alex chiang: web 6.0

March 27, 2008

firefox 3 annoyances

Filed under: geek — alex @ 9:02 am

In the spirit of helping out the open source community, I upgraded most of my machines to Ubuntu Hardy Heron, in order to help with the beta test effort.

It’s mostly all good so far, except for a few firefox3 annoyances.

  • middlemouse.contentLoadURL is set to false, but you have to turn that on in older Ubuntu installs too, so I already knew what to look for.
  • browser.zoom.full is set to true, which means if you scale text up for easier reading, it scales images up too. Yuck. Set it to false to revert that annoying behavior
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=124728
  • the address bar history/predictive behavior has changed subtly, and I find myself surprised when I start typing a url, hit tab, and it chooses some link I wasn’t expecting. Not able to quantify this yet… edit: ah, setting browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to true gets you back to ff2 behavior

I don’t think the above list warrants Ubuntu bug reports, considering I’m not a typical Ubuntu user and changing the defaults to what I prefer would probably confuse people, but in case anyone out there in blog-o-land is wondering how to fix some of the annoyances, there ya go.

March 25, 2008

cure worse than the ill

Filed under: dreck — alex @ 10:45 pm

A well-written editorial in the CSM today entitled Must you buy health insurance?. If you think you might get sick in the next 4 to 8 years, it may behoove you to take a quick read.

While I agree that “healthcare” in America is seriously screwed up, neither of the Democratic candidates’ plans will fix the root cause of teh suck. [Of the two, Obama's is less bad.]

As others way smarter than I have pointed out, the real problem with health care in America today stems from two reasons:

  1. Health care is unlike any other typical good or service one would normally purchase, because when you are sick, you are willing to pay anything to get well. Note that “anything” includes “money you don’t actually have”. No judgment on my part there; it’s simply the truth, and I’d do the same.
  2. Capitalism.

No judgment on that second bullet either. Capitalism in America has done way more good for our country than bad.

However, in the case of health care, the toxic combination above has created such an environment where rational people might actually think that Michael Moore can make a decent movie. editor’s note: we do not actually think that; we are merely pointing out that others may.

Clearly the current system is not sustainable. We can do better. Maybe a single payer system is the answer, I don’t know. But requiring mandatory private insurance fixes neither of the two root causes of our ills today.

March 20, 2008

playing work

Filed under: dreck — alex @ 2:36 pm

March 18, 2008

bear costume = danger

Filed under: dreck — alex @ 9:06 am

This is why I wear a giant yellow big bird suit when I ride my bike.

March 11, 2008

my first git-bisect ™

Filed under: geek — alex @ 11:57 pm

Pull latest 2.6.25-rcN git tree to refresh my physical PCI slot patches, hack-hack-hack, go to test them on my test machine, and ruh roh, something’s hanging.

Try a clean tree without any of my patches and still get the hang. Hmm…

Not sure when this bug crept in, but for some stupid reason, I decide to start with 2.6.23. git-bisect happily tells me that I only have 11,000 more commits to go. Yikes.

A few hours later, we have a smoking gun: pciehp regression hang.

Oh, and btw, death be to those who introduce non-bisectable commits. Even if your code is 100% bug-free, you still make life difficult for those trying to debug others’ code. Bleah!

Time to relax by reading the Baroque Cycle.

March 8, 2008

theory vs. reality (why is openid b0rken?)

Filed under: geek — alex @ 6:36 pm

So I’m reading Val Henson’s blog entry about paying $14.95 for ffm on osx, and I feel the urge to make a witty insightful comment (as if I could make any other type of comment even if I tried).

Val disabled anonymous commenting — fair ’nuff. Hrm, I don’t want to create a LiveJournal account just to make a comment… Oooh! I can login with an OpenID — yay! Finally the big players on the intarwebs are starting to play nice and fix one of the most annoying things on the intertron, namely creating fifteen gazillion throwaway usernames and passwords for every site you might want to access. OpenID is the great idea that will solve all that right? Now you get to choose which $MEGACORP you get to sell your soul (and all your data) to — Google or Yahoo or whatever — and all the other $MEGACORPS can go screw themselves, they’re not gonna get your data, right?

Right!

Um, not quite:

yahoo-openid-b0rken-2

Damn you, LiveJournal! Can’t you see? “Yahoo! only supports OpenID 2.0 because it is more secure.” IT IS MORE SECURE!.

More secure than what?

THERE IS NO MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

Oh, ok. I guess I’ll just wait for LiveJournal to get with it and support a protocol that is “more secure”.

I guess I may as well use this opportunity to make my awesome witty insightful comment, that being, I too, hate the shareware culture so prevalent in the Mac community. Does the author of “mondomouse” really think that the audience who knows what ffm is (aka X refugees on osx) is really going to be willing to pay $15 for some closed source kernel module? Dude, that’s like 3 lattes from Starbucks, and you only got 3 and 1/2 mice from Macworld to boot! No thanks.

One of the things I dream about doing in my Copious Spare Time ™ is writing GPL replacements for all the silly Mac shareware out there, except I don’t want to learn obj-c, and I can’t figure out how to get compensated for my time…

On the plus side, this little web 2.0 adventure led me to discover that Google Contacts API has landed. Yay!

Time to go write a shim to get mutt talking to Google Contacts appropriately. After it’s done, you can have it too, for the low low price of $9.95 upfront and $0.001 per contact lookup for perpetuity.

March 6, 2008

i am so white

Filed under: travel — alex @ 7:38 pm

I am white because white people like to travel.

If a white person shows up in your country, you can make them feel fantastic by saying how you’ve never seen a white person before, and that you are amazed by their iPod - “a device that plays many songs? impossible!”

big time

Filed under: geek — alex @ 12:55 pm

Woo hoo, I’ve hit the big time!

PCI, ACPI: Physical PCI slot objects

Ok, this is small potatoes in the scheme of things, but you gotta start somewhere, right?

And if you have a lwn.net subscription, you can read about this week’s kernel development news. If you don’t have a subscription, you can wait until March 13 to read that link.

thursday thoughts

Filed under: dreck — alex @ 12:49 pm
  • “today is a 5 day”
  • “mmm… i’m lovin’ it”
  • “woo hoo! first lift!”
  • “there’s no point to first lift on packed groomer days”
  • “maybe fat skis aren’t the best choice for packed groomers”
  • “it. is. cold.”
  • “still, not a bad way to start a work day.”

March 4, 2008

of fish and bicycles

Filed under: dreck — alex @ 11:50 am

Very interesting article in the Atlantic titled Marry Him! (The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough).

The thesis occurs early on in the story:

ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

I think she is confusing the primary and secondary motivations.

My opinion is that societal pressures actually gear women towards wanting to have a child (or children). If it were easier to raise a child without a husband, than all those 40-year-old single women would be just as fine without.

But it’s not easy; it takes a team, as Gottlieb points out (or a village, as Hillary is wont to say), and thus Gottlieb spends the entire article making the case (to her implied audience of firey feminists) that settling for a less-than-ideal husband is ok — as long as he can help raise *your* child.

In other words, this whole article is a conceit. It *seems* like an admission that Steinem was wrong, that “we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle”, but it’s *not* — Gottlieb is a fish who wants babies, and recognizes that a bicycle (built for two) is (or can be) more efficient than swimming upstream alone (apologies for the Abu Ghraib treatment on those metaphors).

That bit of deception bothers me somewhat on the “critical thinker” / intellectual level. But don’t take that to mean that I hated the article — I actually did find the discussion and justification quite interesting.

The stronger implication is that as long as society (ours or any) casts women in the role of nurturer, care-giver, child-raiser,
there is always going to be a patriarchy.

If I were a feminist (which I’m not, but I do believe strongly in equality), my tactic would not be to stand on the rooftops and roar, but to Copernicanize the discussion, and start demanding that men wear the child-raiser mantle.

That is to say, increased women’s rights won’t come from trying to snatch the pebble out of the hands of men. Rather, they’ll come from dumping a load of gravel on men’s heads and watching them struggle for air.

Everything Gottlieb wrote about why women should settle for husbands applies equally in the other direction if men had to raise children by themselves too.

Of course, I’ve only outlined the theoretical portion of my thesis. There are lots of practical matters I didn’t address, like biological reality and the like, but I’m interested in hearing feedback on the big picture idea (of judo-ing the relationship to gain more freedom/power for women).

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