Details from the 2000 census, in a map format. You can poke thing where you are living…
Does ‘x’ mean close?
Depends on the application. Most applications on windows will take the clicking of the red x to mean close the application. Others take it as a hint to minimize to the notification area. However most applications will give you the choice once and remember it from then on. KDE applications tend to take the minimize to notification area, gnome applications go away (but fear the one process gnome-terminal). Close should mean close.
Close to hidden is even worse – I’ve seen a few applications close to a still running, just hidden from you, mode. They run as a service while they’re in that mode, even if they’re not designed as such; it is a cheat for quick start.
Japanese Gift Giving
This week’s Josh in Japan discusses Gift Giving in Japan. It’s an interesting topic, especially the ‘never refuse‘ principle – refusing a gift is considered rude.
Primum non Nocere (linkfest)
One of the links for The Best of Software Writing II linkfest is to an article entitled ‘Primum non Nocere‘, or First, do no wrong. It’s an important principle that should be followed when writing software. On the non paranoia side of things we have the 10 places you must and must not use AJAX, which is a good consideration of appropriate cross cutting of client/server interaction. There’s the ‘Fractal nature of UI design problems‘, where I’ve reached step 5 in the problem being addressed before just saying ‘good enough’. How I came to despise AJAX, part of a long rant that I’ve experienced myself. Does Visual Studio rot the mind? I’m a vim user. Why I hate Frameworks – an argument against complicated frameworks. Simple ones for me thanks.
Bit of a linkstravaganza really.
The perils of the food we eat
The Luther burger is something I had seen referred to a few times but I never pursued the definition with any vigour. To discover after the fact that it’s the genuine article makes my heart hurt. Scary, scary Homer Simpson like incidents involving six pounds of rich, creamery butter.
gedit character set interpretation
gedit has this nice feature where it asks you what character set encoding a document is in if it can’t decide this for itself. I’m not familiar with the mechanism that is being used for this, but it probably has something to do with ninja badgers, character counting and a telepathic link to the borg collective. The problem is that if it has to give up on guessing what the file is, there’s no way to force the file to be opened as any file type at all. I encountered this when trying to access some old data that had trailing NULL characters at the end of the file. The problem is that there’s no ‘mangle it to this file type and show it to me‘ option.
Firefox/Flash crashing in Linux
Disable the Composite extension in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
For me, this solved the problem.
finally Brian sends out an email without a 5Mb attachment
Brian has this habit of sending out emails with a bunch of attached pictures/embedded power point presentation/something using up lots of bandwidth.
Finally an email that only weighs in at 5k (damned html email). It contains a link to pictures. Now if only he would not have his website in a notes database. It just makes me cringe when I see it. It’s so… wrong. There’s no other word for it.
music.podshow.com – id3 tag suggestions
There’s a little message in the middle of Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, from a man in Greece about dynamically adding ID3 tags to the file just prior to downloading. I just remembered that Version 2 id3 tags are put at the beginning of the file. All you need to know is how long the tag is, add it to the content-length for the download and the feed the tag out before the file. Adam’s idea of the golden ticket is doable without too much processor overhead.
Theoretically, you can embed ID tags into mp3 files once they are out of frame. The property of the tag is that it appears as junk for non-supporting applications. Embedding audio bumpers at the start and finish is trivial (you may need to eat a v1.1 tag at the end of the file).
Other trivial pieces of information I discovered today – WiFi is a pun-term of HiFi, and doesn’t stand for Wireless Fidelity, it was simply the name that the ad execs came up with when asked (as 802.11 doesn’t have a ring to it). [via The old new thing]
[Listening to: Untitled 4 – Sigur Rós – ( ) (7:33)]
I’m Teal Green, in case you want to know
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You Are Teal Green |
 You are a one of a kind, original person. There’s no one even close to being like you. Expressive and creative, you have a knack for making the impossible possible. While you are a bit offbeat, you don’t scare people away with your quirks. Your warm personality nicely counteracts and strange habits you may have. |