Playlists and Programs
My playlist this morning has incorporated a sequence of contemporary Christian, bluegrass, and underground rap. I would not have touched any of those genres in junior high.
I implemented a web browser in about 15 lines of code last night using Qt/C++ under Linux (the new Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition). I mean, the start page is the only page you can load aside from links from the start page, but it’s something.
In London I had this consuming sort of idea fire going on with a Qt-based equivalent to XFCE. This is complete nonsense, so let’s say essentially a very lightweight Linux desktop environment using a better programming platform than has previously been used for this purpose.
This would likely include a web browser (WebKit-based, in accordance with the new fashion and aligned with Qt’s allegiances), a terminal emulator, a file manager, and probably a basic text editor. It would likely also benefit from a Qt-based window manager, but that prospect is scary to me. It would be really cool to have a graphical manpage reader, but I’m not sure how that would work. This is clearly a developer-/expert-oriented interface, although nothing about it would be particularly incomprehensible.
Qt provides drop-in functionality for most of these (including the framework to refresh a directory view automatically upon update, as of a recent version). This makes this an interesting thing to boot into and play with occasionally, as the wins would be typically rapid and fun. I’m dual-booting the VAIO to make this happen (virtualization is too fat for the poor guy’s resources), so the work is out of sight and out of mind until I want to play with it. My kind of throwaway project.