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Welcome

Thornton 2 Productions is a spare-time solo Internet venture run by Don Thornton II. Thornton 2 produces unique media and intellectual property creations: art, animation, creative and technical writing, and Web development. Thornton 2 Productions is also the home for Don Thornton II's spokesman, mascot and avatar, Ariel Millennium Thornton (or ArielMT). Check the Projects page for the current production projects.

Internet yard sale of sorts

I need money. I have entirely too much stuff. Those two things meet, rather conveniently, here on the Web. I have some of my stuff listed on Amazon.com. I don't list on eBay anymore because the fee structure is out of control, their own item listing system is broken to the extent sellers are stiffed routinely, and they're banning good payment systems in favor of their own scammer-friendly system.

So... Please check out my stuff.

(At least I'm not bumming for donations, although I'll take those as well.)

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Most recent of the all too infrequent updates:

April 23, 2012 - Fun with Linux window managers

I got tired of GNOME on Ubuntu, and I wanted to upgrade artpad (my Toshiba Portégé M200 tablet) to something less susceptible to shocking change on updates and new versions.

I decided to give Debian a whirl, and at the same time I wanted to experiment with window managers to see if I could find something lighter than GNOME that was to my liking.

I remember using KDE once upon a time and really liking the experience, so when I installed Debian Wheezy, I configured it with KDE as my desktop environment. That turned out to be a mistake. Like GNOME 3, KDE 4 went in a different and more bloated direction. The plasma interface is nice, but it has some annoyances, and it doubles my start-up time. (That is not an exaggeration. It takes just as long for KDE to settle in enough to let me do anything as it does to boot to KDM.)

I tried 9wm, amiwm, ctwm, e17 (Enlightenment), flwm, olvwm, twm, vtwm, and wm2. I skipped windowmaker because, despite being my perennial favorite window manager, my experience from just a year ago was that it can't handle xrandr events and it hasn't been updated in that time. I also skipped icewm and fluxbox because I didn't want a bar manager.

Enlightenment is the most user-friendly for in-environment customization, and it's exceptionally fast even with all its frills. It's definitely the window manager to show off on any PC up to 10 years old.

TWM is almost perfect for a traditional X11 feel, but it and its clones have a critical shortcoming regarding accessibility. Since this is a tablet, I need an on-screen keyboard entry program when in tablet mode. CellWriter isn't perfect, but it's the best so far on Linux. The problem with twm is that it doesn't respect cellwriter's keyboard focus hint, sending keystrokes to the entry window itself instead of to the most recent previous window, and this makes on-screen text entry impossible.

WM2 is almost perfect as the ultra-minimalist mouse-driven window manager, in terms of both size and appearance, but it suffers from the same accessibility failing as twm and clones.

The window manager I finally settled on is flwm. The decorations are just large enough without being too large, it manages windows in pleasantly interesting ways, it starts up very quickly, and it respects my most critical tablet needs.

Next up was customization. Unlike full-blown desktop environments like GNOME and KDE, and unlike self-contained environments like Enlightenment, flwm is a window manager and nothing more. To configure a desktop environment, I had to install and configure desktop enhancement applications, like desklaunch, stalonetray, and hsetroot, but that's not a problem for me. Reading a manpage, writing a text file, and experimenting with settings let me find exactly the settings I like and will keep.

Getting programs to run automatically at login historically required editing ~/.xinitrc, and the format is very straightforward. It's just a shell script, so start programs in the background (with the "&" modifier), and at the very end "exec" the window manager.

That isn't the whole story with Debian. The .xinitrc file is completely ignored by the chain of Xsession files starting at /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc. Because of this, the system default session is run whenever you choose "Default" as the session type from GDM's or KDM's session menu, not the session specified in .xinitrc. (Incidentally, that makes choosing minimalist window managers from the session menu pointless.)

Debian's Xsession files look for two files in the home directory, ~/.xsession and ~/.Xsession, and executes the first of the two it finds. So the solution is to link .xinitrc to one of these two files:

    ln -s .xinitrc .Xsession

And presto! I have a working desktop environment on my terms. Edit /etc/kde4/kdm/kdmrc so the AutoLoginUser line says AutoLoginUser=arielmt and I can now start up in tablet mode without needing the keyboard.

Trivia: Because hsetroot isn't smart enough to scale images to fill the whole screen while preserving aspect ratio, I have to use two images and a script to change the wallpaper. One image has to scale well to 1400x1050, and the other has to scale well to 1050x1400. The script I use is in my arbitrarily-named ~/.xpapers file. Also, my ~/.desklaunchrc file, and ~/bin/rotate script for tablet control. The icons named in ~/.desklaunchrc are 24x24. Desklaunch doesn't care about size and doesn't scale, so I used `convert` from ImageMagick to scale them down and turn them into XPMs.

Oh, and if I haven't yet said how much I despise Network-Manager, let me reiterate that the very first thing I did after installing Debian was:

    sudo apt-get install wicd wicd-curses wicd-gtk

    sudo apt-get --purge remove network-manager

    wicd-gtk

Then I connected to my wireless network, set it to auto-connect, and added wicd-client to the list of start-up applications. Unlike network-manager, wicd doesn't need the GUI running in order to do its job, which means I'm not stuck without a network connection if either the tray icon or my entire desktop crashes.

By:

ArielMT

Tags:

Linux

GNOME

Ubuntu

Debian

KDE

e17

flwm

wm2

windowmaker

CellWriter

Network-Manager

wicd

add/edit

April 23, 2012 - Fun with Linux window managers+discussion

April 11, 2012 - The Magic of Friendship (PMV)

Audio: "The Magic of Love" by Two Steps from Hell

Video: My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic ("Friendship Is Magic I," "The Ticket Master," "Applebuck Season," "Griffon the Brush Off," "Look Before You Sleep," "Bridle Gossip," "Winter Wrap Up," "Fall Weather Friends," "The Cutie Mark Chronicles," "Friendship Is Magic II," "Boast Busters," "Dragonshy," "Feeling Pinkie Keen," "The Stare Master," "The Return of Harmony I," "The Return of Harmony II," "Lesson Zero," "Luna Eclipsed," "Sisterhooves Social," and "Hearth Warming Eve.")

By:

ArielMT

Tags:

My Little Pony

Friendship Is Magic

Two Steps from Hell

add/edit

April 11, 2012 - The Magic of Friendship (PMV)+discussion

March 28, 2012 - Techdirt has a gift for the Author's Guild

March 28, 2012 - Techdirt has a gift for the Author's Guild+content+text

By:

ArielMT

Tags:

Computers

Books

add/edit

March 28, 2012 - Techdirt has a gift for the Author's Guild+discussion

March 18, 2012 - Â©opyright Mathâ„¢ or The $8 Billion iPod, a TED talk by Rob Reid

With a hat tip to YourAnonNews on Twitter (and also on Tumblr):

By:

ArielMT

Tags:

RIAA

MPAA

MAFIAA

Humor

Copyright

Piracy

add/edit

March 18, 2012 - Â©opyright Mathâ„¢ or The $8 Billion iPod, a TED talk by Rob Reid+discussion

February 25, 2012 - Linux Compose Key

One thing I really don't like about how the universe works is how becoming frustrated with trying to do something seems to be the only way an open mind can conspire to learn something new and do something useful.

Today, that frustration was the inability to type in lat-long coordinates in Google Maps. I type a location that should be in Illinois, and Google thinks I mean a street in Cancun. Google is perfectly happy with signed-decimal coordinates (positive degrees for North latitude and East longitude, negative degrees for South latitude and West longitude), but it hasn't got a clue about coordinates entered in degrees-minutes-seconds (D-M-S) unless the Unicode degree sign is used, along with the ASCII single- and double-quotes for minutes and seconds. The main problem with entering a degree sign is that, on American keyboards, it's extremely inconvenient and unintuitive at best.

In Linux, or at least in X11, any Unicode character can be entered by typing Control+Shift+u, the Unicode character's hexadecimal value (267b for the black generic recycle symbol â™», for example), and a space. But that doesn't help because I'd still have to memorize more hex values.

The trick, I learned, is to enable the Compose key on my keyboard. Most how-tos for it use the right Windows key as the compose key, but most laptops don't have two Windows keys. (Some don't even have the one Windows key in the main typewriter keypad.) The best substitution is the right Alt key, often used as the AltGr key.

One how-to says that /etc/X11/xorg.conf should be edited, but that's outdated. Debian has split xorg.conf into multiple dot-conf files under /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/, and Ubuntu uses HAL and /etc/defaults/console-setup to configure the keyboard in X11. Nevertheless, it can be done.

The secret is to enable the XKB option "compose:ralt" (use the right Alt key as the Compose key).

First was to try it out and make sure it did what I wanted:

setxkbmap -model pc105 -layout us -variant dvorak-classic -option compose:ralt
- This is specific to my setup: I touch-type Dvorak, and I prefer the classic layout which rearranges the number keys as well. I copied all but the -option from my keyboard configuration in /etc/defaults/console-setup.
- For people who expect the standard QWERTY layout on a PC, the command would be: setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us -option compose:ralt

I was then able to type a degree sign by pressing Compose+o, o. That makes loads more sense, and I could still type as normal. Next was to make the change permanent.

If you use KDE or GNOME (the two major Linux desktop environments), there should be a regional/language settings section in the control center or desktop configuration tool. Under that is keyboard settings, and under that is XKB options, and theoretically under that is Compose key position. (Both major desktops are resource hogs that get in my way, so this wasn't an option for me.)

If you use /etc/X11/xorg.conf or if you have a keyboard section in one of the /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/*.conf files, then you can edit the option in. As a sample I found elsewhere, with the relevant line boldfaced:

# Your section in xorg.conf about the keyboard looks similar to this:

Section "InputDevice"

Identifier "Keyboard0"

Driver "kbd"

Option "XkbModel" "pc104"

Option "XkbLayout" "us"

Option "XkbOptions" "compose:ralt"

EndSection

You have to do this as root, because regular users can't change this file. Look up the su, sudo, gksu, and kdesu commands. On some systems, you have to log in as root and give root's password, but on others root is disabled, so you have to be a sudoer and give your own password instead.

Anyway, this wasn't relevant in my case because the whole keyboard section of my xorg.conf was commented out during my last upgrade. The comments said:

# commented out by update-manager, HAL is now used and auto-detects devices

# Keyboard settings are now read from /etc/default/console-setup

I do have to give props for at least being commented in a useful manner, but the whole reason I wrote this entry is because I didn't find it elsewhere on the 'Net. So here it is; we come to it at last.

Type cookie you idiot.

In the file /etc/defaults/console-setup (which can only be edited by root), I have this block of text:

# The following variables describe your keyboard and can have the same

# values as the XkbModel, XkbLayout, XkbVariant and XkbOptions options

# in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

XKBMODEL="pc105"

XKBLAYOUT="us"

XKBVARIANT="dvorak-classic"
1. (This is because, again, I touch-type Dvorak. I don't expect many folks would have this.)

XKBOPTIONS="compose:ralt"

This change doesn't take effect until restarting X (logging out and back in), but at last, it's easy to type the most common special characters.

Linux Compose Keys

I hope one of you out there in Internet land finds this useful.

By:

ArielMT

Tags:

Linux

X11

Xorg

add/edit

February 25, 2012 - Linux Compose Key+discussion

For WindowMaker, you have to either edit the xorg.conf/xorg.conf.d file, or add the setxkbmap command to your ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/autostart file if you don't have one.

--ArielMT.....Sat Mar 17 18:29:03 -0700 2012

Web site compatibility and design

This site is not at all designed to look right in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Given the choice between Internet Explorer compatibility and W3C Web standards compliance, I chose the latter. Since Internet Explorer breaks key Web standards, the two are mutually exclusive. This site uses HTML or XHTML with CSS , and it is designed for maximum accessibility while preserving good looks.

If you use a Web browser which does not let you change CSS themes on the fly, then you can select a CSS theme by way of a magic cookie over on the Select CSS Theme page. Warning to Internet Explorer users: this will let you see for yourself just how wrong your browser gets CSS.

If your browser identifies itself as Microsoft Internet Explorer, then you are seeing a special stylesheet just for IE. This stylesheet is an extremely simple design specifically to preserve content accessibility. This was done because almost all other CSS themes on this site are known to be poorly handled by IE.

This site is .GIF patent tax exempt.

Notice of Web standards compliance and browser compatibility.

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Hosting provided by the following service and software:

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Content presently created with the following hardware and software:

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Site tested with the following Web browsers:

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