data

I am used to throwing data at the problem. But it seems that these days people throw problems at the data — the data is a primary entity!

(Not everyone, including myself, agrees completely though)

Computation

The world is ever computing. Every object is at least a special purpose computer, computing its own behavior (running the code that is the laws of nature)… can we execute a different code? Are the rules meant to be broken? Can we run our programs on substrates that we do not currently recognize as computational? Is there a substrate or is it all code?
(OR, in other words, am I crazy? :P)
P.S: I do not know how long this ISR, which woke my blog from sleep state will last…

FVWM, making laptop multimedia (sound) keys work

I was giving fvwm a spin on my laptop. Of late I have grown to like fvwm.

Problem statement: Making volume / multimedia keys of the laptop work in fvwm

Well the following two pages documents how it is to be done –

1. Figuring out the key-codes for your multimedia / sound keys and including these in your .Xmodmap : howto-link

2. Map these keys to alsa-mixer commands in your .fvwm2rc: howto-link (post: Audio buttons)

fvwm + xscreensaver

For xscreensaver to work, a daemon process has to be running in the background. I load it up with the following line in my ~/.xinitrc

xscreensaver -no-splash &