Posts

I’m giving Camino a try for a few days to see how it compares with Firefox, my old standard. It is a bit prettier than Firefox, although these Firefox themes close the gap to a certain extent. I think the thing that will ultimately drive me back to Firefox is that it’s basically the same on Windows as it is on OS X. The biggest difference I’ve seen so far is the chrome. The biggest pain so far is that the keyboard shortcut that provides access to the built in search engine box differs between the two. I use that box 25 times a day at least. (If you’re using Firefox and you aren’t using it, teach your fingers the Control-K (Command-K on OS X) keyboard shortcut. Your wrists will thank you for the reduced mouse usage.) ...

I’m revising a list of Web publishing resources. I posted the list to a wiki on the site, and was looking to solicit some help from readers in updating the list. You can find the list here.

I’ve been disappointed in what a lot of my favorite weblogs have had to say about the Dick Cheney incident of late. Take Think Progress for example, or firedoglake. I’ve been reading their posts on this “scandal” as they’ve been posted, and mostly they make me feel tired. I can’t help but wonder what they’re trying to uncover. Did the Vice President accidentally shoot a guy while hunting, after having a beer, and perhaps even more than one beer? Sure. Have some people lied about whether any drinking was taking place? It seems like it. So what? ...

The reporting on gun-related aspects of the “Dick Cheney shot a guy in the face” story has been woeful. Few reporters seem to know much at all about hunters, shotguns, shotgun shells, or anything else that might be helpful in explaining this story to laymen. I’m not incredibly knowledgeable about guns, either, but I know enough to know that the reporting has been atrocious. According to the game warden’s report, Cheney was using a 28 gauge shotgun loaded with 7 1/2 shot, which is birdshot (not buckshot). Gunshop.com has a page listing shot sizes. As you can see, 7 1/2 shot and buckshot are not really comparable. The hospital also reported that the shotgun pellet lodged near Harry Whittington’s heart is 5mm in diameter. That’s not right, either. Unless it grew somehow, it’s about 2.5mm in diameter. ...

As part of migrating everything to the new server, I’m trying to clean out my mailbox on the old server. I had thought I had forwarded all of the email accouns I used to my Gmail account, as part of a project to consolidate all of my email at one address. (Previously I had many, many email addresses. This eventually became the cause of much stress and angst, even though they were mostly forwarded to one mailbox.) Anyway, I started to tar the contents of my home directory and discovered that Maildir a lot of email. I opened the mailbox with Thunderbird and discovered about 8100 unread emails, roughly 8090 of which are SPAM. The remainder of the emails are stuff I probably should have responded to a long time ago. I hate email. ...

My wife and I don’t eat out on Valentine’s Day. The anonymous waiter explains why. In the article he refers to Valentine’s Day as “amatuer night.” I heard exactly the same characterization last week from the owner of a nice restaurant where we sometimes eat – “amateur night.” Bottom line, most of the nice restaurants here will be fully booked, they’ll be offering a truncated prix fixe menu with the most boring dishes imaginable, and the most obnoxious customers will be thick on the ground. I rate Valentine’s Day as safe to skip, but I guess it depends on your significant other. I’m happy that my wife understands the downsides of holiday-mandated romace. ...

Awhile back, I mentioned a memory leak that gave me fits. After numerous bouts with the profiler, lots of hand wringing, and many outage notifications, I was totally at a loss. There was nothing obvious in the profiler output that pointed to the problem, and turning off various components of the system in attempt to isolate the problem didn’t help. One day our systems administrator updated the MySQL JDBC driver on the server and we decided to see whether that fixed the problem. As it turns out, that was the problem – the server hasn’t run out of memory for a couple of weeks, and it used to have to be started every 48 hours. Leaky abstractions strike again. ...

Anyone have any tips on the best way to use Movable Type to publish a weblog of links? The basic requirement is that each link has a title and description, and that you can link directly to the destination (rather than the weblog entry) from the RSS/Atom feed. It seems like you need three fields to do it the traditional way – a title field, a field for the description of the link, and a field for the link itself. I’m thinking that the simplest approach is to use the title for the title, the entry field for the description, and the extended entry field for the URL to the destination, and then write alternate templates that use those fields as I intend. Is there a more accepted approach? ...

Fair housing activists have filed a lawsuit against Craigslist because the site failed to filter out ads that advertise housing in a discriminatory fashion. I’m interested in this because I have sympathy for both sides. Discrimination in housing ads strikes me as a bad thing, and indeed Craigslist added a warning about posting discriminatory ads in response to complaints. The other side though is that what makes Craigslist work is that everything is automated. There’s no good way to flag discriminatory ads without human intervention, and if every ad has to be screened by a human, there’s no way that Craigslist will be able to operate at the scale that it does right now. ...

Tristan Louis has a post on gatekeepers in the weblog world, the idea being that the “A list” bloggers set the agenda and most other people pick up the topics of interest based on what the gatekeepers are talking about. I tend to fall into the camp that argues that this sort of thing is inevitable. Nobody can absorb and process all of the information that’s available, and what follows from that simple truth is that some sources of information are going to be more popular and more trusted than others. ...