Why does NICS need to help my computer start after a power outage?
The problem is that the manufacturers of your video cards won't let their proprietary driver software be distributed with the open-souce operating systems. That means that every time your machines get updated kernels, the video drivers need to be recompiled by hand.
Your kernels get automatic updates which are applied at the next reboot. So if your machine has been updated since the last reboot, X will not come up cleanly because the video drivers need to be rebuilt.
The short-term way around this is to select an earlier kernel in the boot menu (reboot again if you missed the grub menu the first time). Then email nics and arrange a time for someone to bring down your machine and rebuild the video driver.
Close buttons
Why, oh why, did Gates and company decide to put the "close" button right next to the "minimize" and "maximize" buttons in Windows 95? All modern interfaces have followed suit, in spite of the fact that this is probably the worst user interface design decision in modern history. They should be in opposite corners of the window. I used to make sure that I reconfigured my window manager so that this was the case, but over the years they've beaten the resistance out of me. I'm swimming against the tide and I've decided to just live with it, in spite of its obvious ridiculousness. If you have a nice fix for this (that can also be used under OSX? Yeah, right!), let me know.
Update 13 Nov 03 Kudos to Scott Seagroves for taking up the challenge and finding out how to fix this. Under Red Hat 9, run gconf-editor and look in apps/metacity/general. There's a key called "button layout" which you can use to rearrange the buttons in the window title bar.
I still don't have a solution for OSX, but I don't have much hope on this front. I can't imagine Apple putting that much user interface control in the hands of amateurs...
Nautilus Scripts
Here's an idea that's almost correct: The Gnome file manager, Nautilus, has a slot where you can stick scripts that you want to run on selected files. Nice, now I won't have to constantly open up terminals to actually do something with the files once I find them.
Almost. I either wanted the script to be run from the current directory, or to have the full pathname of the selected files on the command line. I also wanted the standard output of the script nicely piped to a GUI window. I got none of the above.
The selected files are a newline separated list in the environment variable a NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS (newline separated!?! For the love of god, why???). And I had to learn Python so I could pop up a little GUI window showing the output. Answers/Code/NautilusScript is the result. Put it in ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts, make it executable, and you should be able to get it by right clicking on files in Nautilus.
Update 26 Jan 04 Scott Seagroves pointed out that there are Gnome programs that pop small dialog boxes given command line arguments. Gnome 2.2 uses gdialog and Gnome 2.4 uses zenity. Both are in the gnome-utils rpm. This way you don't have to choose your scripting language based on what has a nice interface to Tk.
Finding Printers
The command to find what printers are available to you is 'lpstat -a', courtesy of Bulent.