Scarring

If you want to be scarred for the rest of your life with no chance of recovery, watch this video.

Man, MS interns are scary. At Google we do more normal intern-y things like playing foosball and ping pong, and drinking beer.

September 08, 2005 (link)

Picasa runs in Wine!

I got bored tonight, and was browsing the Google Store, where they had a link to Picasa (which is Windows only). I wonder if this thing works in Wine; almost no chance in hell, I figured, since it does all kinds of fancy visual effects.

But lo and behold, I downloaded it, ran the installer, and it fired up and found all my images! And it works pretty much perfectly, as far as I can tell. I'd be extremely surprised if the CD-burning worked, but pretty much everything else does.

Of course, F-Spot and gThumb work fine as well; this is more a testament to improvements in Wine (and this is "normal" Wine I'm talking about, not CodeWeavers or TransGaming or anything). And Picasa does have some cool effects, if you feel like checking it out.

September 09, 2005 (link)

Google movies

Now in Canada! I really liked using this the last term I was down here, and missed it in Waterloo. But now it's available in Canada and the UK!

Try it: Google "movies <postal code>" eg. movies h2w2e3.

September 11, 2005 (link)

iPod Nano

My plans to spend a whole bunch of money this weekend were thwarted: the entire Bay Area is out of 4GB iPod Nanos. Apple always seems to have these supply shortages when they launch new products, and I'm sure they'd say they didn't anticipate the demand, etc. But when it happens so often, and it's a problem that can't be all that hard to solve, part of me wonders if they don't do it just to increase buzz.

4 years

On a more serious note, this is worth reading. Say what you will about Michael Moore, this is one instance where I think he makes a lot of good points, tries not to be too condescending, and really drives home the fact that the current administration just isn't working.

September 14, 2005 (link)

Productivity Enhancer of the Day

$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1       newton.net.local        newton  localhost.localdomain   localhost
127.0.0.1       slashdot.org
127.0.0.1       arstechnica.com
127.0.0.1       pla.nit.ca
127.0.0.1       fark.com
127.0.0.1       kerneltrap.org
127.0.0.1       advogato.org
127.0.0.1       livejournal.com
127.0.0.1       planet.gnome.org

$ lsattr /etc/hosts
----i-------- /etc/hosts

Works wonders.

September 17, 2005 (link)

iPod Nano

It arrived today. First impression: it's gorgeous, and it just makes you want to pick it up and play with it. Remarkably good design. It's small and light yet somehow avoids feeling too fragile.

Of course, I don't often talk about something without ranting, so here goes:

• Making the touch wheel control volume is stupid. It's too easy to make the sound too soft or too loud.
• The earbuds, like all earbuds I've ever tried, immediately fall out of my ears.
• It actually sounds worse than my Rio on some songs. That's odd, because people often rave about the sound quality of iPods, and have been particularly enthusiastic about the Nano.
• No oggs. But everyone knows that. But it still sucks.
• I'm not a big fan of shuffle, as in "randomize my playlist," I prefer random, as in "choose a random song from my playlist not equal to the one most recently played." Maybe that's just me.

Of course, I had to get my songs in the thing somehow. I used gtkpod for that.

Things were going great; I plugged it in, and it was automounted at /media/ipod thanks to udev, dbus and HAL. Then I ran gtkpod. And boy did things go downhill. That application has one of the worst UIs I've seen and was so utterly contrary to the experience of using an iPod that it was almost funny. It did eventually manage to put songs on my iPod, but it was extremely unintuitive.

I might work up the courage to install all the crazy crap needed to run Banshee at some point; maybe it'll suck less. It's odd though; from their screenshots they look like a total Rhythmbox ripoff, written in C# plus tag editing and iPod sync. I mean why not just add those things to Rhythmbox? I guess I should try it before I rant too much though...

Microsoft Atlas

Long story short: a small JavaScript library, containing...

• Some wacko crap to implement Java-like classes in JavaScript.

I dunno, I'm not convinced the whole OO model is really right for JavaScript. Part of its value is that you can just throw code in wherever and that it's so tightly integrated with the document. I've heard JavaScript described as "object-based," not "object-oriented," and that sounds about right to me.

• A StringBuilder

Heh, yeah, well, string appends are appallingly slow in IE and with IE7 not coming for a while, no wonder. Meh.

• Browser abstraction

This one's useful. They abstract many browser-specific things into a base class. Most people do this already in various (usually less elegant) ways so it's nothing new, but handy nonetheless. Kudos for making it work in FF and Safari; of course they implement some things pretty slowly in those browsers, but hey, they tried.

In any case, I don't think this is as big a deal as everyone is making it out to be. They've got some buzzwords so they got some press, but anyone who's written a web app of any considerable size already has all this crap, so it's hardly innovative. Releasing a JS "library" is kind of an interesting thing to do, and odd for MS, since by its very nature the source is right out there.

September 23, 2005 (link)

sshfs

It officially Doesn't Suck (tm). I was pleasantly surprised. You see, at Google the general rule-of-thumb is no code on laptops. If you absolutely must you can use a crypto loopback filesystem, but even that's somewhat frowned upon. So, wanting to code from home but very much not wanting the connection latency to affect every keypress in my editor, I decided I'd give it a try.

Turns out they do enough caching and prefetching that it's totally decent. I wouldn't expect to be watching DVD rips over it any time soon, but text editing, listening to music, etc. are no problem. Plus, FUSE will be in 2.6.14, making things even easier in the future.

Life

Got barftastically sick this week, which wasn't much fun. Spent most of Tuesday at home alternating between code reviews and barfing my guts out. Didn't eat much yesterday. Finally got hungry again today, and stuck to light foods. No word yet on what caused The Purging (no, it wasn't alcohol!)

Been watching Firefly with Jim, James and other random people. We're due to finish it off on Saturday, in preparation for the movie which comes out in a week and looks pretty damn awesome. First time in a long time I've been excited about seeing a move (the last time was The Matrix Reloaded, and well we all know how that turned out...)

Still need to get into the city at some point. Mmmmm.. city. I could use me some Ghirardelli too.

September 28, 2005 (link)

Terminals

So I use ion as my window manager pretty much exclusively these days, because I use it on my laptop due to the annoyances of a trackpad, and I use it at work for the increased productivity it affords me. (I still use GNOME on my desktop, but it's across the continent in Waterloo :)

I'm happy with ion, but there's one thing that seems to only occur with ion that is driving me insane. I use a lot of terminals, and when you open pretty much anything in ion, it almost immediately gets a resize event to fit it to the size of the frame.

Every terminal I've tried (xterm, rxvt, urxvt and gnome-terminal) has the issue that sometimes this resize doesn't seem to take effect, and only a very small portion of the frame is actually filled. (Yes, this is almost certainly a race condition; but why is it only in terminal applications?)

But what's more, sometimes this only applies when I run something like vim or mutt inside said terminal; the application will only fill the standard 80x24 size but at the shell the full dimensions of the terminal can be used.

Then there's this other gem: if I type a command at the shell longer than about 30 chars, it begins to wrap way before the window boundary, BADLY. As in it wraps onto the same line, overwriting the shell prompt and causing all kinds of ugliness.

Has anybody experienced this and been able to fix it? I've tried a bunch of terminals, a bunch of Xresource settings for each one, I've tried fiddling with stty, all to no avail. And no, moving the terminal from frame to frame does not fix it.

I really like ion but this is driving me nuts. And I've experienced it on 3 different systems now (my laptop, at school and at work) so it can't be that uncommon.

September 29, 2005 (link)

Terminals (cont'd)

Several people kindly emailed me to inform me of various things that may or may not solve the problem. In short:

• Debian has some patches in either ion or xterm, since this problem does not occur there.
• Mod1+L in the default ion keybindings gives the current window a kick in the pants (probably by sending another resize event) and that seems to fix things up a bit.
• bash + a long PS1 cause odd wrapping issues in every terminal application I tried, but not on the console. So now I have a less spiffy, but less broken PS1. Such is life.

Thanks for the tips, everyone. No more crappy resize issues!

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