timbenke.de

The thing I always miss most on Windows is the command line — well and Spotlight, but that’s for another post. And if you look at the cmd.exe, its just extremely badly done. It’s a fixed font, fixed width window with way too small font. I don’t want to go too much into detail, but it’s very lacking. Even the newest and greatest Windows has this bad terminal emulator/shell.

But oh brother, there’s salvation! The mighty god of open-source software development has blessed us with two great pieces of software: “Console2″ and”bash”. “Console2″ offers what any other old terminal emulator already has,holy!, even xterm is better than cmd.exe! Sure you might mention that there’s at least Powershell (Can you think of a cheesier name?), but then you’re still stuck with the terminal emulator cmd. Ok, so Console2 has configurable windows size, variable font, coloring and tabs. And the greatest thing for me is that I can even select text with this extremely modern device called a mouse! I always get so exited when I have the chance copy something by selecting and pasting with the middle mouse button.

And then there’s this other little thingy called bash. Using cygwin you can actually get a hold of this extremely powerful UNIX shell. There’s a whole lot of examples how to write in its little language in comparison to the embarrassed giggles that you receive when you ask somebody if they knew how to use the “Powershell”. Ok, so bash is what you want as a shell, seriously. It’s standard on the mac and virtually all Linux distributions. It also has tab completion how god intended it, because it does not just stumble through all the files in a directory but lists all possible completions if there is no unique one.

Ok, to make this hopeless rant helpful for you here are some tips to get a nice terminal in Windows:

- Install Console2 and Cygwin
- Setup an entry in your explorer context menu to start a shell where ever you want (the inverse direction is even simpler: “explorer.exe ./”
- Familiarize yourself with the command “cygwinstart” (it’s the equivalent of Mac’s open command): it automagically opens the correct application for a specific file extension
- If you’re using Eclipse get the EasyShell(update site) plugin and setup to start a Console2 bash; After this thread, I found a way to specify it:

1. add the cygwin/bin directory to your PATH variable
2. in your bash startup files (/etc/profile, /etc/bashrc, $HOME/.bashrc, $HOME/.bash_profile) remove any commands that change the directory on startup, suchs as cd $HOME and so on
3. in Console define your bash tab configuration to start bash –login -i
4. start console2 with a command “ /Console.exe -t “” -d “” (in easyshell this should be {1})
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There’s something very appealing about widescreen displays and TVs, the wide ratio just seems more natural to the human eye my father always told me. Maybe it has something to do with our past, in which the prehistorical hunter scanned the savanne for game. Who knows..

The trend in recent years goes more and more in this direction and there are a lot of 16:10 and recently some 16:9 displays have surfaced. But the newest “invention” are “cinema ratio” displays wiht a 21:9 resolution. Apart from the different window behaviour needed for this, there’s another issue to be considered here: lost screen estate.

This applies to the common diagonal length comparison. It seems intuitive that if you keep the diagonal constant and  the more you increase the width/height ratio, the smaller the actual screen area gets.

Here’s a small python script that computes the screen area for any given diagonal and the ratio:

def ca(e,ratio_shorter_over_longer):
    ratio = ratio_shorter_over_longer
    b = math.sqrt(1.0/(ratio**2 + 1)) * e 
    a = ratio * b
    return a*b

I’ll spare you the simple mathematics to simplify this to compare two ratios with each other. The result is:

def cr(r1,r2):
    Ar1 = r1/((r1**2) + 1)
    Ar2 = r2/((r2**2) + 1)
return Ar1/Ar2

For example cr(10/16.,3/4.) gives 0.93 = 93%. For the other ratios you get:
16:9 vs. 4:3 = 89%
21:9 vs. 4:3 = 75%

Since about a year IMAP has become widely available with free email providers. See GMX and gmail. That’s why I decided to abandon my old payed email account at fusemail. Now to backup your emails there a couple of open-source projects that store your emails (archivemail, imapbackup.py and offlineIMAP). I finally settled for offlineIMAP because it has the most interface options and supports incremental backups. Incremental backups were very important to me because the other programs seemed to hang from time to time and had to restart the whole backup process all over again.

This might be due to my flaky Wifi connection; YMMV.

Offlineimap only backups in Maildir format. Unfortunately most GUI email clients like Mail.app or Thunderbird by default only support mbox format for importing mails. I found a small script that converts mails from Maildir to mbox format using the command formail from the projekt procmail.

Using this command the conversion is extremely easy. I’ve written a small script that should be executed from the parent directory of the backed up Maildir folder with maildir2mbox.sh <foldername>:

for i in $1/cur/*;
do formail -I “Status: RO” <”$i” >>$1-mbox;
done
for i in $1/new/*;
do formail -I Status: <”$i” >>$1-mbox;
done

The resulting <folder-name>.mbox files can be easily imported into either Thunderbird or Mail.app. Another possiblity for import to Thunderbird.app is the Add-on ImportExportTools. Which recognizes the mails from Offlineimap if you add an .eml extension to their filenames.

There remains the problem that mails for special folders like drafts or templates are imported like normail emails in e.g. Mail.app. A simple solution to this problem is to drag them to the drafts folder in a local POP3 mailbox or on another remote IMAP mailbox.

Studies have shown that theachers in the US did not increase their efficiency with the help of of computers: in the double-blind experiments (I ask myself how they did that) the effects were negliegible or evene negative. The bottom line seems to be that a teacher can achieve the same efficiency without any technology.

The university in Waterloo I have see many CS professors that followed this idea and presented using only a white board. Depending on how prepared they were, this approach was successfull. On the other hand most of them had no special presentation training in their career and might not have learned the essential skills for good powerpoint presentations.  I’ve only once taught a series of tutorial sessions on a black board and found it extremely hard to keep my line of thought while at the same time writing or drawing something on the board. Additionally I find it very tedious to draw any kind of diagram on a board (think how funny it is, when the lecturer needs 2 minutes to draw a circle). At the same time you have up to 40 eyes staring holes in your back and waiting impatiently for you to finish.

So for me it’s not really an option to learn all the skills necessary to give very good computer-less presentation and I find that I can spend my time much more efficiently honing my powerpoint skills.