(In case you’re wondering, it’s a receipt item for Land O Lakes butter.)
Category: Life
That Annoying Typing Bug
From the Gnome 2.10 release notes:
In the past, while typing something into one application when suddenly your instant messenger offered a chat request from your friend, your words would be typed into the chat window. Imagine if you were typing your password at the time. This should no longer happen in GNOME 2.10.
In addition, if an application takes a long time to start, your work will not be interrupted when it finally opens its window.
About time someone fixed this! The window focus-stealing problem has plagued just about every desktop out there. I think Windows is the first one I noticed that attempted a solution (blinking the taskbar button instead of switching to the dialog box). And since I often fire up several programs at once, it can get really annoying when I start typing my password into one, hoping I’ll finish before the other window appears and drops the last three letters into my web browser or something.
Unfortunately I’ll probably have to wait for Fedora Core 4 to really use it, unless I want to go even more bleeding-edge than I already am.
Judicious Activism?
There’s been a lot of talk on the conservative side of the fence about “activist judges” and “activist courts.” There’ve even been calls to limit the 200-year-old principle of judicial review.
Of course, there’s also been a lot of talk about appointing conservative judges to the Supreme Court so that, given a suitable legal challenge, they can overturn Roe vs. Wade and make it possible for Congress to pass laws banning abortion without resorting to a constitutional amendment.
So can someone tell me, how is this not judicial activism?
Stupid Censors
Remember last year when I realized some net filter was looking at teentitans3.jpg, breaking the words in the wrong place, and concluding it must be adult content and therefore should be blocked? (It replaced the “offending” words with spaces, which get encoded as %20 in URLs.)
At the time I left it, since I figured anyone who installed a filter that brain-dead given the popularity of the Teen Titans cartoon deserved what they got. Well, the usability and “make the site work for the visitor” side of the debate finally won out (with a little help from “the people who use these filters aren’t the ones who install them”), and a few weeks ago I renamed the file to teen_titans_current.jpg.
Guess what? I’m now seeing hits for %20%20%20%20_%20%20%20ans_current.jpg.
Even when I give it word breaks, it can’t figure it out.
They’re lucky I called the file titans.html. Otherwise some people wouldn’t be able to see it at all.
Given this level of “quality,” can you blame librarians for opposing mandatory installation of filters on library computers?
Further reading: The Censorware Project, Peacefire, and Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Note to Purveyors of Pop-ups
In the past few weeks, advertising developers have come up with scripts that will work around Firefox’s pop-up blocking. This is rather like a telemarketer calling someone on the do-not-call list. We installed a browser that blocks pop-ups for a reason. We are not your target audience; we are the people for whom pop-up ads are an invitation to boycott the advertiser.
If you’re selling something door-to-door, some people will buy, some will not, and some will be annoyed. But if someone has posted a “No Soliciting” sign, it’s a sure bet that they’re going to slam the door in your face. Why go to the effort when you know it’s going to be counterproductive?
%@$* Networked File Systems!
You’d think with the number of years we’ve been sharing files across networks we’d be able to do it somewhat reliably.
Windows: Try to connect to a computer that’s down or misconfigured, and sit for at least 30 seconds, unable to use an explorer window, click on your desktop, or, if you’re really unlucky, use the taskbar or Start menu, until it realizes it can’t connect. (I don’t know if this has been fixed in Windows XP, but it’s still a problem in Windows 2000.)
Unix: On one hand processes are separated better so you don’t normally get a full system lock-up unless it’s trying to connect while starting up…but if you have a modern GNOME desktop, and you have a file in your recent documents list on an auto-mounted NFS share that isn’t available anymore (say, because you turned the computer off), it can lock up your desktop while it tries to connect to create a thumbnail. (This happened to me last night.) And don’t get me started with trying to disconnect from an NFS share that isn’t available.
Mac: Have you got a folder on a server with lots and lots of files in it? Especially images? Hope you can wait for it to transfer every single image over the network and create a thumbnail, because you aren’t going to be able to see anything in that Finder window until it does. (To be fair, I’m basing this on connecting to a Linux box via Netatalk, which implements Mac file sharing. For all I know, connecting to an actual Mac would pull thumbnails out of the images’ resource forks or something.)
Hmm, now that I think about it, generating thumbnails of files on network shares seems to be a problem in itself.
Billion-year-old Nuclear Reactors
From the Astronomy Picture of the Day, it’s the remnants of a two-billion-year-old nuclear reactor discovered in 1972 in a mine in Oklo, Gabon.
Apparently in the old days there was enough uranium-235 in the Earth’s crust that, under the right conditions, nuclear fission could occur naturally. Over time the fuel was used up, and now uranium deposits are mostly 238U, so we don’t need to worry about any new nuclear reactors popping up without our help.
What’s really odd is that this reactor produced plutonium naturally. There’s still some there. Most periodic tables I’ve seen label plutonium as a synthetic element, so the idea of natural plutonium takes some getting used to.
Kind of like the idea of a natural nuclear reactor.