By
sarah
29 Nov 2001
I listen to history
<p>reflected in your smile.</p>
<p>A geek moment.</p>
<p>You state your position;</p>
<p>pomulgate the way-things-are.</p>
<p>But I only see the pulsing </p>
<p>vein at your throat,</p>
<p>and smell your sanguine essence</p>
<p>in a zig-zag structure of life.</p>
<p>Cells floating in an n-dimensional </p>
<p>space of memory and desire.</p>
<p>An intersecting lattice of </p>
<p>broken dreams, piercing</p>
<p>minds and deflating memory.</p>
By
sarah
29 Nov 2001
When Anders plays,
<p>thraxil sings.</p>
<p>And I’m afraid.</p>
By
jerfunfin
29 Nov 2001
a co-worker just found a test tape from a video shoot we did last year. I am the subject in front of the camera (what a goofball). It’s a short clip of me with the Prof. we were to interview in the backround. I am lacking the goatee and peachfuzz I now don.
<p><a href="http://thraxil.dhs.org/users/jerfunfin/me.ram">Enjoy!</a></p>
By
anders pearson
27 Nov 2001
i mentioned in my diary a while back that i’ve started using ion as my window manager on my work machine.
<p>take a minute and go look at the ion site and look at the screenshots.</p>
<p>ion uses an entirely different approach to the <span class="caps">GUI</span> than your standard mac/windows/gnome/kde interface. everything is based on frames and tabs rather than windows. windows don’t really exist. you can’t have apps stacked partially on top of each other in ion. far from being a limitation, i’ve found this to be a serious improvement. it meshes particularly well with the tabbed browsing of mozilla and <a href="http://galeon.sourceforge.net/">galeon</a> (mozilla’s support for tabbed browsing still has a long way to go but galeon is a dream). with ion, i spend no time at all moving windows around and trying to find the right app or browser window. furthermore, the frames + tabs approach lends itself to much more efficient keyboard shortcuts than traditional <span class="caps">GUI</span>s which also tends to make it faster to use. no matter where i am, i know that with my desktop setup i can hit ‘alt-f1’ and see my email, ‘alt-F2’ and have my browser in front of me or ‘alt-f3’ and have emacs up. no alt-tabbing through the 15 browser windows i have open at any given time searching for the icon that corresponds to my ssh session to the email server. it’s just right there; the shortcut is already hard-wired into my brain so i don’t have to think about it anymore.</p>
<p>to get the most from ion, you really have to take the time to learn all the keyboard shortcuts and to experiment and customize your setup to the way you work (you can customize pretty much anything about ion by editting one or two config files (even more if you’re comfortable writing a shell script or two)). expect this process to take a few days.</p>
<p>since ion is still under development, it’s fair to say that it still has room to grow. right now, if you want support for “sticky” apps (ones that stay on screen in the same place no matter what; such as an icq client, clock, or system monitors), you have to apply a <a href="http://rt.fm/ion/archive/2001-11/0051.html">patch</a> to the source yourself and recompile. </p>
<p>you also run into the problem that there are a few apps (such as <a href="http://www.gimp.org/">the gimp</a>) that make assumptions about how the window manager behaves that turn out to be false with ion. eg, the gimp uses a different window for each palette and toolbar which turns into a mess of tabs in ion and some image viewing apps don’t know how to handle it when their “window” is resized to fit a frame in ion, stretching the image incorrectly. the workaround for these kinds of problems is to use <a href="http://www.xfree86.org/4.1.0/Xnest.1.html">Xnest</a> to run a seperate X session inside a frame and then run a lightweight but more traditional style window manager (<a href="http://blackbox.alug.org/">blackbox</a> is my favorite of those</a>) on it to handle these rogue apps.</p>
<p>ion certainly isn’t for everyone (“you mean you actually have to <em>learn</em> something to use it?”) but it’s a good example of how interfaces can sometimes be improved by throwing away old, broken metaphors like “windows” and “desktops” (these are fine if you’re doing office type tasks on the computer but are pretty meaningless for what i do all day).</p>
By
lani
27 Nov 2001
1)remember to breath deeply. oxygen is very important to make sure that your anxieties are birthed in a ball or football shape and not in an explosion of ‘why’ and ‘what the…’
<p>2)push with greater force than it pushes you…but not so much that you’ll poke someone’s eye out in the release.</p>
<p>3)remember not to feed it once it’s out, because they are self-replicating.</p>
By
Matthias Dittgen
27 Nov 2001
Remember the time when thraxil was /dev/random?
Remember the look&feel of thraxil.dhs.org back in August 2000?
I like to remember the days when thraxil was not so dark, yet ;-)
Check also other sites history with the wayback machine.
(Should I have put this cool entry to the links-section?)
By
anders pearson
26 Nov 2001
lani was up for the weekend :)
<p>on friday night we went out for indian food with obert, clayton and clayton’s girlfriend. then obert and lani and i went to see <b>Amélie</b>. beautiful movie. highly recommended. Jeunet really has a way with colour and always seems to present an array of fascinatingly idiosyncratic characters. if you’ve seen <b><a href="http://www.geocities.com/falling_for_faye/chungking/">Chungking Express</a></b> by Wong Kar-Wai, take a moment after you’ve seen <b>Amélie</b> to compare and contrast plots. should be interesting.</p>
<p>after seeing <b>Amélie</b>, i discovered that lani hadn’t seen <b><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0118583">Alien: Resurrection</a></b> (another Jeunet film) so that went on the agenda for saturday night. then i find out that lani hadn’t seen <em>any</em> of the Alien series so some education was in order. it turned into a 6 hour Alien marathon (we skipped the third movie due to time constraints) for which gerard <a href="node.pl?nid=2673">joined us</a> for part of.</p>
<p>today lani and i (well, lani mostly) pulled the trigger on some cheap tickets to berlin. just a quick whirlwind weekend trip the weekend after next (dec. 14th – 17th). we were both feeling a need to get the fuck off the continent for a little while. my plans are to visit <a href="http://www.miromi.org/">mimi</a>, drink some good german beer and otherwise just enjoy my first trip to europe. anyone else going to be in berlin that weekend and want to get together for a drink? any recommendations on places in berlin that should be visited at all costs?</p>
By
jerfunfin
25 Nov 2001
Just spent the last hours of my Saturday night watching Aliens at Anders flat. Great company and a great film. (oh, and the wall, urr..ahh…screen is awesome!) I love watching movies on huge screens and you can’t get much bigger than 8’ in a NYC apartment. Thanks again, bro. It was fantastic.
By
anders pearson
22 Nov 2001
spent my thanksgiving alone in my apartment.
<p>had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cranberry sauce and beer with some kind of sweet, nutty, fruity bread stuff for dessert.</p>
<p>cleaning and listening to a David Bowie concert on <span class="caps">BBC</span> america.</p>
By
sarah
22 Nov 2001
Whose voice is speaking, yours or hers or mine?
Though we spoke as one, in blood, pleasure and pain—
a story to keep us entertained—things changed.
<p>Thinking the voice is yours, you made demands.<br />
Thinking it was hers, she screamed in pleasure’s bands.<br />
But perhaps it is mine because I walked away.<br />
<p>Struggling to make ourselves seem real,<br />
controlling what we felt and thought,<br />
we cried for meaning in our chains<br />
<p>and pleasure brought us together.<br />