Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I've been writing HTML for about 17 years now, hard as that is to believe. I'm not a fan of WYSIWYG editors - I prefer to use text-based editors. It's how I learned, and as far as I'm concerned, usually easier. After graduating from Notepad, the first editor I bought was something called WebEdit Pro, by Luckman. It had a clean, well-organized interface and I used it for several years before I discovered HomeSite. HomeSite , originally developed by Nick Bradbury (who later went on to create TopStyle, still my favorite CSS editor) was acquired by Allaire, who sold it as a standalone editor, and as a repackaged editor for their flagship ColdFusion software. Incidently, the original freeware version, Homesite 1.2 (written for Windows 95), is still out there on the web, though it's gotten harder to find. Its feature set is pretty basic, but it's still usable, and still has fans. Google it if you're curious. I used various versions of HomeSite for a perio...

I'd sort of been wanting a netbook for a while. These dinky little toys will leave some disappointed who are looking for a cheap general purpose laptop. Understanding the design focus is on portability and battery life is key. After shopping around, I finally took the plunge and got an Acer Aspire. It had a new-ish processor (the Atom N450), a 6-cell battery, 1 GB RAM (expandable to 2 GB by swapping the chip) and a 160 GB hard drive. As with many netbooks, it came equipped with Windows 7 Starter Edition , a stripped down version for the modestly powered machines. 1 GB occasionally leaves it gasping for air. I'd made up my mind to dual boot to Linux before I'd even decided on a machine. Enter Wubi . Wubi (Windows UBuntu Installer) lets you install Ubuntu Linux using a Windows-based installer. No repartitioning, no finding an external CD/DVD drive, no blowing away Windows. Download the installer in Windows, run it, choose the edition you want to install and sit back...

Okay -- a follow up on my previous post about KDE 4's apparent memory leak. Despite following the steps I listed I found I was still prone to creeping molasses. Here's what I ended up doing, which seems to have helped. First, uninstalled all of the widget libraries I could locate (relax -- I reinstalled them). Then I went in and basically re-installed KDE 4, using Synaptic. I'll note for the record I don't have a lot of love for the newest release of Adept; it's a sorry downgrade of the version that came with KDE 3. Next I installed OpenBox , which is an alternative window manager. Once completed, I had the option, when logging in, of starting my session with KDE / OpenBox. This substitutes the OpenBox window manager for Kwin , the default KDE window manager, while retaining the KDE look and feel. Compared to Kwin, OpenBox is a light weight . I confess, I can see no discernible difference between the two once I've logged in -- other than the fact tha...

For the last month or so my Kubuntu Linux box has been plagued by a particular problem: after running for a little while it would gradually become more and more unresponsive, to the point of unusability. I'm running Jaunty Jackalope on a pretty quick Intel chip, with 2 GB of memory. I've got a 256 MB NVidia video card to boot -- one previously purchased by youngest son (the gamer). I'd walk away from my desktop and find when I came back it was stuck in molasses. Clicking on a button would do .... nothing. I'd have to hold the mouse button down and wait.  And wait.  And wait . Usually I've found this sort of weirdness can be explained by overheating, but that didn't seem to be the case here. Couple that with the fact that I didn't see the problem when running another window manager and signs pointed to an issue with KDE 4. After suffering through this for a while, I discussed the situation with clever youngest son ( now a freshman computer science / inf...