One day while watching Arrested Development, I noticed something: The theme song is strikingly similar to the Pac-Man theme.
I had to slow the Pac-Man theme down a bit to match these up, but otherwise:
Arrested Development / Pac-Man
Update: More at CelineTheFeline
I began noticing recently that sometimes when trying to send a file to the trash, I was told that it couldn’t be moved there and that I’d have to delete it entirely to get rid of it. I didn’t really think anything of this at first, until I began to suspect that it was only happening with files in my /home directory.
My /home directory is on its own partition on a standard hard disk. The rest of the file system is on another partition on an SSD. In order to fully reap the speed benefits of an SSD, I symbolically linked as many non-personal directories as I could from /home to the /var/jay on the SSD. These included ~/.local, ~/.cache, ~/.gconf, ~/.mozilla, etc.
I didn’t really know much about the way Linux/GNOME handles Trash. Files deleted from a third internal hard disk or from USB sticks would be moved to /.Trash-1000 on that device, while appearing in “Trash” in Nautilus. Files from a user’s home directory, however, don’t go to /home/.Trash-1000, or even /.Trash-1000 — instead, they go to ~/.local/share/Trash. Because in my setup this directory was on the SSD rather than the hard disk with the /home partition, GNOME refused to move it there, since that would require copying from one disk to another, which GNOME’s developers (smartly, I think) believe would be alarmingly time-consuming for someone who’s just trying to delete some files — they shouldn’t expect to see a copy dialog grinding away.
In order to try to fix this, I made ~/.local/share/Trash into a symbolic link itself, back to the /home partition at ~/Trash. After this change, things were getting trashed properly — at least, I wasn’t asked to delete them entirely — but they weren’t showing up in Nautilus’s Trash view. I don’t know how Nautilus makes itself aware of all the trash folders spread across different devices, but for whatever reason it wasn’t picking up on this one, even after several reboot cycles.
Finally I gave up and moved ~/.local back onto the same partition as /home, and now everything’s back to normal. But I’d still like to know if it’s possible to keep ~/.local on a separate disk while retaining GNOME’s and Nautilus’s ordinary trash behavior.
Bug reporting sucks, it’s clear. How can it be better?
One idea that could alleviate a lot of the headaches of bug reporting while providing increased functionality is a desktop bug-reporting application. I won’t pretend to be familiar with any APIs that are made available by Launchpad, GNOME, Bugzilla, Trac, etc., but I have to imagine that some exist. I also won’t pretend that I’m the first to have this idea — it’s entirely possible that it’s been attempted and that those attempts have failed many times. But from where I’m sitting it seems like a near-perfect solution. Here are the benefits we’d get from a desktop bug-reporting application:
I’m sure with my limited imagination I’ve not even scratched the surface of what a desktop bug-reporting application is capable of. What else would you like to see in one? What would some of the pitfalls be? Is this practical or impractical, and why?
Bug reporting sucks. Every time I’m forced to do it, it’s laborious and soul-draining. It makes me give up hope for free software having a viable future. But it’s necessary, (a) as the way I “pay” for free software, and (b) to see if maybe I can slightly hasten a hypothetical future where the software I rely on daily might work reasonably well (it’s coming!!).
Here are the stages of bug reporting, and why each of them sucks:
“So, then if I click on the button again, this time *after* clearing the .config directory, but without having restarted the program, the drop-down list (usually just the “Profiles” one, but sometimes all of them) will lose any entries that I created (except for the ones made before I upgraded to 0.0.2.11).“
What you find yourself wanting to do is take a video of the problem occurring, but that would require subjecting yourself to the hell that is desktop video recording software for Linux, a path that will only leave you spiraling further and inescapably down into the toilet that is the bug reporting process.
That’s it. Oh my god I hate it every time, it’s like pulling god damn teeth, and it’s a wonder anybody chooses to do this with their free time. What in the hell is wrong with me? And more importantly, how can we make this better? I have an idea, but I’m too emotionally exhausted right now to get into it.
Update: Part 2
Skip forward to about 2:20.
Update: Here is the original video from which Colbert’s clip was taken. More from O’Reilly about us being “lucky.”
It is so plainly obvious how deeply flawed O’Reilly’s reasoning is here, and these are more words than the subject could possibly deserve, but I can’t help but want to address it.
What’s really peculiar about it is that he doesn’t seem to be saying that the creation of the moon can’t be explained by ordinary, mechanical events. I’m sure he’d agree that it’s viable to theorize that a huge asteroid smashed into the earth a couple billion years ago and formed the moon. It has explanatory power, although there is no way to know for certain that that happened, because we can’t observe it directly. And that seems to be his point; it’s one thing for apologists to point to something that can’t be explained in order to suggest that there is a god — “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the gravitational constant what it is?” — but here he’s invoking something so trivial, something that can be explained, but whose explanation we can’t verify with absolute certainty, and suggesting that it has the same logical heft.
Lately, my Dell Vostro V13 has been acting up. Or, rather, Ubuntu has been acting up on it. At first I thought it was limited to hibernation: waking from hibernate often (and I mean often) failed, shutting power off to the machine sometime during boot. Then I began noticing that it had also been happening while booting back up from an ordinary shut down. Sometimes it took three or more tries to get back to the desktop in these circumstances.
I’ve explored what feel like countless possible explanations — shutting the screen before shut down/hibernate had completed, the wireless driver, the wireless being on during shut down/hibernate, the “splash,” “quiet,” and “no_console_suspend” flags in GRUB (and their 8 permutations), two shut downs/hibernates in a row (rather than alternating), the particular version of the kernel, and, finally, some unidentifiable kink in my installation that resulted in me reinstalling Maverick entirely.
Nothing seemed to alleviate the problem. Even the third or fourth boot after reinstall (the first one after updating to the newest kernel, in fact) failed in the same manner.
It wasn’t until Mark Shuttleworth’s announcement of “windicators” that I learned of the rationale behind the palette of notification colors in the indicator applet. To quote:
[Windicators] would follow the same styling as Ayatana indicators: Semantically colored: with red for critical problems, orange for alerts, green for positive status changes and blue for informative states that are not the default or usual state.
This came as a real surprise given that I had (and still have) never seen a blue or orange indicator icon.
The obvious and primary objection is that four colors in a palette to convey meaning is far too many. Shuttleworth even said as late as April 1 — just four weeks before Lucid’s release — “Personally, my expectation is that green vs orange/red is as far as we want to go.” Two colors is an absolute maximum here — one for negative messages about something being broken, the other merely to notify you of something — although even one should suffice: “Something has changed; requesting your attention.”
If “orange is for alerts” and “green is for positive status changes,” then why do new IM messages turn the messaging icon green? Isn’t that an alert? What is “positive” about getting a new message? What if it’s your boss firing you? Your boyfriend breaking up with you? A spambot?
Recently I got a Nexus One, which had me curious to discover the value (if any) of location-sharing applications like Foursquare and Gowalla. I had dormant accounts for both, and decided to see who among my contacts were actually using these things. I imagined not many.
Foursquare’s friend finder was straightforward and I was able to add three or four people. Gowalla’s, on the other hand, misled me into sending an invite to all 947 people in my Google contacts. This includes people I bought stuff from on Craigslist; old bosses; old girlfriends; co-workers; probably even prospective employers.
The trick was in mimicking a fairly standard “Step 2″ format for these types of functions. It appears that I’m being presented two choices here: the first, to begin following only those contacts who are already on Gowalla; the second, to send invite emails to all checked names in the list.
Instead, both buttons do exactly the same thing. So when I clicked the button at the top, an email was sent to every person on that list. There was no pop-up window telling me, “You are about to send an email to 947 people. Continue?”
Fortunately I hadn’t used my full name on my profile; the email people received came from no-reply@gowalla.com or something similar; and I deleted my profile as soon as I realized what had happened. So hopefully I wasn’t as incriminated as I may have otherwise been. I know I roll my eyes whenever a friend has fallen for an obvious trap like that. And I like to think I’m pretty good at spotting these tricks. But this layout is outright deceptive.