OK, first things first, stackoverflow.com. This is a joint venture between Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. It’s a programmer’s question and answer site. Probably the best description I’ve heard is

It’s Expert’s Exchange without the suck.

Anyone can ask a programming-related question, and normally an answer will be posted within a few minutes – that’s how active the user community is. It’s likely that there will be a number of answers for any given question, and the asker can select their ‘best’ answer.

If you register on the site (using OpenID) you will collect ‘reputation’ or ‘karma’ points and ‘medals’ as you use the site. Anyone (above a small threshold of karma) can vote both questions and answers up or down, so in theory the best answer should find its way to the top of the list.

Stackoverflow.com has been around for several months now and is proving to be an invaluable resource. Googling for almost any programming-related question will probably get a result on stackoverflow.com.

Just this week serverfault.com has come out of private beta. This is very similar to stackoverflow.com, except that the focus is server, network and system administration rather than programming. Of course, there is a fair overlap between the two sites in terms of users.

You may also be interested in the weekly podcast by Jeff and Joel, which is always worth a listen.

I can heartily recommend both sites – obviously it depends on your focus as to which (if either) will be useful to you.

At work, I can now use 2 screens again, thank goodness

The 2 screen set up is slightly different now to how it was with KDE 3. Previously I had 2 separate X screens defined, one on each physical screen. The downside of this is that you can’t move windows between screens (the mouse pointer is the only thing that can do that). If you have Thunderbird email in one screen and the Firefox browser in the other, when you click on a link in an email message you get a message saying you can’t open another instance of Firefox because there’s already one running. So, the work-around is to just copy and paste the URL between the applications.

Anyway, with my new configuration I used the nVidia configuration utility (nvidia-settings) to configure Twinview. Now I can happily move windows between screens with no problems. Pop-up dialog boxes tend to appear on a random screen, but it’s not a big problem

So, overall, KDE 4.2 is what KDE 4.0 should have been to begin with.

Finally, KDE is back! Congratulations to everyone involved

Fedora 9
To upgrade, I followed the excellent instructions at http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/f9-tips.php. The key point is to use the ‘preupgrade’ package to sort everything out:

yum -y install preupgrade
preupgrade

This downloads new F9 versions of all the RPM packages you have on your system and then sets everything up so that when you re-boot your machine it will start F9.

It’s an excellent idea, and for me It Just Worked.

KDE 4
KDE version 4 is all rather new. Initially I had version 4.0 installed. The biggest drawback to this version was the absence of the Fuzzy Clock. However, I’m pleased to say that on my first ‘yum update’, my system was upgraded to KDE 4.1, complete with Fuzzy Clock. Whilst version 4.0 was looking a bit rough round the edges, 4.1 is a far more polished affair.

One of the new features (on System Settings, Desktop, General tab) is the ability to ‘Enable desktop effects’, which makes the whole machine much more Mac-like in the prettyness of the desktop. However, I noticed that with this turned on, even when nothing else was running, I was using about 50% of my CPU power just to run the desktop. So I turned that off

The other annoyance in KDE4 was the lack of launch buttons on the panel for my favourite applications. This was really getting on my nerves until I realised that the default ‘tab’ shown initially when clicking on the ‘K’ menu button is the Favourites tab. To add things to the Favourites tab just find the application in the labyrinth of menus on the ‘K’ menu, click it with the secondary mouse button and select ‘Add to Favourites’ from the context-sensitive menu. Now all your favourite applications are just 2 clicks away on the ‘K’ menu button.

UPDATE: Neither KDE 4.0 nor KDE 4.1 can cope with dual screen display systems! I’ve seen comments that imply dual screen configurations are very rare and so fixing the problems is not a priority. Boo : -( See my comments below for details.

Units will convert quantities expressed in one unit in to another unit. Here’s an example:


$ units
2439 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units

You have: 12 miles
You want: kilometres
* 19.312128
/ 0.051780933
You have:


So, 12 miles is equivalent to 19.312128 kilometres. OK, that was an easy one to warm up with. Units knows about all kinds of arcane measures and can happily convert between them all. Here’s an example from the man page:


$ units
2439 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units

You have: furlongs per fortnight
You want: m/s
* 0.00016630952
/ 6012.8848
You have:


I actually needed to use units to find out my weight in kilos:

$ units
2439 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units

You have: 20 stone + 1 lb
You want: kilos
conformability error
127.45946 kg
1000
You have:


My goodness, that’s a large number!

Units should be available in most versions of Unix and Linux – just get a terminal session (telnet or ssh for example) and type in ‘units’. As usual, read the manual page by typing ‘man units’.

I’m pleased to report that since the release of version 0.8 of Lightning, and the corresponding update of the Google Data Provider add-on everything seems to be working well. I can now update calendar data in both directions.

This, in combination with GooSync, which syncs the Google Calendar to my mobile phone (a Nokia N95), means all my calendars are now easy to keep in sync.

For work I use a Blackberry 8300, and I’m pleased to say there’s an official Google application to sync the calendar.

Phew! Synchronising calendars has been a surprisingly difficult problem to solve, but thankfully we seem to have licked that particular problem now

The main reason I use KDE rather than Gnome or another system is the Fuzzy Clock. The clock in the lower right hand corner of my screen uses real English to tell the time. So, for example, 11:22 would appear as ‘Twenty past eleven’. The fuzziness is adjustable, but the minimum setting changes the time every 5 minutes, which is more than good enough for most things. This means that the clock will say ‘Twenty past eleven’ until it changes to ‘Twenty five past eleven’.

Recent versions of KDE also include a nifty utility called ‘kbluelock’. When you enable kbluelock, it scans for Bluetooth devices nearby. Select your phone from the list shown, and if your phone ever goes out of range, kbluelock will enable the screen saver, automatically locking the screen. Effectively your phone is being used as a ‘presence detector’ – it indicates if you are at your computer.

This reminds me of the Active Badge system, although that used infra-red technology rather than Bluetooth wireless. I like the idea of using my phone to indicate where I am (within limits