You often hear people complaining about how much money someone else makes. They talk about politicians or football players or anyone else who makes a lot of money (actually, politicians don’t really get that much money). They are envious and want to have that much money too.
But when was the last time you heard anyone complaining about those buddhist monks who achieved happiness? Surprisingly, most people are not envious of them. I’m not really sure why that is so, but I think that it’s because people don’t really want to be happy. They want to have a big house, luxurious car, and many other things, but they don’t actually care about happiness.
Don’t get me wrong here, money is very important for one’s happiness. People who completely lack money are likely to become unhappy as a result. Complete lack of money makes it difficult to get food, place to sleep at and other important things like that. But as long as you have enough money to survive comfortably (ie. not permanently stressed about where you are going to sleep tomorrow and what you are going to eat), getting more money is not going to increase your happiness nearly as much as you might think it would.
I think the key to real happiness lies in consciously and fully enjoying small joys of everyday life. I won’t suggest anything particular, as each of us has to find their own, different small joys.
This is not going to be only about the systems themselves, rather about general (desktop) working environment. As I had to spend substantial amount of time working with Windows recently, I feel qualified enough to share some insights:
What I like in Windows:
- Total Commander: it really rocks, it remembers my ftp connections with passwords, it allows me to use tabs, and it has many other nice features (I just don’t get it why I can’t rename files with F2)
What I don’t like in Windows (sorted by annoyingness):
- Broken clipboard: When I select bloody text I want it in the bloody clipboard. This is just fucking annoying as I have to copy text between apps several hundred times a day.
- No real terminal with real commands: Sure, I can use ALT+F7 <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <space> in Total Commander, but I find “grep” much more comfortable to use than ALT+F7 <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <space>, not only because grep is just four keystrokes and ALT+F7 <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <space> is eight, but also because grep has all sorts of things like -i or -x (those can probably be reached in Total Commander with something like <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <space>, but again, that’s not very comfortable). As for commands I miss, I mentioned grep, but there’s also bc, tcpdump, df, du, top, ps, and that’s just off the top of my head.
- Moving windows with alt: when I hold alt, and press down mouse button, I want the window to move. Especially when the window jumps out on me with its title bar hidden above the top of my screen, as is usual in MS Windows (a colleague suggested a very useful ~5 key combination that helped, but I already forgot what it was).
- Missing package management: want to update all the installed software to newest versions? Out of luck, I guess…
- All those annoying messages that attack me from lower right part of screen everytime I log in.
What I don’t like in Linux:
- General inconsistency in behaviour of different apps (one gets used to it occasionally, though).
- Applications crash much more often (though the system itself stays stable). But it’s getting better (I haven’t experienced gaim crash ever since they started calling it pidgin
, and firefox 2 doesn’t crash anymore either).
- No good filemanager for everyday work.
And now for something completely different:
Yeah, separating different topics into individual posts and all that… never been too good at that…
So, I’m searching for a good Linux filemanager… here are features of the ideal one (sorted by priority):
- Two-panel layout
- Find-as-you-type (without having to press alt key or something to enable it, I have a terminal in the other window, thank you)
- Ability to remember ftp connections (w/ passwords is a big plus). Also, ability not to segfault when one tries to upload a file through an ftp connection that timed out (hello, mc?).
- Lynx-like motion (left and right ascend/descend directories)
- Tabs on each panel (that’s useful when working on many things at once)
- Ability to run in a terminal (not too important, but it surely would be neat)
So far, mc is the best, but it’s still far from perfect (doesn’t remember passwords, segfaults on ftp timeout, no tabs support).
When I saw the link to “badge creator” (marked as new) on flickriver, I knew I just had to add that to my blog. But somehow the side column was too long already…
Making the whole thing wider, adding the second side column and adding my flickriver favourites was the first change (the most work on this one was to change the header picture).
The second change was setting the main text to left-align instead of justify. I spent a great deal of time thinking about whether I should do it, but I really couldn’t decide. So I just decided to use the common advice of the experts (that site seriously rocks, they even hang left quotation signs, and follow just about every other rule which is normally almost unfollowable on the web).
The third change was the most difficult and tedious. I won’t say what it is, but I’ll give you few hints:
- it has something to do with the bits of extra empty space that appeared almost everywhere
- it was especially necessary because of the extra column
- it has a very positive effect on the visitor, although 98% won’t even realise it
Can you guess what the third change is?
Why oh why do native speakers suck at spelling so much?
English people are notorious for making the most basic mistakes. Your/you’re and their/they’re/there win shared first place for the most annoying and stupid misspelling. It twists the meaning and shows that whoever wrote that can’t even grasp the absolute basics. Also, if your keyboard features the apostrophe, please differentiate between its and it’s.
Another pearl is when people use “of” instead of “have”. Not in “I of a dog” (surprisingly, no one writes that), but much more in “could of” or “would of” (makes me feel like poking my eyes out).
Except/accept, where/were, loose/lose (if you ever “loose a game”, something is seriously wrong with you), principal/principle, quiet/quite… wtf…?
Sadly, English speakers are not alone. I’ve just seen someone repeatedly saying “żucił” (instead of the correct “rzucił”) in certain Polish chatroom. Luckily, I knew the correct spelling and readily corrected that horrendous mistake. But what if I hadn’t known…?
Sincerely, I don’t care about your spelling. What I do care about is my own spelling. And I learn to spell from — you guessed it — native speakers. So, when they fail, I do, too.
After you of read this post, I think your definately not going to make those grammer misteaks again.
PS: Having written that, I expect to make a very serious Czech spelling mistake during the next 24 hours… Karma is a bitch. 
As we all know, Flickr is the best photo sharing site (if you haven’t heard it yet, Microsoft is buying Yahoo, who own Flickr… so there’s a very real possibility that Microsoft will kill Flickr, which would make me hate them even more). Almost unbelievably, the flickr source is only 60k lines of php and 60k lines of templates… I’ve seen 10k lines files that didn’t do anything useful. The fact that all of the Flickr’s functionality can fit in 60k lines is simply amazing.
Flickr has the best features and — even more importantly — best photographers and best photos. Flickr Explore shows some of the most interesting, provoking and artistic photos.
And the best way to view any Flickr galleries (including Explore) is Flickriver. It’s currently my most favourite site on all the internets.
Why Flickriver rocks:
- Infinite scrolling (aka river) enables you to get to see more photos simply by scrolling to the bottom. No more clicking “next” and “previous”! (I absolutely hate paging, having everything on one page is just perfect)
- Black background just makes it look good. Show me a photo that looks better on white background and I’ll show you a hundred that look better on black background.
- Larger image previews are much better than the small squares you usually see on flickr, you see the full uncropped picture, and you see it at a size which actually enables you to recognize what is displayed on the picture.
At least once a week, I visit Flickriver and go through at least top 50 explore photos from each day since my last visit. I’ve been doing this for several months yet I’m amazed over and over again how perfect photos there are.
Give Flickriver a try, I’m sure you won’t regret it!
Oh, and I can highly suggest viewing my favourite photos (mostly falling into at least one of these categories: hdr, landscapes, mist/fog, cities, conceptual).