Marzhill Musings

There is an axiom coined I believe by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes novels that every programmer should keep in mind while debugging his program.

When you have eliminated every other possibility; Whatever is left, however improbable, Must be the Solution.

There has been many a time when I could have arrived at the answer much sooner but was stuck because what the program was doing seemed to be impossible. When I accepted that it was possible then I was able to begin tracking down how it was possible and thus finding the solution. After one too many occurences of this I think I’m going to make a big poster with this axiom on it and hang it above my monitor.

I’m not sure how useful this actually is but you can’t deny that it’s pretty cool. May I present to you the Cube:

Now, like all the things Beryl can do, this is in realtime so you can watch progress bars move, text scroll, and movies play all while rotating your cube.

A particularly handy feature of Beryl is the Scale Plugin. This plugin gives an easy intuitive way to select the window you want to switch to on a busy desktop. It can be activated by setting a hotspot or using a hotkey. It takes all the open windows and tiles them in the screen scaling them to fit so you can pick the window you want to switch to easily. It also displays those windows in realtime so video keeps playing commandline console text keeps scrolling and so on. Here is a screenshot of this feature: