anything without the slightest trouble. It has HDMI, component, composite and S-Video outputs, and you can solder an RGB SCART output to it. You can play data off NFS or SMB shares in your network, off YouTube directly, from Flickr and Picasa and from any attached USB storage device. All my external hard drives are ext3 formatted, and it reads ext3 just fine; it’s the native format of the machine. Hell, it even plays DVD ISO images, with menu support, and you can hook up any external USB DVD drive and use that for DVD playback. Even has an eject button for the external drive.

Perfect media player device for the GNU/Linux user (and extended family)? It’s this.

This is the third time that a French court had to force a PC dealer to return the money for an unwanted copy of Windows. The Slashdot article has some more information in English. The refunds were between 100 and 300 Euros, depending on version of Windows etc.

Do the math. Laptops nowadays often cost under 700 Euros. Laptop makers still bundle Windows and force it down customer’s throats, but if you don’t want that software, return it! It can shave up to a quarter off the price of your laptop, as you can also get a refund for MS Works or other software that was included without asking you. You can then use some other operating system on the machine, or if you want to keep using Windows, you can use your existing license. Tying a license you’ve already bought to a specific laptop you bought it for is also not legal in many countries, so if this happens to you, check out the legal status and sue the company.

If you don’t want to go through all that hassle, I have been selling brand-name (Fujitsu-Siemens) laptops without any operating system for almost a year, at decent prices. Send me an e-mail. We’re working on getting other brands to cooperate, too (HP is next on the list, after Lenovo chickened out).

And this time, the thing has really earned the label “car”. It runs for around 170 km on one battery charge, has side impact protection and two airbags, plus a GPRS system that phones home to Norway and calls your car back for battery changes, which shouldn’t be necessary more than once every five years.

Lovely, no? And it looks like it isn’t vaporware, people in Norway have already bought some of these, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and France seem to be next, then the USA.

Photo is © Think

The Dutch company Phusion has developed an Apache module called Passenger, with the prestige-heavy alias “mod_rails”. This might turn the entire Rails hosting landscape upside down, because Rails application deployment can finally become non-convoluted, non-annoying, non-wasteful.

Here’s an insightful interview with the Phusion dudes Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui.