Monthly Archives: November 2007

The importance of being willing to ask stupid questions

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Last week I spent a day interviewing candidates for a programmer position. One of the candidates discussed things that he looked for in an organisation. Two things in particular struck me: He wanted to work in an organisation that, if he was making good progress, didn’t slow him down and that, if he asked a stupid question, didn’t call him stupid. The first question revealed the candidates lack of experience (not a problem in this case btw) but the second one is very important to a career in software engineering.

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Xinerama

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I configured my docked Ubuntu laptop with an external screen to have an extended desktop using Xinerama. It works (almost) nicely. I have a wide desktop that I can drag screens around on now, but unfortunately the pointer isnt rendering properly on the external screen – instead of a clean pointer I have a 2cmx2cm square on the external monitor.  Even with a clumsy mouse pointer, this is an improvement on my previous dual monitor setup which used aticonfig’s bigdesktop setting. I found that bigdesktop configured two separate desktops which meant that I was unable to run firefox/thunderbird on both desktops, or drag windows from one screen to another.

These two references were useful: