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nautilus spatial tree

I put up a few more screenshots here.

nautilus spatial tree

I put up a few more screenshots here.

Guys, this stuff really isn't that hard. There is no such thing as a "bad memory." Just an untrained one. Seriously, anyone with half a brain can learn to memorize long-digit numbers or the order of a deck of cards. I consider myself a person of average intelligence and yet I can take a randomly shuffled deck of cards and view each card in order once for less than a second and then list the cards in order or name a specific card by it's index. It just takes training. People often attribute these sorts of feats to raw ability, but the truth is you can vastly improve your ability to remember through practice.

With some practice, you really can get to the point where you can calculate days of the week for any date in just a few seconds. People don't realize it's not all that difficult so it's a nice parlor trick.

Also included in that article are methods for remembering long-digit numbers, the order of a deck of cards, etc.

I mentioned this morning that it seems he's going to Microsoft to work on IronPython and improve the CLR for dynamic languages. It's hard to say what Microsoft's plans would be for IronPython, but improving the ECMA CLR for languages such as Python sure sounds exciting.

For reference, this is approximately what my notebook desktop looks like right now.

On the first workspace I have a maximized terminal with multiple tabs. This is a gnome-terminal, meaning that I can do things like click on URLs in the terminal to open them in my default browser (epiphany 1.2.4).

On my second workspace, I have epiphany running. Any time I click on a link in a GNOME application (gnome-terminal, gaim chat window, Evolution, etc.) it opens in a new tab on this workspace. When I download a file in epiphany it automatically save in the Downloads folder on my desktop unless I specifically say "save as..." to save to another location.

On my third workspace, I have a busy gvim session. Gvim isn't as integrated with GNOME as I'd like, but at least it's a Gtk application. From time to time instead of vim on this workspace it's Bluefish or MonoDevelop or Eclipse.

My fourth workspace contains gaim and other small utilities and on my fifth workspace I have Evolution running. A common scenario for me is: I click on a link to a file in epiphany. A dialog pops up and I tell it to download. It automatically saves to Downloads. I flip to Evolution, compose a new email, With a click, I have my Downloads folder open. I drag the file I just downloaded to my attachment bar of the composer window to attach the file and send to my coworker. Then perhaps I open it myself to take a peek before sending the mail. Later if I want to access it I can just open it in my "Recent Documents" menu on the panel.

If I've downloaded an image file, say a wallpaper, I can right click on the desktop to change background and then drag and drop the file to the wallpaper changer to set it and add it to my list of available wallpapers.

In a matter of a few seconds I can select a few files in nautilus, right click and select "Create Archive" then drag the created tarball to an email to attach it.

When I pop in a CD the gnome cd player automatically opens and starts playing it. When I pop in a blank CD the nautilus CD creator automatically opens. I can drag files to the window and then hit "burn". I can right click on an ISO and select "Write to CD" and a click later it's burning the image. I can hit Print Screen to screenshot my desktop and get a preview of the screenshot before saving. I can likewise hit alt+Print Screen to screenshot an individual window. These are defaults. I don't have to tweak. I don't have to remember commands to type in a terminal. GNOME gets out of my way and lets me work. If I do need to change something, like configuring a new printer, the settings are all there in my menu. I don't have to vi some configuration file or restart a service from the command line.

In short, I spend less time fiddling and more time writing code.

I wrote a paper on using mnemonics which you might find interesting