Happy No Pants Day!

I hope everyone reading this is enjoying a nice pantsless day. Sadly, I have not seen any other pantsless people in NY or at Google today! I got a few strange looks in the subway but so far at work only mag seems to have noticed, probably because he was explicitly looking for boxerage.

May 04, 2008 (link)

Rant Time: Hardy

So I recently upgraded to Hardy on my desktop. Overall, the upgrade went pretty smoothly. But there are of course some aspects of the new system I didn't appreciate:

1. gnome-keyring now asks you to unlock the keyring whenever you ssh somewhere. Not only does this completely fail to work, because for some unknown reason it is not running as me, it also doesn't really make sense. I am using ssh, so by definition, I am using a terminal. The last thing I want is an annoying window popping up in my face and stealing focus.
2. nautilus has decided that cifs is a local filesystem, and is happily previewing all the files on my remote samba server, eating up bandwidth. Good job guys. Does anyone know where in the code I tweak this? I suspect it is a matter of adding the string "cifs" to a list of filesystems that are considered remote. I am happy to make the 1-line diff and send it in myself, I just don't know where that line should go.
3. I had disabled all the "automatically do crap when I insert <blank>" in GNOME. The prefs were moved around and not migrated, it seems, since all the auto-run things were enabled again after the upgrade.
4. The nvidia kernel module was not installed after the upgrade, causing X to run in degraded mode. This is actually better than before, since it at least falls back to vesa instead of failing completely. Still, I don't understand why my enabling of restricted modules in gutsy didn't grandfather me in to having them enabled in hardy.

In short, far from a painless upgrade but much better than I usually have with Linux upgrades. At least my machine booted after the upgrade, the very first time too! Usually grub is completely fucked and I have to redo it manually.

May 07, 2008 (link)

Note to self

If Firefox is super slow and freezing up all the time and using all your CPU and generally sucking (more than usual), the time-honoured tradition of

mv ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla_bak

And restarting Firefox will cure what ails you (er, Firefox). I don't know what causes FF to start sucking like this, and it seems to happen quite suddenly too, not gradually as you might expect as your ~/.mozilla accumulates cruft.

May 26, 2008 (link)

Only in America

I just came across this. I'm not really sure what's more apalling: that you can get a free gun with your new car or that the guy who's doing it thinks it proves Barack Obama wrong about his "clinging to guns and religion" statement. If anything, I think it re-inforces the image of the midwest as a bunch of bible-thumping gun nuts.

And for the record: I am not saying that the midwest is a bunch of bible-thumping gun nuts, that is just the image often imagined by people living on the coasts. Frankly, this guy with his "free gun with every car" is not helping that image.

I do find it funny that the two people who didn't take the free gun were "a Canadian and an old guy" :P

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