12 hours unto the exams ...

Barely twelve hours remaining. Have finished most of what I had to, and as always, left something for the last day. As we in engineering get ready to face the exams, here is a dialogue from "The Return of The King" :

Thousands of orcs stream out of the (enemy) gates. Aragorn's soldiers look frightened. Many take a step back. Aragorn rides before them.

Aragorn: Hold your ground! Hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan! My brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me! A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down. But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth. I bid you stand, Men of the West!

Question: Who would stand up to play the role of Aragorn among us?

A quest for the perfect Window Manager

Recently, I have been trying to choose a window manager (WM) that will suit my needs. The search has been long, and it's far from over. I hope u don't mind reading through my experience as I went on this quest.

When I first started looking, I was using WindowMaker as my WM. Initially, my "needs" were speed, speed, and speed. I have a 500 Mhz box, u see, and I resent even a two-second delay when I deal with my computer. So I went for a "pure X" WM - FVWM. This WM was *fast*, and the memory usage was the least of all WMs that I tested (about 500kb). However, configuring this WM was a royal pain in the u-know-what. The configuration possibilities were endless, and I seemed to be taking forever to come to grips with them. Why, even getting a keyboard shortcut to work properly took me about ten minutes! Also, fast though it was, it wasn't pretty. There are people online who say that it *can* be made to look pretty as well, I wasn't ready to put in the effort. Not for now, at least.

So the quest continued. I stumbled uppon FVWM95 (an FVWM fork that aims to be a Windows 95 clone). I left that alone. Then came Joe's Window Manager (JWM), which was very small indeed. Compilation : a mere 20 seconds, on MY machine. However, it was far too less configurable. I tried fiddling with the source, and even managed to overcome a deficiency (that of switching to the previous desktop - my first attempt at modifying source), however, there were far too many issues. Then there was IceWM. I can't recall why I left it ... ahh ... yes, the rendering was slow in some cases. Whenever I switched to a desktop with a Gnome app, redrawing was a bit slow. Not acceptable. Also, it had a far too many binaries (executables), one for managing windows, other to set ur backgrounds. Ditto with Blackbox, which needs bbkeys to get keyboard shortcuts working. I also tried Hackedbox, a hacked version of Blackbox, optimized for speed (or so they would have me believe). There was also TWM (comes with all Redhat installations, I think), but it has no support for virtual desktops. I moved on.

I had given up by now. In fact, I had decided to switch back to WindowMaker. Then a thought hit me - whenever I am *working*, I am in the console mode. I even have a console player (mpg123) that plays songs for me (with a randomized playlist, which is important for me :). All I use the GUI for is the internet, and maybe a few games. Not very demanding applications, are they? Then why was I looking for a lean-n-mean gui environment? I decided to revert back to the old console while working, and into the gui only at time of _leisure_. Now that speed is not one of my concerns, "looks" has taken over. While I am at it, I'm trying to get the best gui environment that is out there. I have decided to go back to KDE. Here's a screenshot of my latest desktop. It may not be the coolest one around, but I hope I am getting close!

BTW, notice the wallpaper ... does the lady bear any resemblance to Aniston?

Here's a close-up ...

LOGO interpreter for M$ fans

I had posted about LOGO yesterday. Just so that everyone on the bad side can share the goodness, here's a link for a LOGO interpreter that runs on Windoze. Haven't tested it, check for your self that it works.