Periodic Ramblings

I was looking for a Twitter application for Linux today, and stumbled upon a Twitter plugin for VIM, called TwitVIM.  Now being a longtime Unix admin, VI has always been my editor of choice and VIM is just a more feature rich version of VI, so this plugin excited me.

I downloaded the plugin, sourced it in VIM then restarted VIM to use it.  The plugin is pretty simple in that it only lets you post entries and view your timeline.  There is no search or lists or  any of the other more advanced features of Twitter, but it does get the job done.

It constantly amazes me the interfaces to web apps that people come up with.

I took some time last night and downloaded the Chromium OS from Google and compiled it so I could try it out on my Asus Netbook.

I have to say that I intrigued by the OS.  Basically they took the Chrome browser and used it as the window manager for a customized version of Linux.  Nothing fancy and focuses on simplicity which has been the cornerstone of Google since their first web search page was released.

The concept of Chromium is an interesting concept for an Operating System.  First off, since it focuses almost entirely on the network for application and datastore, it removes the need for a powerful piece of hardware to run the OS on.  In fact, Google has already stated that their official release will be for netwbooks using SSD as the onboard storage.  All user applications and data will be accessed through the web browser interface and for the most part be stored externally in the “cloud”.  As has been stated on a number of other websites, these machines will primarily be secondary machines.  The machine you pack in a bag for a trip to the coffee shop or on a trip where a full-fledge laptop does not make sense to carry along.  My only concern with this approach is, how will Google handle situations where the user does not have access to the Internet and therefore to their data.  Will they leverage the Gears technology that allows offline access in Windows and OS X, or will there be preloaded appplications in the final release of the OS.

While the current release really is nothing more than a browser and even the UI states that it will not be the final version, I can already tell that Google will have at least a certain level of success.  They are creating an OS that is simple to use and allows people to easily access their information that is stored on the web.  This will turn the netbook into more an appliance than a pure computer.  That “something” that you use for a specific purpose, to get you by until you have access to your work computer.

I have an Asus EEEPC 100h that I am running Ubuntu 8.04 on.  One of the problems that I was experiencing, was that even though I had loaded the proper drivers for the touchpad, and could disable the tap-click through the configuration utility, it would be re-enabled each time the computer would be awoken or X restarted.  Since I hate tap-click with a passion, I was looking for a permanent solution to the issue.

What I found was that it was a simple addition to the InputDevice section of the xorg.conf file.  Here is what my InputDevice section now looks like.

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier    ”Configured Mouse”
Driver        ”synaptics”
Option        ”SHMConfig” “on”
Option        ”MaxTapTime” “0″
EndSection

The setting that took care of the tap-click was MaxTapTime set equal to 0, effectively disabling the option.