Remember Sawfish? Well, if you’re a veteran Gnome user you might remember it. It used to be Gnome’s default window manager back in the days. Sawfish looked quite simple on the outside, rendering a nice theme for window decoration and getting out of the way. Under the hood, however, it had a sophisticated LISP-programmable window matching engine, which allowed you to discover what new windows are being shown and do all kinds of things to them.

Speed forward a few years. Gnome ditched Sawfish in favour of Metacity, a simple, GTK-based, no-frills window manager (and with the latest Ubuntu you even get the singing and dancing, Enlightenment-syndrome inflicted Compiz, which makes your windows look like they’re made of jellow). There’s a lot to be said for using standard components, they’re stable and supported, for example, but for years I did feel that I’m missing the flexibility of Sawfish.

Take, for example, Firefox and Emacs. I spend considerable time in both of them. I usually open one instance of each at the beginning of every session, maximize it and switch between the buffers/tabs within. For a window that’s always maximized, it seems a bit unnecessary to draw a border. On my small laptop screen it’s downright wasteful. With Sawfish I could easily tell the border to go away, but with Metacity I just have to put up with the chunky, useless border on top of my window.

sudo aptitude install devilspie

Enter Devil’s Pie. Devil’s Pie is a complement to the window manager that fills the void left by Sawfish. It works in the background and reads LISP scripts that allow you to match new windows and do things to them.

; .devilspie/fullscreen-firefox.ds

; maximize the main firefox window and
; remove the window decoration.

(if (matches (window_name) ".* - Mozilla Firefox")
    (undecorate maximize))

I’m blogging about this now, before I’m going to solve the mystery, so that I can look back and laugh later on.

I followed a micro-blog of a friend to the website spotify.com. I don’t know what it does, but since someone I know recommends it, I figured I might as well check it out. This is what I see when I get to the front page:

Let’s see what I can tell about the service provided by spotify, from staring at the homepage for a couple of minutes:

• It’s instant
• It’s simple
• It’s free
• or it costs a dollar for a day
• or ten dollars for a month
• it’s something to do with music
• and it’s very web 2.0 - huge fonts and rounded corners galore

Now, I’m no design maven, but as a user, is it too much to ask that this new website trying to sell me services will actually let me know first what it actually does?!

You know what, now that I think about it I’m not even going to check it out. It can’t possibly be that good.

Update: so I did end up trying spotify. It’s a net jukebox, which let’s you listen to whatever music you want using a client that looks like iTunes. The experience is pretty smooth (after you download the program from the website) but the music selection is ridiculously limited. Still, that’s totally the way music consumption is going to be, and thumbs up to spotify for making a step in the right direction.

Recently, the BBC weather website started displaying some visuals for a new service: BBC Weather BETA version 1.0. Ha ha, very funny, but the question is, is it intentionally funny?…

In other news, I finally got around to contacting the TV licensing people to let them know that they can stopping sending me letters - I still don’t have a television. They promised to send someone to make sure that I’m not deluded.

I finally got into mapping. For starters, I’ve created maps of places I visited and of places I used to live at. The former is very incomplete (I traveled quite a lot and a lot of that as a child, so I don’t remember everything).

If you spot mistakes or omissions, or if you’d like to show me your own maps, go ahead and post a comment.

Facebook just announced the new Lexicon feature, which allows one to search for terms in the wall posts of all users. I thought I might as well give it a try.

As you can see for yourself, people don’t seem to talk much about philosophy. That’s not news, but what is surprising and revealing, is that people talk a lot more about shopping than they do about sex (always, and especially before the merry season).