Multiple Desktops

Today's Views:

Not news, views. AAPL Undervalued?

I know a couple things about stock prices. One is that rising EPS is a good thing. The other is that today's price of X is the price at which exactly half the people on Wall Street think X is overvalued while the other half believes X is undervalued. This is good to remember when you read an analyst who is in the undervalued camp. Half the people on Wall Street, and there are some very smart people on Wall Street, disagree.

Multiple Desktops:

I have a nice big desk and I keep it organized. This is good. Having several nice big desks would be better. Each project I am working on would have its own desk. Books, papers, 3D models, whatever would be on its own desk. Changing from project A to project B wouldn't require putting A's stuff away and opening B's stuff. I'd just move from desk A to desk B.

This is exactly what I have in Linux. I press Ctrl+F3 for this blog. Ctrl+F4 gets to my personal website. Ctrl+F11 gets to my Decaf language project. Almost all my desktops have a browser open, but none have the same tabs open. Most have a text editor, but each editor has different files open. I use 12 desktops (max: 20, but even 12 may be too many). Some have spreadsheets; some have pictures.

Multiple Desktops in Windows:

Windows sucks you back in like a black hole. Google SketchUp, for instance, runs in Windows and OS X, but not Linux. You want SketchUp Rubies? Any language you want, provided you want Ruby and any OS you want, provided you don't want Linux. Windows does not have multiple desktops.

Hold on. Windows has multiple users. Each user has a single desktop. Many users times one desktop each looks a lot like multiple desktops!

In Linux, Ctrl+Fx switches to desktop x. There's also a little display of an array of desktops where one mouse click switches. In Windows that's Start, Logoff, Switch User and then click on user. But if you hold down that special key with the windows logo and press L, you've got Start, Logoff, Switch User all at once. It's only a single click more difficult than Linux.

So go ahead and create a "User" for each of your projects. You will be very happily surprised at how nice it is to return to a browser with a handful of tabs open related to the project. And at how convenient it is to not have to put one project away to work on another.

You do have 2GB of RAM, don't you?

Today's News:

Let's get to the really critical issue of the day: Will Windows 7 or Snow Leopard have better wallpaper? They're really on top of things at Fortune.


Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7: The War of the Wallpapers

The article's link to MSFT's wallpapers got you to its financial results, not its wallpaper. Use this one, instead.

I recommend that you get a camera and make some of your own. Here are a couple of mine: Catskills in Winter, Fall Scene from Kayak. (Big, fat files. Sorry.) The secret to good amateur photos? Take lots and lots. Then throw most of them, almost all of them, out.

Linux Desktops

Linux has two graphical front ends, GNOME and KDE. Free software champion Richard Stallman created a Unix workalike, naming it GNU (GNU is Not Unix). GNOME, (originally GNU Object Model Environment), and KDE (originally Kool Desktop Environment) are both excellent desktops. Both disavow their original acronyms.

I started with, and still use, KDE for the simple reason that it came preinstalled, as Windows typically comes. The computer was so cheap that I bought it just to satisfy my curiousity about Linux. Was it really as reliable as people said? Would the learning curve be steep?

Yes, it works for months at a time and no, there was almost no learning curve. I turned it on and started using it. A big button labelled "Launch" looked like it would be similar to MSFT's "Start" and it was. I was soon in familiar software: Firefox and Open Office. Then I found the Konqueror browser/explorer replacement. Firefox is maybe five years behind and Windows Explorer is utterly primitive by comparison.

I have learned to open a command window and use a handful of the original Unix commands, but this is no more necessary than using the DOS window in Windows.

What I have learned to love most, and even sort of simulate when I have to go back to Windows, is the multiple desktop feature. More on that, soon.

Open Office

Are you still paying Microsoft for its Office software? Why? It will not be long before you are asked this question by one of your directors whose own organization has switched successfully. The only acceptable answer is, "We're in transition right now. We'll be fully converted before the current licenses expire."