Of course, I’ve tinkered with tunneling X through SSH, tunneling VNC, the somewhat faster tight VNC, and I even tried the XRDP project which aims to provide a Windows compatible RDP server (remote desktop) for *nix systems. In the past I’d combine one of the above with a bare minimal window manager like ratpoison or evilWM, and I’d achieve somewhat usable speeds. Certainly tight VNC isn’t a bad option, and it can even provide for detachable and re-attachable X sessions, but nothing has really lured me away from screen till now.

Enter NoMachine’s NX. All I can say is I am simple stunned. The speeds are phenomenal. Indeed, nothing really prepared me for this kind of remote X goodness. I have a Gnome desktop running, and I am happily rediscovering X Windows and the Linux desktop after a long absence. As much as I love ncurses and screen, I think it would be foolish to deny that certain applications can benefit from a graphical interface. So, If you need remote access to your Linux desktop, I would definitely check it out. There is an open source offshoot called FreeNX, which is what I currently have installed on my Ubuntu system. NoMachine is also kind enough to offer their server with few strings attached, and clients are available for virtually all platforms.

Search

/

Search the file downwards for the string specified after the /

?

Search the file upwards for the string specified after the?

n

Repeat last search given by ‘/’ or ‘?’

N

Repeat the last search given by ‘/’ or ‘?’, except in the reverse direction

F

Search the current line backwards for the character specified after the ‘F’ command. If found, move the cursor to the position

f

Search the current line for the character specified after the ‘f’ command. If found, move the cursor to the position

;

Repeat the last f or F

Replace

[address] s [/pattern/replacement/] [options] [count]

Address can be empty (current line only), or a range designated as follows:

Options

c Prompt for confirmation before each change
g Substitute all instances of pattern on each line
p Print the last line on which a substitution was made
i Ignore case for the search pattern

Examples:

:s/foo/bar/g
Replace every occurrence of the word foo with bar on current line.

:%s/foo/bar/c
For each line on the file, replace the first occurrence of foo with bar and confirm every substitution.

:1,10s/yes/no/g
Substitute on first 10 lines.

:%s/[Hh]ello/Hi/gc
Confirm global substitutions.

:%s/foo/bar/gi
Ignore the case of the pattern you want to substitute. This replaces foo, FOO, Foo, and so on.

:s/Fortran/\U&/ 3
Uppercase first instance of “Fortran” on next three lines.

:g/^[0-9][0-9]*/s//Line &:/
For every line beginning with one or more digits, add the “Line” and a colon.

I kind of like the “genius” playlist feature in the new iTunes, so I attempted to do something similar for J. River’s Media Center (my music manager of choice at the moment).

The idea behind iTunes “genius” feature is to scour your music database and queue up tracks similar to the one you are currently listening to. How well it does this is debatable. iTunes seems to cook up it’s “similarity” data based on the listening and purchasing habits of it’s users. Interestingly, if everyone’s listening habits were completely eclectic, and if they always kept their player on random, there would be nothing to go on. Fortunately, this isn’t the case. Sometimes these genius playlists are spot on, other times they are wildly divergent. Either way it’s kind of fun.

Unfortunately iTunes doesn’t make their “genius” info available via web services, so my plugin leverages Last FM’s web services instead, which will give you a list of similar tracks for any track, as well as a list of similar artists. Once again, results vary.

Here’s an example:

>>> Looking up “When We Get Famous” by Math And Physics Club
Merging with current Playlist

Found 149 Similar tracks according to Last FM
Found track: Mars by The Lucksmiths
Found track: Young and Dumb by The Lucksmiths
Found track: Get It Right by The Fairways
Found track: Twee by Tullycraft
Found track: Leaders of the New School by Tullycraft
Found track: Emblematic by Pipas
Found track: Run Run Run by Pipas
Found track: Popkiss by Blueboy
Found track: Talulah Gosh by Talulah Gosh
Found track: One Two Three Four by Acid House Kings
Found track: Springtime Sunshine by The Shermans
… and so on.

Here’s a screen shot:

I’ve tried this on J. River Media Center versions 12 and 13, and also on Jukebox. Here’s the installer:
J. River SmartAlec Plugin v. 0.1

Here’s the source code as well, in case anyone wants to poke around. I did this in MS’s Visual C# Express Edition. If you do anything cool or useful please send me a copy. The project uses Martin Lottering’s CheckBoxComboBox control which can be found on CodeProject, as well as an XML-RPC wrapper which can be found here.

J. River SmartAlec Plugin v. 0.1 source

The podcast helped me to conceptualize the issue in terms of causation. I’ll outline two different stances, one spiritual and the other materialistic. I won’t pretend to get either right. It’s interesting to note up front that historically there have been theological stances which do not believe in free will, Calvinism being one example. I think the issue partly being the difficulty in reconciling individual free will with the idea of God’s omnipotence.

When a conscious agent decides to take some action, how do you conceptualize the chain of causation that preceded that action? In the pro free will stance the chain ends in a kernel of free agency which one might call, alternatively, the self, soul, or spirit, and this kernel operates outside any physical laws that operate on the material world. In the Christian view the kernel was forged by God in His own image, and is usually considered to be immortal. The self becomes a well spring of action in the world that operates from outside the world. A kernel of agency unfettered by physical laws, but which is capable of generating a spark of action within the world. The first, uncaused node in a chain of causation. This freedom from the physical world adheres only in ones mental life, of course. In the attempt to exercise our will we are brought once again into the physical and material world.

Alternatively, in the scientific or materialist view, the chain of causation for every action essentially has one well spring… the big bang. Thoughts and decisions are synonymous with neural activity in the brain. The more rational the thought or decision, the more the pre-frontal cortex in involved, hopefully, but either way it all amounts to neural activity. This neural activity, in turn, was caused by outside stimulus, or perhaps internal biochemistry. It’s hard not to resort to the computer as an analogy here, and conceptualize the thoughts as algorithmic in nature. The algorithms and networks themselves are built upon templates ironed out over the course of evolutionary history. The experiential and developmental history of the organism fine tunes the algorithms, as well as creating a repository for data, in the form of memories, which might be used in making future decisions. Of course this explanatory path is no where near complete, scientifically, but in principle the chain of causation becomes a massively tangled web, winding it’s way back in time to the beginning of our universe.

This is a radically different notion of the self. One in which we are riders on a causal trajectory which started with the big bang. At the end of the podcast, Ginger, who seems to more or less agree with the materialistic notion of free will outlined above, makes a defense for the idea of personal responsibility, but I can’t help thinking that from within that framework such notions are simply useful fictions. At the very least, notions such as blame, praise, responsibility, guilt, etc… loose some of their gravity.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a different way of thinking about the world and the self. Different, but certainly not new. Diderot was already writing about these things in works like D’Alembert’s Dream way back in 1769.

Anyway, I haven’t read much about flow but I imagine it’s an idea that is not typically called upon to illuminate the motivations and psychology of those striving for goals that don’t match up with societies.