Hacking on Tomboy

For the past few days I’ve been hacking on Tomboy. For those of you who don’t know, Tomboy is a note-taking application from the land of Linux. It’s extremely well done because it has a very minimalist user interface and does exactly what it advertises. I just press Ctrl + Shift + N, and a new note appears on my screen. I type whatever I have to jot down and then close the window. There is no need to press save or to say where you want the note to be stored. That’s what the program is for. There are tons of really nice features that you don’t even notice at first. I highly recommend it for people who are looking for something like this.

It was written using Mono C# and was, for the most part, gracefully ported over to Windows. However, the UI toolkit it uses is GTK+, which I have found to be very subtly broken on Windows, with bugs that are difficult to reproduce. I’ll just give one example. Tomboy has a tray icon which you can click on, and a menu pops up with a list of your recent notes. If you decide against opening any notes, you might want to click elsewhere on the screen to make the menu go away. You’ll be out of luck though. It won’t go away. This bug was reported to the GTK+ team in November 2006, and it’s still not fixed.

Thankfully, a knowledgeable figure by the name of Raphaël Godart found a way to work around this bug. I tested his patch yesterday, debugged a couple of issues with it, and turned it back in to the Tomboy team. Hopefully it will be included in the next stable release. I, however, can take advantage of the patch straight away, which is awesome.

One last cool thing about Tomboy.

An addin that lets you type math equations in Tomboy using LaTeX.

What you see here is a note where I have typed a bit of math. You input it by writing LaTeX code surrounded by \[  \], and when you move away from the code, Tomboy automagically turns the code into a picture. Placing the cursor over the picture turns it back into code for you to modify. It took a bit of effort on my part to get this addin to work on Windows. I hope to finish it up and send my work back to the author, so others can use this.

I used to take notes in math class using LaTeX. At the end of one semester of class, I had 39 pages of notes in a pdf file. Having the notes in Tomboy would have been much cooler though. And more organized.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377416

Intrusive software

I’d like to take a minute and complain about one instance of software that did things to my computer which I didn’t expect. I’m not talking about a virus where the transgression is fairly obvious. I’m talking about Silverlight – one of the less successful attempts of Microsoft to take over the web. Even though few web sites use it, Microsoft, of course, uses it prodigiously on their own. One web site that I frequent is the Tuva project, created by Microsoft, which hosts a video collection of Dr Richard Feynman’s lectures on physics, and instead of Flash Microsoft opted to use Silverlight to deliver the video.

My computer is fairly slow, so web video causes it some discomfort, but while watching the lectures I found that any other program (apart from the browser) that I try to use at the same time is completely unresponsive. The reason for this is because the moment the page loads the Silverlight component, the priority of the browser’s process is increased from “normal” to “above normal,” and as it pegs my CPU at 100%, no other program can function. Job well done!

Richard Feynman quote about nature

Nature only uses the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Dr Feynman is referring to the fact that if you can find a simple mechanism that explains a complex system, then you can expect that mechanism to work in other places, possibly throughout all of nature. You can explain the motion of the planets around the sun with Newton’s theory of gravity and then notice that that same theory works for humans being pulled toward the center of the Earth, and that our solar system orbits around the center of the Milky Way. Thus, an example of the “small piece,” to which he is referring, is gravity.

Insight into grad student’s life

I saw this on a grad school oriented forum. I thought it was hilarious, but go ahead and judge for yourselves.

In my department in grad school (not humanities) we were told by our director of grad studies that we should aim for A-’s because anything less meant we didn’t work hard enough in our classes and anything more meant we didn’t work hard enough at our research, such that we had too much free time to spend on our classes.