Morning Ramblings
Last night’s MHVLUG meeting was quite good. It was nice to get an outside vendor like WindRiver to come in and talk about Linux in an embedded environment. After a quick overview of the challenges of an embedded system, they gave demos of their toolkit, based on eclipse, that provides real time debugging of embedded systems. It’s pretty interesting to see how the open sourcing of the eclipse framework has lead to a lot of tool vendors just writing eclipse plugins for all their work.
Susan has taken up using the exercise bike in the house, which is a good thing for all. Well, almost, as it means that inevitably the bike seat is in the wrong position when I get down to the family room in the morning. 
Changing it every morning isn’t a big deal, just taking some getting used to. Susan also apparently just figured out that I was blogging for the past 3 months. I’m pretty sure I said something previously, but I guess not. She was reading my curling post while I was writing it the other night, with much amusing running commentary during it.
The weekend was a grand success of yard work. Given that spring had just sprung, and yet most of the plants hadn’t really started expanding roots yet, we had quite good luck ripping out these nasty rose bushes and some other woody brush that define our “woods”. The end game was to expand the lower yard another 15 feet into the gladed area, and let some of the young maple trees there get enough sun and room to actually grow. 20 lbs of grass seed have gone down, and the warm spring rain should make it just about perfect. In 4 weeks we’ll know.
Taxes are done (finally!), and big refund checks should be sailing my way soon. Now we’re definitely in good shape for paying for the bathroom remodel, we’ve just got to find the right tile at this point to get the contract rolling. There is also cleary enough left over to think about doing the deck this year (which I can actually manage on my own). That should be the early summer adventure.
On the tech front, I’ve decided to try out Ion as a windowmanger on Linux. AfterStep has been great all these years, but it’s definitely got memory leaks (given that after 14 days it grew to 170 MB), and there are a list of other quirks that have gotten under my skin of late, and as all the other bits of my laptop are actually surviving that long, I wanted to see what else is out there. Ion is an interesting idea that is the “screen” of windowmanagers, where everything is full screen (mostly), and tiled, and notifications are centralized (which is actually the nicest feature). The lack of a pretty Heads Up Display might end up being the deal breaker for me (though you can run dockapps, which is useful, though not quite as integrated), as would be the linear chaining of desktops (though I can forgive that a bit, as desktop count is dynamic). I suppose I should get on the mailing list and ask a few of the questions that I’ve got. If I had a key sequence to show/hide the dockapps, I’d be golden I think.
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