CCASIONALLY I get reminded why productivity and Windows remain an oxymoron. Take authoring in research, for example.

Colleague: juggling processes, restoring and minimising active windows, yet unable to cope with the complexity and clutter in the desktop

Over here: 8 virtual desktops

Colleague: needs to convert many images from encapsulated PostScript to PNG. Approach: start bloatware and wait for a little while; Load all images, assuming physical memory permits it; Wait for a long time for images to be rendered; Save images one by one and change file extension by hand.

Over here: a simple 3-line script does all of the above in just seconds. It uses ImageMagick.

Colleague: uses Wordpad for composition and paint.exe for simple graphics

Over here: a decent choice of professional tools

Colleague: figure placement handled by hand, hyphenation not possible. LaTeX is not reliable under Windows as it is not ‘native’

More issues: occasional viruses, FS maintenance, regular reboots (thus restoration of workspace is needed)

I estimate that we save several hours per day by opting for Linux. I am left baffled wondering: how can anyone who uses a computer for work possibly choose Windows? Has the world turned upside down?

I will soon be writing about the transition of a close friend to Linux. He recently discovered a world of power computing and left Windows on the curb. Linux stereotypes are often the main peril.

Google Earth on Windows; screenshot taken
when it was first released; click to enlarge the image

FTER several months of waiting, the Windows version of Google Earth has been ported to run on Macs too.

If I recall correctly, they did the same with Google Talk recently. Will a Linux version be next? That would the real test. So far they have primarily, if not exclusively, catered for commercial, closed-source platforms. Perhaps Google Pack was a key milestone, due to which they could not afford to lose time on ports.

Rants about interoperability have been voiced before although Google’s media player was cross-platform from day one. Google’s clear intent is to remain Open; in fact, all of their Web-based tool are rarely ‘platform-discriminatory’.

A screenshot of Word (Office 12) with copied graphical themes highlighted

PENOFFICE 2 was officially released a few months ago. Microsoft Office 12 will probably be out in the near future and it imitates much of the Mac OS X look, for which it has been criticised. See the above image if persuasion is needed that the contention is true.

Around the release time of OpenOffice, a particular controversial article made the rounds. It described OpenOffice as slow and inferior. Comparisons involving Microsoft Office and OpenOffice were only conducted under Windows, for it seems the only possible platform for benchmarks of this nature. However, it is a ‘home and away’ situation.

Windows is optimised to run Microsoft Office. It keeps many common objects in memory, for which there is a noticeable cost. On the other hand, OpenOffice ‘feels’ most comfortable in its origins: Open Source environments. The Windows OpenOffice version could be treated as merely a secondary port. Moreover, someone claimed that the OpenOffice build which was used in this comparison had been compiled with debugging ‘bits’ which accommodated for bug reports. It was not the final product, but merely a candidate with a practical purpose that entailed improvements.

Judging and comparing office productivity tools on Windows is unfair and grossly biased. It is like assessing the performance of a football team based only on its home games. This is not the first time that biased studies are conducted. Web servers, legacy hardware, and security are a few more examples. There was recently a big controversy over a study which counted security flaws, but compared Windows against many dozens of different Open Source platforms and applications like Apache and Firefox. The miserably-delivered figures were very deceiving, almost intentionally so. Flaws count was aggregated from just about any distribution or derivative of UNIX and then compared against the corresponding number from Windows.

Giving the more professional look to your text

HIS blog item revolves around a wonderful Perl script which can revolutionise the layout of your plain-text messages, giving them looks reminiscent of that found in professional literature. The tool is called the Paragraph Adjuster with Hyphenation and it is of course free.

To give an example of its use, a file I created in ~/Main/Programs/Scripts/indent.sh contains the following:

perl ~/Main/Programs/paradj/paradj.pl --width=74 -h -n -b
     ~/in > ~/out
kedit ~/out

The first command invokes the script from its path and passes it some arguments, which are personalised. The input come from the file in and output is sent to a reserved file (out) which acts as a common container and somewhat of a placeholder. The last command makes the output available to me (on screen) to copy and then paste, often to be used in newsgroups, mailing lists, and rarely in E-mail too.

The script is based on a Perl module that was inherited from T_EX. The L^AT_EX family is rather presentation-aware and smart in terms of its fragmentation decisions. It ‘knows’ when it is reasonable to hyphenate and where added spaces for justification are least distracting. Maybe the same applies to indentation. There are many options in the script, which control the tendencies, the priorities and thus the behaviour of the output.

The command example above hopefully illustrates how simple it is to use the script, as well as invoking it rapidly, without too much manual intervention and input/output ‘piping’. I have also set up a shortcut (CTRL+ALT+7) to convert in to out and then copy and paste onto the required place, so indent.sh need never be called from the command-line.

Example from my most recent use of the script:


The  short  answer:  Windows has  got  itself
trapped. Over the years it has adopted overly
permissive  and  lenient mechanisms that  ne-
glected security. Security seemed like a cost
hat  hindered functionality. Unauthorised in-
stallations and lacking verifications are one
example. ActiveX controllers are another.


Notice that all text lies within a rectangular block. This needs fixed-sized fonts, which cannot be guaranteed by all recipients or readers. If sent to a recipient and read by a mail client, feed reader, newsgroups reader, browser, etc., it may be displayed in whatever form the user prefers, even proportionally-differing font sets.

HIS morning I got myself isolated for 3-4 hours. I spent a long time mechanically erasing unwanted music. At the end, I was 5GB leaner; around 1200 unwanted files were fully disposed of. The existence of so much ‘grabage’ is an artefact of recursive downloads and the procrastination that follows. The approach is based on the accumulation of piles of arbitrary music, then getting rid of the undesirable bits. I concentrated too much of the former part, yet the hard-drive’s capacity has reached its limits.

I finally had the opportunity to take some time off (owing to the holiday), so I got a few mandatory chores out of the way. Now that media files have been filtered, I will have fewer cases of bad music coming up when I change tracks in shuffle. mode The method of music erasure involved a few tricks to increase overall efficiency:

• Deletion from the physical disk directly via the music player (in this case XMMS)
• Deletion in batches of up to 12 files at a time
• Seeking for 5-10 seconds per file using the track poisition bar, thereby getting a sense for what tracks are unwanted and what tracks must stay
• Global shortcuts, particularly for skipping tracks
• Prompts for deletion confirmation – use the ENTER key which is adjacent to the keypad and thus nearer to the mouse. Meanwhile, the other hand (usually the left) hovers near the ALT, SHIFT and CTRL keys to take advantage of keyboard accelerators.
• Use of the playlist highlighter feature (of any) for selecting of multiple items, with the aid of the SHIFT key. This becomes natural after hours of repeated keystrokes and actions.

A big burden has been lifted off me. The result: more free space and improved ‘successful hit rate’ for music.

The next challenge which involves a mechanical-type job is organisation of my references. They tend to float around in different documents and some text files; all in a flat or inline text form, thus no semantics. One needs a better storage form, a better structure, more like a database. Putting some papers on-line has enabled me to use Web searches for quick discovery, but this is far from convenient. I want to embed everything in a BiBTeX-friendly tool. I have been planning organisation under a tool such as JabRef, which I have had installed for a while. Some time in the past I was using EndNote, but soon departed from that lock-in which involves expensive proprietary software and integration with Windows-centric programs.

A 3-D visualisation of virtual desktops
switching under 3-D Desktop (click image above for homepage)

IRTUAL desktops are means of extending one’s workspace. Given the finite size of a monitor, one wonders if that size also imposes strict limits on the (in)visible window environment. Well, it does not. It is possible to treat the monitor as just a rectagular box or a a ‘sliding window’, which metaphrically glances at something much larger. It enables the user to view smaller segments of the whole at any one time. Most commonly, the user would watch only a quarter of the workspace at any one time.

Virtual desktop environments have been available for a long time to Linux user. They will also be officially introduced in Windows Vista, having encountered third-party software that achieved this in the past. Apple Macs have commercial add-ons that achieve the same thing — presenting the users with a pager to control multiple virtual desktops.

The Pager is a small widget which enables the user to select which segment of the screen should be viewed. More specifically, it enables switching from one virtual desktop to another. It often reflects on the content in all virtual desktops. In KDE, for example, the pager contains a schematic of active windows and their positions. In GNOME, it appears to even embed application icons. I used the Pager with virtual desktops about 4 years ago, but not excessively. I needed them when doing some programming jobs, but wasn’t competent with the corresponding CTRL+[1-4] shortcuts, which make the transition between one desktop to another very smooth and rapid.

On to page 2

One of the commonest Web activities involves information discovery and fetching using search engines. It is worthwhile to adopt habits that make that activity a more efficient and productive one. For example, the user can be delivered 100 results per page (in Google at the least). When using GoogleBar, the plug-ins can be configured to get 50 results by default. This is valuable to users on a fast connections.

I am sometimes surprised, on the other hand, by the lacking support for efficient keyboard navigation. Neither Google nor Yahoo use accesskeys in the results page. It always bogs down to having to scroll down (or go to the top of the page) and then aim at the fine numbers to skip to the next page.This is laborious if there are many pages to browse through. Some arrow-shaped buttons exist for that reason in various toolbars, but no keyboard accelerators are bound to them. Moreover, they only accommodate the more basic functions.

I am aware that my request is a ‘power user’ feature, but why not incorporate some keyboard shortcuts (accesskey) to make SERP navigation quicker? It is very simple to implement and it adds just a few bytes to the page. Size-wise, it is affordable even if the large majority of users take no advantage of it.

Related items:

• Universal Accelerators
• Keyboard Accelerators
• Mozilla Firefox Keyboard Navigation