Eight Days of Happiness (Day 4)

This is a belated post for yesterday.
What made me happy yesterday was xmonad.

Back when I was trying out wmi for the first time, the main tiling window managers I was aware of were ratpoison, ion, larswm and wmi. I didn't like the limitations of larswm (it only tiled things in a certain way), and ratpoison is very very limited, so the chief contenders were ion and wmi. They each had different strenths and weaknesses.

Now there are two more recent entries in the pack, "awesome" and "xmonad". The "awesome" window manager (stupid name, it makes it impossible to google for it) seems to be an inheritor of ion in at least one way: it is scripted in lua. The xmonad window manager is written and scripted and configured in Haskell. Both of them have taken ideas from their predecessors.

I am trying out xmonad in place of wmii.
( why is nobody interested in the geeky details? )

This all makes me think again about how we approach the creation of computer interfaces. The "desktop" metaphor is all well and good, but it can only take us so far, and if one is submerged too deeply in the metaphor, it hinders us rather than helping us.
( rambling about the nature of user interfaces )

Eight Days of Happiness (Day 5)

And now the Proper Post Of Happiness for today.
1) 117.1 kilos -> 114.9 kilos!
2) I got another nomination in the Children of Time Awards; in the "Classic Who" Crossover section, my story Things That Never Were.