Customizing the Cocoa Text System is not exceptionally useful to me, because I hate having custom anything on my computer. When I use another computer, I'll be frustrated.

However, that page links to Default Mac OS X System Key Bindings, which is a reference that I have wanted for years and years. And now I HAVE IT.

On The Nasser Quote That Never Goes Out Of Style.

On middle managers and options.

Work is really frustrating right now. Like five months ago, my boss asked me into his office to check out a product because he wanted my "buy in". We were going to get a real bug tracking database. The product is called Enterprise Wizard, and it's basically a low-quality web based RAD tool. Its business logic is infinitely customizable and is not any more suited to issue tracking than it is suited to any other rudimentary database function.

I hated it, and told him so. I showed him some other bug tracking tools that work better, and he pointed out that they are not as flexible as the tool he was showing me. We were going to use this tool for tracking things that were not bugs. He wanted to be able to add a bunch of fields to issues so that they could be perfectly categorized. The thing I showed him couldn't do that, and it was the public opinion of the software developer that this sort of categorization should not be done. This turned him off, rather than turning him around. I backed down.

Enterprise Wizard got "buy in" from everyone else but the CFO, who was to approve the (expensive) purchase. He didn't understand why we needed it. Neither do I. So my boss and his boss made a more extended case for the purchase and got it included in this year's budget.

So now I actually have my hands on it. We're going to use it for our internal computer help desk (not bug tracking). It is worse than I expected. Aside from not being a help desk application, it has inane bugs. The same sort of inane bugs that I would have to deal with if I developed the thing myself. No, I couldn't develop something as flexible as Enterprise Wizard. Those guys bit off a way bigger task than I would aim for. My boss and I agree that implementation will take at least until April. I would lean on him to change his mind about using this product, but I don't know how much respect that would cost me. As if he respected me. He's already sold it to the CFO. Maybe he thinks he can't back down now.

Earlier today I was "documenting" a list of the rules that Enterprise Wizard's consultant put in the system. Because my boss doesn't want to figure it out any other way. While looking at a stack trace from an uncaught Java exception, tears welled up in my eyes. I cried, if only a little. I was literally bored to tears.

Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.

"Bush couldn't follow the fourth amendment if he was on rollerblades and it was stapled to his dick."

http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war52.html

I'd like to make a DVD that will play in ordinary DVD players. I'd like it to also have high-resolution photographs that people can access w/ a computer. I know that it's possible to do, because I've seen DVDs that work in DVD players but have DVD-ROM data as well.

Can I do it with my freebie NeroVision Express 2 SE on Winders? Any bright ideas?

So there's this very frequently-linked article on The Mercury News about Google refusing to turn over search data to the feds.

The thing that I think people are missing here is two-fold:

1. This is the stuff that the Justice Department wanted to publicize . They think media attention will help them here.
2. The stuff that they don't want published will be persued via Patriot Act style secret warrants. I don't know whether there'd be any way for us to know if Google is complying with or fighting those.

Calling an addictive substance (or anything you don't like) a "crutch" is idiotic.

Crutches are good. I've never heard of anyone using a crutch when they didn't need it. You know: to move without injuring themselves.

This is up there with "age is just a number" for sheer dumbness.

On Disabling CD autorun in Windows.

On Shareholder liability.

So there's this neat article on Modified Preorder Tree Traversal for storing hierarchical data in a database. It's of no use to me because I don't have any hierarchies to store in databases. I only ever work with digraphs. Does anyone know of any similarly handy algorithms for storing/retreiving digraphs? They're mostly acyclic, and maybe we could work at guaranteeing that, but nodes can definitely have two parents.

I just have a table for edges and a table for nodes with no special algorithmical sugars at all. It works great for dumping the whole digraph into a .dot file for graphviz, but anything else requires subquery after subquery. If we had an rdbms with recursive queries, we could use that, but something about recursive queries makes me go a cold wet one. Sounds like cheating and sounds like the wrong idea. Maybe there isn't a better way...

He's such a serious guy. I hope he'll get a laugh out of this, but maybe I'll just get banned. And I don't mean to put him off the lazyweb.

reddit
digg
slashdot
del.icio.us/popular
populicious
mefi
waxy links
linked list
<lj user="jwz">
my amigos
my lj friends

are various different ways to find dumb crap on the web. And they vary widely in quality even though they recycle eachother's content, intentionally or not. And there's probably room for new ones, because digg and reddit are new. Slashdot may not be dying from a business perspective, and I still use it all the time, but it's slowly dying to me. I no longer like to use it.

But not for any change in how /. works. It's different because the crowds at the different sites are different. del.icio.us/popular was always lame because it was filled with self-actualization and self-help bullshit all the damn time. That was just a consequence of filling up with "tagsonomy" dweebs, but not a consequence of how their site worked or its intended focus.

Reddit is excellent because it is apparently mostly used by people who are interested in the same things I am interested in. This is very different from /. or del.icio.us, and I love it.

Blah blah blah blah. I'm done talking now.

everybody-is-a-celebrity-now.com

or maybe

whattheinternetisfor.com

or something along those lines.

It would be a social networking reference site without participation from the people being listed. A wiki with an entry for every person that anyone feels like listing, no matter how unknown they are. A haven for libel, self-aggrandizement, harassment, and stalking. Everything would be public, and all information submitters would be anonymous. Perhaps each person listing might have an associated forum along the lines of the wikipedia talk page, or 4chan, or say-so.com, so that dialog about any given person would be longer-lasting.

Each page could have a section at the bottom with authoritative information (or rebuttals :) entered by the actual person being discussed, but then you'd have to vet whether this person claiming to be Ben-Donley-of-San-Francisco really is the dude being discussed on this particular person listing. Perhaps people could pay money in order to be vetted and put their information up, like a public encryption key.

Hosting would have to be in some kind of legal haven, because many laws would be violated in many nations. That would be the hard part. Maybe figure out who hosts the pirate bay, and go get hosting with them. Of course, if the primary function of the site turned out to be a libel/harassment machine, then it would be lame and I wouldn't want to do it. But I think it could be an incredible resource. Like Wikipedia white pages or something.

It could also turn into a public mirror of private credit information, like previous addresses, phone numbers, employment and relationships. If people started posting SSNs, it could screw up our current shared-secred identity system. Dunno. I'm really curious and I want to find out.

On physics breakthroughs in recent history.