headphones as productivity aid

I'm sure a bazllion people already know this: headphones let you work better. I used to listen to a lot of music when sysadmining at UNSW but that changed when I escaped into the outer world. At the CSIRO I had my own office, which was good for concentration but I found it easy to be distracted. At my current workplace I'm in cubicle land (pretty good cubicle land actually, but nonetheless). I find other people talking very distracting; I'm someone who literally can't think if there's a TV on in the same room; many waiting rooms drive me nuts - I can't even sit and read:-(

I recently got around to buying a decent set of enclosing headphones (SennHeiser HD270s [review @ dansdata]) and am ripping a bunch of CDs to Ogg format (using cdrip [manual] if you care). I'm now in my own little world and actually getting much more done.

just because you can do something doesn't mean you should

Rant: today I tripped over yet another busted web site that hasn't mastered the basic tool of the web - the hyperlink. There I am glancing at the Night Watch screenshots and as is my habit middle-clicked all 4 shots to pop them up in new tabs, knowing they'll take a little while to load and intending to read the text while that happens.

What transpired? I have four new tabs named "(Untitled)". This is The Clue.

The links attached to the screenshot thumbnails say:

javascript:popUp('press/174/nightwatch_shot25_uk.jpg')

embedded in this page is some pointless javascript function to open a new window containing the screenshot, an ad banner and a pointless "close this window" link, also javascript.

So what have we here? Another idiot web designer who thinks he/she knows what the reader should be doing.

Of course, what should be on that link is this:

http://www.worthplaying.com/kiwi_popup.php?img=press/174/nightwatch_shot26_uk.jpg

or even this:

http://www.worthplaying.com/press/174/nightwatch_shot26_uk.jpg

Why? Because the reader has their own ideas. If I want a new window I can make one thank you. If I want to point a scraper at the pager to grab the shots, perhaps to view them conveniently in some handy image view I like, a plain http: URL can be grabbed trivially. Maybe I'm using a text web browser, or have javascript disabled (since it's widely abused). A plain URL is portable and flexible.

If the web author wants to hint that I should get a new window he can always put a target="_new" tag in the anchor. Most browsers will open a new window for that, in some form or other.

Which brings me to the new window itself. As mentioned earlier, it's got a "Close this window" link. What a pointless waste. The user already has a way to close the window, usually at least two ways: they can press the browser's close-window button or they can use their window manager's close-window facility (the X in the top right for most desktops, Alt-Delete for me). And the beauty of both these things is that the user's hands already know how to do it, without thought. The "close window" link is a pointless, annoying and insulting waste of space.

I take it as a sign that the web author is incompetent. It at least makes me feel better than thinking they're trying to alienate their readers.

switched to rxvt-unicode from aterm

I'm try out rxvt-unicode. I'm a long term aterm user. It's small, does pseudotransparency and generally just works. However, it's got some minor annoyances: it can be fiddly to build (or it used to be - depended on WindowMaker for some libraries, and I'm not a WindowMaker user) but more importantly always had some unremovable borders.

Since I have a rather disciplined Zen desktop environment this is a bit annoying; I'd pop up a new terminal and find the text slightly inset from the screen edges. rxvt-unicode seems to honour its borderwidth settings and also has a neat "stay aligned to the nearest screen corner" setting that keeps things neat.

Besides, though I tend to live in a "C" locale, I like the idea of properly rendered glyphs. The other neat setting is the vanishing mouse cursor, which will disappear after a tunable time if not moved.