I always thought that Wine (or WINE, WINE Is Not an Emulator) is good enough for me to play Windows games and running Windows applications without using the virtualisation such as VirtualBox. However, this is not completed.

Recently, due to a giveaway from CodeWeavers, I downloaded and tried the CrossOver. Then I found the comparison of Wine and CrossOver, CrossOver contains some proprietary components, which makes Windows applications run smoother than Wine. I tried, yes, there are some differences. But I am still using Wine because of my own favour.

This is an interesting thing. I love the tree so much. The Knowledge Tree here I mean is not referring to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad.

Tree is a graph theory. The powerfulness of tree, is that almost any data structure can be represented into the tree. In order to store the data, we can use a single variable, for a single data. In order to store a list of data, we can use array and associative array (or hash, map, dictionary), list, vector, and others. Another powerful data structure which I like is the 2D array, especially used in matrix calculation. The 2D array represents the data in the table form. It is very useful in database. An image can also be treated as 2D array. Comparing the tree to the matrix, the tree is possible to represent the matrix (though it is not preferred).

Sometimes we use spreadsheet to store data as table just like database. Especially the features provided like sorting and filtering. This allows us to look at the data easily without the knowledge of SQL (structured query language). Furthermore, we can add in the rows easily, do calculation using formulae, and also copy-paste the data to any cell. Comparing to database, the data needs to be filled row by row, this is the main drawback. This is why spreadsheet is easier to use.

The best desktop environment I mentioned here, doesn’t mean the DE such as KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, etc. The purpose of this post is to express the best desktop environment, that is, the features and functionalities.

You can called me old fashion, does not able to follow the latest technology. Whatever it is, the followings are my opinions on the features:

Taskbar as in Windows XP, or task list as in Xfce.

The taskbar in Windows 7, which groups them all, not user friendly for me. At least two actions needed: mouse over (or click) to show the whole group, then click again into the window of interested. The best is ungrouped, zero level, all windows showed. The sorting can based on time or window name, at least the users will know how to find the window based on some rules. The DE like GNOME 3 or Unity are too bad for me. Group the windows or applications in workspace, difficult to switch between the windows.

The probability subject is a very difficult subject to me. This is because it involves estimation of all the possible events. Therefore, it involves the combination and permutation. And there is no exact formula for different situations. It also involves statistics.

Gambler’s fallacy, is a very good notion. To simplify it, gambler’s fallacy is a belief that the next outcome will be different if the observed outcome is repeated consecutively, where these events are actually independent. The best example is tossing the coin, which has the probability of 0.5 for head and 0.5 for tail. Because tossing the coin first time will not affect the second time, the probability to get the head or tail is always same.

Long time ago, I used to use a text file to collect all my favourite websites. This is because I was using Internet Explorer, and Firefox was not yet introduced. I totally disliked the “favourite” files in IE. Besides that, I cannot bring my favourite websites to any other computers.

Then, after using Firefox, I started building up my bookmarks. This is really great because the bookmarks can be easily exported and imported with a single file.

Preface

I am Arch Linux fan. Recently, I discovered a distro, Fuduntu, which stated that it is optimised for laptop and netbook use. This increases my interest due to battery draining problem for my old netbook. Though my old netbook was installed with Arch Linux using LXDE, the battery can only last for only 1 hour. That is why, I think I am going to switch to Fuduntu. However, after installation of Fuduntu, then I found some problems like missing the packages FreeFileSync and VisualBoyAdvance, and also failed to install Wine because of dependencies error. This made me regret to uninstall Arch Linux from my netbook, because installing Arch Linux is really exhaustive.

I want to learn the speed reading skill. So, I look for the resources, and keep practising. The following is the summary on what I learn about speed reading, especially based on the following video.

Average reading speed is 150-250 wpm (words per minute).

Most of the problem of reading is regression, that is go back to read again. To avoid this problem, if one sentence we don’t understand, we just continue. Only go back if the whole paragraph is not understandable. To make the reading continuously, one of the way is using a finger or any pointer to go through the words. There are several reasons. One of the reason is that our eyes always distracted by the thing it is moving. Another reason is help us to focus. Also, using finger, we will not go back to read again. This is best way used in speed drill (refer below).

Firefox, though I like it, I still feel a lot of limitations of using it, especially reading the PDF using the plugin from Adobe Reader. This is really a drawback. Because the plugin in Linux I feel that it is not very stable. That is why, normally I open the online PDF with Chromium, because Chromium (Google Chrome) has built-in PDF plugin.

Now, Firefox 15 has a built-in PDF plugin as well. By default, it is disabled. So, we need to enable it manually.

I use aMule. But even with the SVN version from Arch Linux, it produces the same problem as I was using Linux Mint, high CPU usage problem. It works well at the beginning, but will suddenly high CPU usage, causes my laptop battery drain very fast.

So, I try to find the solution. Then, I found one solution, not like using MLDonkey or other alternatives before.

Using the aMule daemon, amuled from command line.