A review of Diakonos came to my attention today. It was written by Damian Gawęda on his blog. Some excerpts:

I used Vim for several years before realising that all this complexity and a user interface from the 70s were not for me anymore. I needed simplicity. I needed something with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V for clipboard and Ctrl-F for find. I decided to look for another editor.

Well, I tried at least a dozen various editors and couldn’t find any that would meet these requirements. Not until I stumbled upon Diakonos. Diakonos is a simple programmer’s editor for the Linux console that I find almost ideal. It’s open-source, it has all I need and it works out of the box.

To summarise. If you’re frustrated with complexity of Vim and Emacs, try Diakonos.

And my reply:

Hi, Damian. Thank you for the positive review of Diakonos! I’m glad you were pleased by my “it just works” approach to designing and developing Diakonos. Indeed, my experiences with emacs and vi were frustrating, so I decided to take a stab at rolling my own editor.

I’ll be the first to confess that Diakonos is not fast [yet]. I will take 95% of the blame for that, and leave 5% for Ruby and other things. There are various algorithms and internal process approaches which could stand for refactoring. See this wiki page for tips on how to speed Diakonos up, though.

The multi-lingual syntax highlighting is a known issue. As a workaround, you can temporarily change the highlight language of the whole file with Alt-Shift-T. Change to ‘php’ or ‘java’ (for Javascript) when those are your embedded languages. Also, try playing with larger values for the view.lookback setting. This will make more demands on your hardware, but it may solve the highlighting problem in more cases than not.

If you have any feature requests or anything, feel free to drop me a line, either in IRC (chat.freenode.net #mathetes; or http://chat.purepistos.net ) or by e-mail at the e-mail address I used here on your blog. User interest and feedback always motivates me, and I value user feedback.

Thanks again for trying and using Diakonos!

During casual conversation in #ramaze on Freenode, manveru told me about htop. This is a great program; far superior to normal top. You can sort; scroll (sideways, even!); easily renice or SIG processes; easily configure various meters and the displayed columns; view processes in a tree layout; and more. It’s in colour, too! Anyone serious about their top usage should check this out.

Know of similar programs? Leave a comment. (I already know KDE has its System Guard.)

I was searching for getElementsByClass today, and came across “with Imagination“, “a JavaScript, CSS, XHTML web log focusing on usability and accessibility by Dustin Diaz”. Clicking along through the blog, I encountered several cool Javascript and CSS visual effects. I draw your attention to two:

Click on any article, then try out the five screen buttons in the upper right of the article, labelled “Change Layout for your reading convenience”. Three of them dynamically change the article width, the other two dynamically fade between two colour schemes. Cool stuff.

After that, click on the “Take a Tour” link underneath the search box in the upper right.

I can’t speak to the content of the site, since I didn’t do any in depth reading. His last post was a couple months ago, but he does seem to have quite a large readership.

The kind folks at pseudodictionary.com accepted my newly-coined word: thumbstream.

thumbstream – The series of web pages which have been positively rated by someone on a social bookmarking website. On stumbleupon.com, users show that they like or dislike sites recommended to them by the StumbleUpon service by giving a thumb up or thumb down. Hence, “thumbstream.”

ex. Pistos’ thumbstream contains an extremely high percentage of top quality links.

pseudodictionary.com is “a site dedicated to made-up slang words, a site where everyone would be able to add and get credit for their own words too”.

I’ve been mentioned on the Weewar blog for making some basic Weewar tutorials. These are nifty little screencasts which show you how to do the basic operations during game play. Thanks for posting about this, Alex!

La première Arabesque des “Deux Arabesques”. This piece exemplifies the sort of dreamy, watercolour atmosphere that I imagine when I think of Debussy.

Read more about my piano recording series here.

Debussy - Arabesque No. 1 [ 4:23 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is the sixth piece from a suite of six solo piano pieces composed by Michael Nyman for the 1993 film The Piano by Jane Campion. Earlier in my recording series, I posted the first piece in the suite, Big My Secret.

In this composition, the continuous stream of sixteenth notes underneath the driving melody gives a very dynamic feel, drawing to mind such images as horses rushing across a field in full gallop. The piece is filled with nearly arbitrary alternations in the left hand between various unfoldings of the underlying harmonic movements. This made it rather challenging for me to play!

The piece ends unexpectedly on a non-tonic chord. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the film, so my memory is vague and unreliable, but chances are that this abrupt closure is due to something that happens in a scene in the movie.

Read more about my piano recording series here.

Nyman - The Heart Asks Pleasure First [ 2:19 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I had a marriage website passed on to me recently by my wife (who received it from a mutual friend). I have no comment on the site. It seemed rather nondescript to me, so I didn’t click around much. But one thing really struck me from the front page. Their currently running poll was:

Was the last fight you had with your spouse worth it? Yes / No

Such a simple question, and it drives the point home really effectively. (That point being, of course, that most of the time, fights are not worth it.) After voting, I was further surprised to see that a whopping 29% voted Yes. I would have expected something in the single digits!

I can count on one hand the arguments and fights I’ve had with my wife that actually produced some good. The vast majority… I wish they were curtailed, defused, derailed, or prevented.

They next time you’re about to engage your spouse in a heated argument, think about whether it’ll be worth it or not. Aim for peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, sincere love, forgiveness and reconciliation. it’s not worth it I think it’s better for you to be reconciled with your spouse than to be the winner of a long argument.

This is the first piece from a suite of six solo piano pieces composed by Michael Nyman for the 1993 film The Piano by Jane Campion. These compositions are somewhat simplistic (intentional on the part of Nyman, to fit the character in the movie), but listening to them can be very immersive. I hope to post the sixth piece, The Heart Asks Pleasure First, in the near future.

Read more about my piano recording series here.

Nyman - Big My Secret [ 2:57 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I just stumbled upon this rather funny treatment on heaven and hell:

Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs Italian, the mechanics German, the lovers French and it is all organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, and it is all organized by the Italians.