Welcome to TuxGirl.com

testing, testing, 1, 2, 3
Hopefully this will post, meaning that for the first time since august, I will have the admin pages on my blog working again (with SSL, of course). It has been a bit of time since I have been able to post, so hopefully this will help! :) (there are still a few bugs, but I will get to those as I have free time)
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Sorry it's been a while
Things have been pretty busy in the past few months, which is why I haven't posted in a bit. I'm going to work on posting a bit more often in the future, though.

In the past few months I bought a new home, got married, and have generally been keeping busy with work. Hopefully things have calmed down slightly since then. :)

In the next few weeks, I will be migrating this server from a CentOS virtual host (hosted by neverblock) to a physical host running FreeBSD. I have been very happy with neverblock, and definitely would recommend them to anyone, but I'd like to go back to handling my own hosting now that my network connection is a bit more stable. :)

Anyway, that's a quick update for now. Keep your eyes peeled for a more technical update in the near future!
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How Windows Users Survive
Since I became used to using Linux/BSD, I have wondered on occasion how Windows (and Mac) users survived without having the freedom to make changes to their systems. It seems so odd to me that they don't understand why I would grumble at the inability to set up sloppy-focus on my work machine.

I think I finally understand how people who have not discovered Free Software manage to survive without feeling like they've been held hostage. It's a very simple issue: They don't know what they're missing!

In some areas of the world, there are people who have never seen running water, or a flushing toilet. These people don't feel like they're disadvantaged by not having running water, because they have never been exposed to it, and they don't even know it exists. In the same way, many Windows users have never even considered the idea of multiple desktops, or thought that it might be possible to type into a window other than the one that's in front on their screen. Without knowing about these options, they don't mind that the options don't exist for them.

I thought about this today in terms of desktops and window-managers, in response to a post by Christer Edwards. I thought a bit about my own transition from the world of Gnome/KDE to the world of more minimalist window-managers like my personal favorite, evilwm. Until I installed and started working with evilwm, it had never occurred to me that Gnome and KDE took a long time to start up. Once I had played with evilwm a bit, I discovered that I could get my gui set up in < 1 second, including everything I use on a regular basis. I also noticed that I really didn't use most of the features of the popular desktops that cause them to run so slowly.

The same issue can be seen in any circumstance, from internet browser to what distro you run. My main suggestion is to start trying different things (and give them a fair try). You might end up sticking with what you know, but at the same time, you might discover new things about yourself and your needs.
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Response to Lickety-Ship
A couple days ago, Pete Abilla posted to his blog some information for a quiz he is giving his students in a class on Supply Chain Management. The quiz looked interesting, so, after checking with him to ensure that he doesn't mind this information being available to his students, I posted my thoughts on the issue to his comments. I'm reprinting my thoughts here since I need to post more often anyways :)

First off, a clarification:
“Because it’s more efficient to deliver products across the city than across the country, they can deliver to you the same day you order for about the same price (and sometimes less) than overnight delivery from FedEx!”
While they may be able to ship for the same price (and maybe less) than the _regular_ overnight delivery cost via FedEx, how does it compare to overnight delivery costs for high-volume-shipping companies? I’m assuming lickety-ship doesn’t yet have high enough volume to get the level of discounts that a major e-tailer like Amazon would have

What incentives does Lickety-Ship provide to the retailers that it works with to convince them to integrate their systems? For many retail companies, actually getting a customer into the store is pretty important. Many stores will discount some items significantly as a way of getting people into the store to purchase more expensive items. Lickety-Ship will need to convince these stores that they offer something worth:
A) losing the actually physical customer walking into the store and seeing other cool things being sold by the company
B) the costs of integration
C) the costs associated with packing up the product (or does Lickety-Ship do that part?)

In order to convince retailers that this is a good option, Lickety-Ship needs to have a large-enough customer base to make the process worth-while. In addition, Lickety-Ship needs to cover most of the work of integration, and make the integration process for the retailer as painless as possible. Lickety-Ship needs to realize that they really have two sets of customers: the people who visit their site to purchase products *and* the retailers who end up selling their items through Lickety-Ship. In order to succeed, they need to focus on making *both* of those customers happy.

From the customer’s perspective, I would want to know a number of things before I ordered from someplace like Lickety-Ship:
A) if the item arrives damaged, or incomplete, or has any type of problem, am I going to be dealing with Lickety-Ship or with the original company?
B) how am I going to get charged for this? Is Lickety-Ship going to share any of my personal information with the seller that they have contracted with? Are they going to share my CC number (or email? or other personal information) with that seller?
C) shipping costs are often uncertain. If the actual shipping cost is greater than the estimated, am I going to be charged more? If the actual is less than estimated, will I be refunded the difference?
D) If I order 2 or 3 items, how will that be factored into the shipping cost? Will Lickety-Ship take into account the costs involved in shipping 2 items separately as opposed to shipping them together? Will they work to decrease the cost to me regardless? If they initially think that they can ship the 2 items in one shipment, and it turns out that they can’t, will I be charged more?
E) what happens if I make an order, and there’s a race condition, and the item I ordered is no longer available at that retailer? Will I still get my item the same day? If it ends up costing more to get the item to me, who eats that cost?

These same issues are things that Lickety-Ship needs to pay attention to. A number of the questions that I’m asking as a customer are pushing Lickety-Ship into a position of balancing a focus on the customer against a need to become/remain profitable.

Anyway, that’s my 0.5 cents on this topic. It’s a very interesting one, and I’d be interested in seeing other people’s thoughts as well!
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你好!
I finally got chinese input working to some degree via fcitx. It doesn't work in all the apps that I'd like it to (I had to copy from gaim to get it into firefox), but at least it works a little bit.

I ran into two major problems while trying to get chinese-input working thus far. First, most of the popular chinese input-managers only work from inside gnome or kde. I don't run either -- I run evilwm without a desktop instead. Secondly, the vast majority of documentation for chinese input-managers is in chinese. Unfortunately, my chinese reading comprehension is more along the lines of "I think I know what that character means!"

I ended up installing a number of chinese input systems including scim, xcin, gcin, chinput and fcitx. fcitx is the only one that I managed to get working at all. Interestingly, I couldn't get it working at all until afer I took a moment to reboot. I'm guessing that's because of either some mis-set environment variables or due to a misconfigured instance of one of the input-managers that was still running.

As a side-note, one thing that you need to do to get fcitx to work correctly is to set the env-variable XMODIFIERS. I did this by adding to my .zshrc the line export XMODIFIERS="@im=fcitx".

I would like to spend a bit of time getting fcitx to work more correctly than it is currently. Once that's done, I'd like to eventually work on getting some of the other input-managers to work correctly in linux. I would also like to go through the entire setup process at least once on another machine so that I can determine what is actually involved in setting up fcitx -- this week's efforts have been inconclusive, as I did so many different things, most of which were not related to resolving the problem.
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