Hardware Monitor
I like to know when my computer is up to something. This is often because I've started something running and want to do something else until it finishes, but I don't want to constantly check whether or not it's finished. I used to embed Xload in my Gnome panel, but sadly Gnome 2 doesn't let you do this anymore. One of the few instances where software became less useful over time.
There are many hardware monitors out there. Most let you plot the percentage of cycles used by your CPU, but not the system load. This is basically worthless because the CPU usage goes up to 100 percent and then gives you no further information. What if I have 10 CPU intensive processes running? It looks the same as if I had only one. The old-time Unix developers crafted a simple, elegant program to serve this purpose: Xload. Amazingly, people have utterly failed to appreciate Xload and proceeded to reinvent inferior wheels to solve this problem.
That said, my current favorite is Hardware Monitor It's small, clean, visually appealing, and it let's you plot system load.
One problem is that it uses the C++ Gnome libraries, which aren't standard on Red Hat 9 systems, so you need to install it via Apt for RPM to resolve the billion dependencies.
Also, I don't like the way Hardware Monitor does the axis scaling when viewing the system load, so here's a patch to fix it. I sent the patch to the author of Hardware Monitor and he said he'll integrate it shortly.
There are many hardware monitors out there. Most let you plot the percentage of cycles used by your CPU, but not the system load. This is basically worthless because the CPU usage goes up to 100 percent and then gives you no further information. What if I have 10 CPU intensive processes running? It looks the same as if I had only one. The old-time Unix developers crafted a simple, elegant program to serve this purpose: Xload. Amazingly, people have utterly failed to appreciate Xload and proceeded to reinvent inferior wheels to solve this problem.
That said, my current favorite is Hardware Monitor It's small, clean, visually appealing, and it let's you plot system load.
One problem is that it uses the C++ Gnome libraries, which aren't standard on Red Hat 9 systems, so you need to install it via Apt for RPM to resolve the billion dependencies.
Also, I don't like the way Hardware Monitor does the axis scaling when viewing the system load, so here's a patch to fix it. I sent the patch to the author of Hardware Monitor and he said he'll integrate it shortly.
Close buttons
Why, oh why, did Gates and company decide to put the "close" button right next to the "minimize" and "maximize" buttons in Windows 95? All modern interfaces have followed suit, in spite of the fact that this is probably the worst user interface design decision in modern history. They should be in opposite corners of the window. I used to make sure that I reconfigured my window manager so that this was the case, but over the years they've beaten the resistance out of me. I'm swimming against the tide and I've decided to just live with it, in spite of its obvious ridiculousness. If you have a nice fix for this (that can also be used under OSX? Yeah, right!), let me know.
Update 13 Nov 03 Kudos to Scott Seagroves for taking up the challenge and finding out how to fix this. Under Red Hat 9, run gconf-editor and look in apps/metacity/general. There's a key called "button layout" which you can use to rearrange the buttons in the window title bar.
I still don't have a solution for OSX, but I don't have much hope on this front. I can't imagine Apple putting that much user interface control in the hands of amateurs...
Update 13 Nov 03 Kudos to Scott Seagroves for taking up the challenge and finding out how to fix this. Under Red Hat 9, run gconf-editor and look in apps/metacity/general. There's a key called "button layout" which you can use to rearrange the buttons in the window title bar.
I still don't have a solution for OSX, but I don't have much hope on this front. I can't imagine Apple putting that much user interface control in the hands of amateurs...
Nautilus Scripts
Here's an idea that's almost correct: The Gnome file manager, Nautilus, has a slot where you can stick scripts that you want to run on selected files. Nice, now I won't have to constantly open up terminals to actually do something with the files once I find them.
Almost. I either wanted the script to be run from the current directory, or to have the full pathname of the selected files on the command line. I also wanted the standard output of the script nicely piped to a GUI window. I got none of the above.
The selected files are a newline separated list in the environment variable a NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS (newline separated!?! For the love of god, why???). And I had to learn Python so I could pop up a little GUI window showing the output. Here's the result. Put it in ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts, make it executable, and you should be able to get it by right clicking on files in Nautilus.
Update 26 Jan 04 Scott Seagroves pointed out that there are Gnome programs that pop small dialog boxes given command line arguments. Gnome 2.2 uses gdialog and Gnome 2.4 uses zenity. Both are in the gnome-utils rpm. This way you don't have to choose your scripting language based on what has a nice interface to Tk
Almost. I either wanted the script to be run from the current directory, or to have the full pathname of the selected files on the command line. I also wanted the standard output of the script nicely piped to a GUI window. I got none of the above.
The selected files are a newline separated list in the environment variable a NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS (newline separated!?! For the love of god, why???). And I had to learn Python so I could pop up a little GUI window showing the output. Here's the result. Put it in ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts, make it executable, and you should be able to get it by right clicking on files in Nautilus.
Update 26 Jan 04 Scott Seagroves pointed out that there are Gnome programs that pop small dialog boxes given command line arguments. Gnome 2.2 uses gdialog and Gnome 2.4 uses zenity. Both are in the gnome-utils rpm. This way you don't have to choose your scripting language based on what has a nice interface to Tk
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