The new emacs included with OpenSuSE 10.3 includes a “feature” that displays this irritating little splash screen when you’re trying to edit a file. It’s almost irritating enough to switch to vi.Fortunately, there’s an easy way to disable it. Create or edit the file called .emacs in your home directory:
$ vi ~/.emacsand add the following line:
(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)and voila, it’s gone for good.
Dear anonymous webmaster: If you have a download link that ends in, say, .bz2, it should not lead to an HTML page, even if the purpose of said HTML page is to beg me for a donation. No, if the URL ends in .bz2, accessing it should provide me with a bz2 file.
Better yet, don’t ask me for a donation just yet. At this point in our relationship, I haven’t even decided if I like what you’ve done. I’m not going to make a donation on the basis of a screencast. And while we’re on the topic of screencasts, can you please get someone that can a) type and b) speak to do the screencast next time?
Furthermore, not everyone browses the web from the goddamned server on which they might want to install your product. Especially when your product primarily runs on UNIX servers that very often don’t have a GUI installed.
So no, I’m not going to donate to your sodding open source project. Not after you wasted ten minutes of my valuable time wgetting half a dozen files before I finally get one whose file type matches its extension.
Oh, wait, never mind, it still doesn’t match. The bz2 file I eventually downloaded is called “donation=complete”. Complete, my ass!
For those of you used to running lookupd -flushcache to clear out stale entries from your DNS cache in Mac OS X, the new version (10.5) has replaced the old NetInfo suite with a bunch of new, more compatible utilities. The new way to do this is dscacheutil -flushcache.
What’s the fascination with taking either a recycled police car, or worse still a garden-variety Crown Vic or Caprice, and making it look as much as possible like an actual cop car?
I can think of three reasons why you might want to do this:
I can’t say any of these are particularly bad reasons, but driving an ersatz cop car also a couple of major downsides:
So what’s the deal, dear readers?
Stilton. Ah yes, Stilton. This Insult to Cows Everywhere is considered the very best in England, where deep-boiled eel guts in slippery-gray fester pudding sauce is Fine Dining. Remember: you can’t conquer a worldwide empire by serving good food at home, and this cheese alone launched a thousand ships for sure. In fact, I did a little research and learned that Stilton’s military roots go even deeper: It’s not really cheese at all, but was in fact one of the first biological weapons concocted by those dastardly Royals during the Revolutionary War. The smallest bit could poison any well from New Brunswick to Fort Calistoga. After pitifully snatching defeat from the jaws of victory at Yorktown, they launched a massive cover-up, made like it was food all along, and have been choking the stuff down with their collective pride ever since.
The Neue Helvetica was purdy, but completely unreadable in large blocks. It also made me feel like a hypocrite when complaining about too-small point sizes on other people’s sites.
The new typeface is Calisto, which degrades pretty nicely into Georgia on machines that don’t have it installed.
Now I just have to figure out how to make everything line up in a nice grid again.
How about a “competitive upgrade,” where you send in your bricked iPhone in exchange for a discount on a new N95?
Sometime back in 1997 — while I was extricating myself from my Porsche 914 after grabbing my car stereo face plate, Palm Pilot Professional, and big, honking Nextel phone — I distinctly remember thinking that it sure would be nice if all three of them could fit into one small device, preferably one that didn’t double as digital birth control.
Not quite ten years later, as I lay in bed sick from some godawful cold, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone and I literally pissed my pants with excitement1. Here was a device that was scarcely bigger than a deck of cards, sexy as an Abercrombie model, that could play music, make phone calls, and keep my contacts and appointments organized, while syncing seamlessly with my other Apple products.
As time drained away, he gawped at the screen like a medieval serf trying to comprehend helicopter controls, confounded by one simple question after another – questions such as where he was going, and how many of him there were. I ground my teeth to chalkdust as his hand hovered over the touch screen, afraid to choose, like a man deciding whether to stroke a sleeping wolf.
Finally the prick was done, and once I had waited for him to collect his tickets and his bloody receipt, it was my turn. Having no change, I opted to pay by card. But just as my hand moved toward the keypad to enter my pin, a voice in my head whispered: “You don’t know what it is.” And it was right.
The previously mentioned teach-myself-to-program-Cocoa-apps app is now available in a more-or-less feature-complete beta version.
The program is called Checkpoint, and is used to calculate scores for a certain style of time-speed-distance road rally. It’s something I had first tried to put together as a pure JavaScript+HTML app à la TiddlyWiki (but without the ability to save), and then as a (buggy) Ruby on Rails app I ran on my laptop. Then I realized that it’s probably one of the few apps that really makes sense to run as a pure desktop application.
Anyway, on the off chance that you think you might find this sort of thing useful, follow the link above. It’s free as in beer and runs on Mac OS X 10.4 and later.