Category: links

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Windows Explorer List-style File Browsing in Linux

I believe my quest for the perfect GUI file manager in Linux has been fulfilled after I stumbled across a file manager named Thunar while playing with XFCE on my Ubuntu laptop. My most missed feature from browsing Windows file systems has been the “List” view. It’s is, very simply, columns of file names, with nothing else. The main file browsers of Gnome and KDE, Nautlius and Konqueror, suprisingly cannot do this, and while they come close with a lot of customization, they do not mimic Windows Explorer perfectly. Nautilus like to wrap really long file name, or only do one file per line, and Konqueror likes to add “…” to the end of long filenames, which makes it less than useful.

Thunar does both these things, and does this very quickly. Here’s a pic of what I’m so excited about (right click and hit “view image” to see the full sized pic):

thunar.png

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Roll your own servers with Netcat

Lifehacker has a primer on Netcat, one useful utility which I don’t use nearly enough. Most stuff shown can be done with SSH, nmap, and telnet, but the author makes the point that netcat is on everything. So if you’re ever stuck without SSH, Netcat will be there. And if you haven’t setup passwordless logins for SSH yet, it’ll be quicker for many tasks than having to transfer keys around beforehand.

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WordPress Cache 2.0

WP-Cache 2.0 showed up on Digg today and with promises of speedy WordPress deliveries. Being the persistant software tester I am, I installed it onto this blog and immediatly saw the page load times at the bottom of the page get cut in half. I then installed it on LiveCDNews.com in hopes of speeding up that site in case of being Dugg again. Of course, having Apache configured to allow more than 150 people at a time on the site will help too.

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Goodbye Microsoft

Peter Write, the author of a bunch of visual basic books, wrote in his blog about his reasons for completely ditching MS software and moving to OS X and Ruby on Rails.

Over and over I’d be lambasted for being too passionate (a condition muppets refer to as arrogance). Time and again I’d find myself explaining basics of programming to people that should know better, people with years of experience under their belts, people that really didn’t care.

There’s nothing more frustrating than having to waste time explaining basic concepts of your job to a coworker in the same position as yourself. It seems that this is acceptable in the IT, but I can’t imagine it passing in any other field. Working as tech support for 4 years at UCSB’s public computer repair facility introduced me to many techs who didn’t know how to open a computer, what a PCI card was, or that there was any way to fix a computer besides reinstalling Windows. The knowledgable techs were few and far between, and I’ve yet to work with one who had passion for MS software.