The daemon feature of Emacs is great. But when should the daemon be started? At one time I used an '@reboot' line in my crontab. But when you want to use things like Tramp mode (for editing files on remote servers transparently), you very quickly wish that emacs could talk to your ssh-agent. So if you accept that you will be running a desktop environment (not always true), you can add the daemon to your equivalent of "System >> Preferences >> Startup Programs". ...
A while ago, I mused on how network latency affects my email usage - one other cause of slowness in my mail client has been GPG key verification. Occasionally, when Evolution wants to check a signature, gpg takes 30 seconds or more to run, and the text of the message is not displayed until the end. The reason gpg runs so slowly is that it sometimes checks its trust database to make sure it's up to date. However, it does not make sense to run this at the time you are trying to verify an email - it will just slow you down. Fortunately, this is very easy to fix - add 'no-auto-check-trustdb' to gnupg.conf, and set up a nightly cronjob to run 'gpg --batch --check-trustdb'. Ensure that you have 'anacron' installed if your system is not always on. ...
Beginning last night, I reinstalled my laptop. Normally, if it were just to clean up some packages, I wouldn't do this - the aim was more to try out removing the disk encryption that I was using, and the effect has been quite dramatic. I worked out a while ago that the device-mapper encryption was slowing down disk access - with it gone, boot times are much shorter (and I don't have to type in a LUKS passphrase). GNOME loads a lot faster. Additionally, bash starts a lot quicker than it did. I suspect loading the bash completion routines takes quite a bit of disk access. Update: No, I just didn't have the bash-completion package installed. Bash is still slow. GNOME is still faster, though... for now. ...
I've had two cases recently where an old configuration file has been causing problems, and there's no clean upgrade strategy. My wireless card was made by Broadcom, and I use the newer b43 driver in Linux. However, the new mac80211 drivers introduce a second network interface (used internally by mac80211) but with the same MAC address as the normal interface. And because it gets created first, udev puts this master interface into the place where the real interface is meant to be, and the real one gets called 'wlan0_rename'. The fix was to look at /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules on Debian, and either add 'ATTRS{type}="1"' to the appropriate line, or delete the file, and let it get created on the next boot. ...
Firstly, a rant: as of December 2007, a self-righteous idiot named Chris Cunningham thinks he can change the name of "Fitts' law" to "Fitts's law" on wikipedia, in the name of grammar. To boot, he claims to have changed every link to "GNU/Linux" to point to "Linux", probably without regard to the difference in meaning. I am not happy. Fortunately, a recent attempt to become an admin was unsuccessful. Anyway. I noticed recently in Epiphany that I couldn't hit the scrollbar by slamming the mouse to the right edge of the screen. It turns out there are two bugs stopping me doing this, one less subtle than the other. ...
Continuing my search for the subtle things that have annoyed me for years about my desktop usage, I want to think about shell startup times. Application startup times have been done to death, I'm sure - it is one of the more obvious areas to work on when improving a desktop application. Evolution's startup time is still appalling, for instance; I count five seconds before I get a GUI, and many more before I see any email. Still, in the case of my bloated email client, it doesn't matter that much - I generally start it once a day, at 9am, when I need coffee anyway. It then proceeds to hang around in the background. It would certainly be nice for applications in general to start more quickly, but it's not the cause of these subconscious feelings of annoyance that I want to pin down. ...
Some things always feel uncomfortable about my desktop usage, even when I change solutions - KDE, GNOME, XFCE, all the way down to evilwm and beyond, to the console. I want to pin these problems down, in order to address them. First I want to focus on network lag. Take email as an example. One of the biggest changes I made to my use of email a few years ago was to store all my email on an IMAP server, so that I can access it from any computer I happen to be using. This has obvious advantages - I have an archive going back years, can do spam filtering and classification in one place, and so on. It does mean performance can suffer, and I'm dependent on a net connection to read my old email. Compare how git changes how you can work with source code, both through its speed and through being able to commit while offline. ...