Chris's computer desktop

I won't inline an image of my SGI Indy's desktop, however tempting it is. That horror I'll save for later (when I have imagemaps working), so for now you'll have to manually fetch a 320K JPEG image of it from my SGI. Well, as manually as a click on the world-wide web ever is. If 320K makes you wince, you should know that it's a 1280 by 1024 picture with at least 256 colours.

I admit that this is a somewhat more cluttered desktop than I usually have; I deliberately opened up a couple of extra windows. It is typical of what my desktop looks like when I'm busy flailing away at something or - system administration being system administration - flailing away at several somethings simultaneously.

In which we tour a desktop

In the future this will be an imagemap. But on the web, many things are in the future. For the present you get a manual explanation of various attractions, in multi-part harmony. Follow along with a separate window full of the image (I use xli on my machine, but your mileage may differ).

Invisible under the main exmh window is another 9term window from which I'm running snapshot and running programs to convert the SGI specific format it saves things in to JPEGs.

Why do you need a volume control panel for your SGI's audio anyways?

I'm glad you asked. I need a volume control up while I'm playing CDs because I'm not playing them through any headphone jack on the CD-ROM drive itself (it's an SGI one; in the usual SGI fashion it doesn't have a headphone jack). Instead I'm playing my CDs across the SCSI bus to the SGI and then out through the SGI's own digital audio system. I find this spiffy, which may just make me a techno-weenie.

Why do most of your windows not have titlebars?

Well, um. What do I need them for?

That's actually the serious answer. I have almost all the necessary window manager functions bound to function keys or mouse buttons plus various modifier keys (the remaining unbound function is window destruction, which I consider too dangerous to put on a key). I don't need the window title; applications are either pretty unique looking or have labels inside the window (observe that my shell prompt contains the hostname). Additionally, xterms show their title in their icon box and if one has the input focus its icon box is highlighted.

This means that all window manager titlebars would do for me is eat up valuable screen real estate. I like to use my screen real estate for interesting things, not redundant things.

Chris Siebenmann