Chrome's new bookmark manager is definitely a poster child for "half-ass it then push it to the masses". It seems to be working hard to almost replicate the Windows 8.0 Metro interface that everyone loved down to the "checkmark a tile to open the menu".

Tips:

If you want to make a new folder, go to the folder you want it to be in and press the NEW button on the left outside of the folders, there's no button for it on the right inside the folder (but there is a button to delete the entire folder from inside the folder).

If you want to drag items into your new folder, drop them quick. If you hesitate Chrome decides that you are re-ordering the items and you want the bookmark to go before the folder even though your mouse is directly over the tile.

If you have nested folders, opening a subfolder seems to randomly display all the elements in the center of the screen where you can't click on anything because its all on top of each other. Sometimes. There's no tree view of nested folders. Top level folders are on the left, after that you have to drill down individually.

No right clicking. Haven't you heard that there's no way to right click on a tablet?

When you checkmark a folder you don't get the option to edit its name or description. You have to open the folder then rename it from the inside.

Last September I went on the most amazing thing ever: the first ever Motorhead's Motorboat! A heavy metal cruise full of great bands that went Miami - Key West - Cozumel - Miami. Four days of partying and heavy music.

They're doing it again this year. I've already pre-booked on Motorhead's Motorboat this time around.

Perchance did any of you go on the first or looking at this one?

For the love of all that is holy, please do NOT automatically select shit from a dropdown list if I'm typing and a dropdown opens up underneath where the mouse pointer just happens to be idling on the screen.

Chrome: This. Means. YOU.

Love is over.

I was redirected to http://java-update-us.com/index.html?sid=42&aff_sub=wb-playanma-us&aff_sub2=am1&aff_sub3= which dropped a java_installer.exe into my Downloads folder from some ad playing on http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/07/24/1357256/empathy-for-virtual-characters-studied-with-fmri-brain-imaging around 2:30PM central time 7/24

In this post, Immerman wrote:

The problem is that our society has been systematically eliminating most of the occupations where an honest, hard-working, but not-especially-bright-nor-politically-savvy person can make a decent living.

Then I wrote:

Then perhaps we need to encourage people with those biological advantages to breed more.

Another Slashdot regular told me that comments like these are "dude, not funny". This is something that I occasionally need help to discern because of my mental condition. I think part of my problem comes from trying to fit in with other users on Slashdot who write comments suggesting similarly impractical workarounds out of hardcore laissez-faire ideology: "No jobs in your area? Just move." "No good ISP in your area? Just move." (1 | 2 | 3 | 4) Some such comments even get moderated up.

Sometimes I can get through to them: "Cost of living in some areas has become so high that an entry-level job doesn't pay a living wage." Or "Public high schools aren't doing a good job of teaching basic life skills such as how to relocate for a job. For example, about how much money should I have saved up before I move to, say, Austin?" Yet some posters can't even come up with a ballpark figure. Or a more tongue-in-cheek approach takes them up on their "offer": "How should I go about qualifying for even a temporary work visa in your country?"

But other times I've concluded that it's easier just to try to fit in. If it has in fact gone too far, perhaps I should take the advice of Jesus of Nazareth. To paraphrase Mark 9:45: "If your Slashperger buddies cause you to stumble, cut them off."

Turned 0x30 on Christmas Eve. That sounds better than 48. I expect to start acting 20 when I hit 50.
insert goatse link here.

The WSJ has floated an opinion piece offering what it calls a conservative alternative to Obamacare, that I think is the first time I've seen any conservative alternative except "Nuh-Uh!" Google news popped it up with a link to http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-381425/ which seems to be some sort of glorified rss feed with an HTML skin, so I have no idea if the link will be good for anyone else in the future.

It is, in my opinion, a beginning. In the past, I've called obamacare the wrong answer to the wrong question. This article suggests extending the current employer tax writeoff so that everyone, not just the employers, can buy insurance with tax-free money. Then it goes a step further by means-testing a tax credit for the poor so they can buy privately operated insurance with their tax credit instead of getting Medicaid. I think this is a good start to answering the question of how to make it possible for everyone to get at least minimal health insurance (if they want it. This is the conservative version, remember).

It is still the wrong question, though.

In an effort to be fancy and helpful, bash now has context aware tab completion (in the bash-completion package on Debian). Based on where you are and what command you're typing, pressing tab will Do (what the completion script writer thought was) The Right Thing.

Unless what you think is the right thing was was the behavior of older versions of bash where you could do

**/*.c<Tab><Tab>

and (eventually, ** is damn slow) get a list of all of the matching files. It also worked with [...] {...} ? or any of the other bash wildcards. You know, just in case you wanted to see what your command is going to do before you hit enter.

Now I have to ^U, ls ^Y, then ^Y, which takes about 2.8 seconds (including the realization that bash is just going to keep beeping at me if I keep hitting tab). Or disable fancy and helpful completion with complete -r

So I right clicked in an explorer window in windows 7 and went to "New >" on the menu and the submenu didn't open. I clicked it a few more times and nothing happened. I clicked it a few more times and the entire explorer shell crashed and restarted.

Wish I knew why the hell it sometimes takes 30+ seconds to get to "New Word Document" on my work computer.

Mystikkman claims that I've been posting messages perceived as unjustly hateful toward Microsoft. I would prefer to express my feelings without hate, but sometimes I have the wrong idea of what is hate and what isn't. Please point out which of my comments are hateful and why so that I can understand how not to post next time.

Ran paint.net today and a popup appeared letting me know there was a new version. It had two buttons:

1. Install when I exit
2. Install now

This is doing it right.

Three words: Four. Way. Diff.

Show me where my patch (before and after) conflicted with the last patch (via blame) before and after. Bonus points if you can show both complete commit messages. Extra bonus points if you look at the branch, figure out where it went wrong (at what point did my patch last apply cleanly?) and show me all the commits since.

Telling me shit's fucked up doesn't help anyone (that's what I got with cvs).

Telling me what I was trying to do tells me what I was trying to do, not what Bob was doing when he checked in before me, but at least I know what the hell I was doing when I did it months/years ago (this is where I am now with git rebase).

Telling me what the hell I was trying to do and what the hell Bob was trying to do, now that's what I need, because now I know what it's supposed to be doing when I'm done merging the code and can do so with a reasonable degree of confidence that both Bob and I will be happy with the result.

For my company's workflow, this would be the holy grail of revision control. I'd even be tempted to use a graphical tool to do it.

git, a love/hate relationship. Right now, hating really really hard.

You can do all sorts of incredible things with it, but there's so much that seems obvious I ought to be able to do, but just can't see how.

Case in point: git rebase. This is an incredibly powerful tool that lets you take changes and apply them to a different branch, one at a time very rapidly (if there are no conflicts). If a conflict arises, the process pauses, tells you where it died, lets you fix it, then you git rebase --continue. EXCEPT you get half of the first line of the commit message (despite being on a 128 column terminal it cuts off at 80) and no hash or any other way (I can find) to look up the complete description of the current commit being fixed (other than aborting the whole thing, going through the complete log to find the commit starting with whatever message then starting again (rerere makes this not painful, just annoying)). Oh, and if you used a branch name, that branch name is MOVED to the new location.

Other case in point: git merge. This is an incredibly powerful tool that throws everything together all at once and lets you deal with the aftermath. Conflicts, conflicts everywhere and no explanation of what the code is supposed to be doing. Fortunately, someone made a git-merge-like-rebase script that creates a temporary branch, rebases it to the target, then deletes the temporary branch leaving you with the original branch where it was (like merge) but applying one commit at a time (like rebase).

Still, I just took 2 hours of work doing something that would have taken 2 days in CVS, thanks to git rebase (rolling out a new version of our code for one of our customers with a heavily customized application. Rebased their custom branch onto our new release branch, fixed all the conflicts where they want customers sorted firstname lastname or blinking red lights or whatever and done). Probably could have done it in 1:30 if I didn't have to go back through the log to figure out how to fix "Change order of fields so that customer rep appears before ". I'm working in more and more tricks to reduce conflicts every upgrade so hopefully I'll have it down to less than an hour soon.

So now I love it again.

So Google followed through on their threat to kill Reader and I ended up having to track down a new RSS feed reader. Having been bitten by the Cloud, I decided it'd have to be locally installed, after trying a few I've settled on FeedDemon (now discontinued, a shame) as "best so far".

The one thing I really, really miss about Google Reader (which in fact was the reason I started bothering with RSS in the first place) is that it had a bookmark you could set that would open the URL of the next unread item in your queue. Dragged the bookmark to the bar, and one click gets me to read something new and exciting (and middle click to read lots of new and exciting things in tabs). Sure, every time someone published an RSS entry without a URL google gave me a 500 error and marked every single article read, but hey, it was damned convenient when it didn't implode.

FeedDemon gives me a link to click on each article to open in its (embedded IE) browser, but as I go down the list of articles it doesn't automatically remove the read ones nor does it automatically add new unread articles unless I manually refresh the article list (maybe I'm doing it wrong?). It has a "Next Unread" button but it doesn't open the URL, it just shows the RSS item header and then I have to click it to open the URL.

Strongly considering taking some of what I learned in the Coursera python class a while back, this feed parsing library, and learning wxPython (platform independence!) and spinning my own. It won't do much, but it WILL have a button that launches a chosen browser with the chosen URL (thinking of making it a systray icon: left click to open next item, right click for menu, blinks when there are unread articles).

It could even pop up a window to display an article with no URL.

Hello, Microsoft. Please explain to me the reasoning why when a meeting is sent to people, they get a blank email with an .ics file attached, which is absolutely fucking useless to everyone not using a calendar app?

Thanks.

BTW, yes, I know about the option to turn ical off, explain to me why the FUCK you are incapable of sending a readable email with an attachment.