Friday August 17, 2007

A little trick with FVWM

I was having a problem using the FVWM window manager that I had installed on OpenSolaris. Each time I opened a window from the command line, I had to open a new terminal window, because I was losing the shell prompt with each application I opened.  Thanks to Deborah and Eric Ray's Visual Quickstart Guide to UNIX, I've now figured out how to avoid this problem. For each new application you open from the command line, add an ampersand (&) after the name of the program, as in

bash 3.00$ firefox &

This runs the job in the background, at least as far as the command line is concerned, so it gives you another command prompt when the application opens. However, from the user's point of view, the "background" job can be interacted with in its own window like any application. I'm typing this blog entry in Firefox in its own window, and my command line is ready and waiting for any applications I care to request. I just have to remember to add the ampersand for each new one I open!

Software Experience Group at Sun

Software usability engineers are the kind of cool people I like to hang out with. They're an interesting hybrid of developer, visual artist and psychologist, and they're responsible for the great, easy-to-use pieces of technology that everyone raves about, like the Mac.

Sun has its own usability crew, known as the xDesign group, and it includes a couple of my buddies, Loren Mack and Leon Barnard. The xDesigner team has a cool group blog,  where they talk about some of the things they're working on, like the redesign of the NetBeans.org web site, and the OpenDS directory server installer.

Currently, Loren Mack is blogging  there about the redesign of  one of the products I used to manage, eIndex(TM) Single Patient Identifier, and there's also a great article about the construction of the Sun usability lab in Prague. Check it out!