“Writing microcopy is hard, but also, some people are just stupid.” — pretty much explains it.

It turned out that when pushed, nothing worked & nothing was correctly documented. tar, cpi, pax, dump, you name it, in multiple versions. Not a one.

I feel cheated—one James Clayton has beaten me to the punch! I've been feeling uneasy about biopics more & more lately. I don't watch movies that much, but even so, it seems that the mythical adaptions of five years ago have given way to the comic book adaptions & the biopics, & the biopics in particular are coming to dominate the arena. This article fills out, completes, & potentially cements my ideas on the trend though.

Two separate teams reported on herrings farting. Better yet, one of the teams included a Dr Batty & a Dr Dill.

Decentralised control strengthens the whole.

— harpo, on StackOverflow. Beautiful.

This is surprisingly good as non-technical intros to technicalities go.

“Take very bold moves like the ones in Australia, where they are building a nationwide network. That’s a very big national commitment and I’m envious of what they’re doing because we don’t seem to be able to get our act together here in the U.S. Our friends in Oz are going to be getting 100 megabit per second connections.”

This document is prescient; it should be required reading for all networking students & anyone involved in network neutrality hearings. The principle is also relevant in other fields—politics, AI, economics; anything where you need a substrate upon which to build greater functionality. Even literal building of buildings.

Fabulous.

There's some beautiful glyph samples here.

This is fucking ridiculous. Even the reason given is ridiculous: they bought drapes to permanently hide two statues of which one has a bare boob, *because they were sick of hiring drapes at two grand a pop every time they held a formal event*. Well how about you *get the fuck over it & let the boob show?* Purile fuckheads.

“Use an apostrophe when letters are missing.”

That is the whole of the law. Simply elucidated, & as far as pedagogy goes the need to explain a little bit of Old English is a good thing—learn 'em some hist'ry.

It could do with some tangential guidance on whether one should omit only the “e” or the full “es” on a possessive proper noun, but strictly that's a spelling issue, not a punctuation one. The One Rule still applies either way—letters are missing: use an apostrophe. On a plural noun one should elide the full “en” suffix, but I'm unsure about on a proper name. Different (& often self-appointed) authorities differ on the issue.

Those who claim Gruber doesn't admit when he's wrong are talking out of their arses. This example showcases his style of doing so wonderfully:

1. In stark contrast to the industry standard, it's a new, full-sized article. An editor's note buried at the bottom of the original article & the author avoiding the subject is the most one can usually expect.
2. He discusses how & why he was wrong. The majority of concessions try to get it over & done with ASAP.
3. He actually looked into whether he was wrong simply because someone got the notion that he might be into his head, not waiting till someone bludgeoned him with a comprehensive exposition, came to the conclusion that he was wrong, & said as much. Most pundits concede only when they're forced to.
4. He admits to wrongness only where he honestly believes he was wrong; his position on any related statements is affected only insofar as they relied upon the conceded point. He may back down when incorrect, but he shows none of the shame or cowardice people sometimes display in that situation.

It's probably the last bit that gets his detractors all huffy. They don't like that he'll back down gracefully on one point but stand by others without bowing.

Basically, “get over it” is an aggressively dismissive phrase & tends to provoke angry responses. Sticking “Some people are gay. Get over it!” on the side of a bus was always going to bring out the straight supremacists. I myself agree with the slogan entirely, including the dismissiveness, but seriously, some people are going to be offended & retaliate with an opposing message. Get over it!

The homophobic ad read “Not gay! Post-gay, ex-gay and proud. Get over it!“, & was banned on the grounds that it was discriminatory. Stonewell has said that it shouldn't have been, for which I applaud them: I'm generally a fervent supporter of US First Amendment–style free speech, & believe that no level of repugnancy disqualifies an opinion from public expression.

Note however that I wrote _generally_ fervent: I make a single principled exception, namely, that freedom of expression does not apply to intentional factual claims which are incorrect. This is a slippery slope, a *very* slippery slope, so it could only be legally implemented in a country where the judiciary has interpretive leeway (i.e., a common law system) & where science is enshrined in constitution & even in the very principles of the law. Without judicial interpretive leeway, someone could easily find themselves on the wrong side of the law just by stating an urban myth as though it were true on a TV show, which would be horrific. Without science & rigorous scientific thinking being woven into the fabric of society & the legal system, it would be too easy for policy mistakes like the food pyramid or the danger of saturated animal fats to become legally inviolable, yet at the same time allowing kooks to that claim homosexuality is a disease, that AIDS *isn't* a disease, or that there's no such thing as anthropogenic climate change. Scientific validity isn't reached through popularity, not even popularity with scientists. It's reached through rigour: thoroughness, replicability, hardiness in the face of earnest falsification attempts, predictive ability, & a number of other factors.

Aaaanyway, the point of that little tangent was that while I don't believe the ad should have been banned for the reason it was, I do believe it should have been banned. It implicitly but clearly makes the claim that being gay can be cured. Once we didn't know how homosexuality worked, & that would have been a fair & defensible claim; now we do, & it's not. Being ‘cured’ of homosexuality isn't just rare, it simply doesn't happen. The anecdotes from insane Christian extremist “Camp” alumni turn out to be cases of repression & re-closeting upon close inspection, & most of the high-profile ‘cured’ gays have been revealed to be frauds to boot. There is simply no scientifically credible evidence that homosexuality can be trained, pep-talked, willed, prayed, or hypnotised away, & there is reams of coherent, mutually consistent, large- & small-scale scientifically credible evidence that it can't. STFU with your proven falsehoods; your culture, religion, beliefs, moral convictions, or daily fucking horoscopes can't stand up to science, & it doesn't matter how you try to justify your shit or discredit the truth, the weight of scientific enquiry will always beat you.

Answer: He writes an uncouth, butthurt, & strongly persuasive essay about what an arbitrary & vicious piece of child abuse it is.

Some dick on Mozy's forum:

> Backup is about trust, confidence ...
> Basically Mozy is saying "our business model is not good enough to sustain the service offered, so we have to charge you more". Sorry, I cannot trust you anymore.
> I'm a happy customer since 2006, you saved irreplaceable photos of my kids after a RAID huge failure ... I've recommended you do literally dozens of people.
> I was so happy with the "streaming" recovering utility ...
> And you abruptly (by email unlike some others apparently) ask me to triple my bill. I was more than offended by the "loyalty bonus".
> Like others I've looked at the competitors and I think I'll cancel my account tonight.

He loved their features & they'd saved his bacon for him in the past, but in his own words, Mozy's “business model is not good enough to sustain the service offered, so [they] have to charge [him] more”. What, pray tell, are they supposed to do about that? Keep mum about it until they collapse, taking his irreplaceable photos with them? Go back in time & charge more from the beginning? They're *doing something to maintain the service*, & they're *telling him about it*. What's not to fucking trust? The cunting dickhead seems to think that because they gave him something once, failure to do so in perpetuity is tantamount to slaughtering his firstborn. It's a pain, yes, & perhaps moving to someone else is a good move, but what they have done makes them *more* trustworthy than before; companies die without warning their customers rather than admit to unsustainability all the time. Fucking dickheaded moron.

tl;dr: Twitter provides the feed, & sure, the content is provided by users but it's Twitter who takes the brunt of the cost in terms of cold, hard cash. When they say they just *might* have to restrict that one of these days in order to break even, STFU & be grateful they've funded your gravy train this long.

Can't say I disagree. It's a bit rough on The Icon Factory in particular, since they originated the word “tweet”, the blue bird motif, & a few other things Twitter has adopted wholesale, but Twitter is still footing most of the bill for this thing to happen at all.

It hurts & frustrates just to *read* this, it's so true.

There are far too many miners in software. Even people who seem like farmers turn into miners when a software giant comes calling.

* When Facebook bought Sofa, Sofa at least sold Versions & Kaleidoscope on to new developers—many bought-out companies just let their products rot & their users dangle.
* When Oracle bought Virtual Iron, they bought the product as well, & rather than gradually integrating it into VirtualBox or at least providing a migration path, they refused to release updates that were developed *before the deal was closed* & essentially killed the product stone dead.
* The proportion of the market made up of programs like Disco, abandoned by their developers around version 1.0.2 because the dev got bored, is growing fast. The Mac App Store doesn't help with that, as elucidated in Shipley's more recent article about the MAS needing upgrade discounts: Apple's policies strongly encourage this abandonment.

I'd link to the source, but I can't read French. This program is the bomb.

‘Maintaining that a personal device fingerprint has “no direct association with any specific individual” is unbelievably specious’

Q.F.T.

This is why I despise Greenpeace. They ignore evidence in favour of dogma, & worst of all they lie.

“When Bernanke sent his second monetary policy report to Congress in June 2006, he told lawmakers that the decision on a possible rate hike would depend on incoming economic data. No crystal ball — simply data-driven decision-making. But this announcement didn't have the stabilizing effect that he probably had hoped for: Financial markets fell in disarray, as some data pointed to a rate hike while others suggested that the Fed would keep the rate steady. As one banker at Lehman Brothers mused at the time, ‘Bernanke is treating us like adults, only to find out we are behaving like children.’ ”

I appreciate the testimonials on this page. Especially the translated ones.

With an explanation of why to do it this way.

I quite liked the idea of a light JSON RPC that still works even if you ignore it. I need to think about how to achieve a pipe at Lisp function-call level: a workable syntax is easy with an operative (or a fexpr or macro), though I'd need a read macro to do proper pipe syntax using ‘|’; the problem is in not needing full output from A before B can start processing it. I can't think of a way to unify that with function application. All I can come up with is a higher-level dedicated streaming interface. It could be interoperable with normal linked-list/cons-tree function calls but that would need the support built in somewhere; where?

A pity no one knows for sure, but the “My father …” part is fabulous. I hope it's true.

Siracusa points out the long-term downsides of violating the sanctity of /System.

Why all kexts have to go in /System/Library/Extensions whether Apple or third-party.

Some fucker in the returns department didn't apply a credit to his account when they took his phone in, so Vodafone harassed the fuck out of him & sold his “debt” on to a debt collector. Happily the staff at a Vodafone retail store helped him work it out, without him “even” having to go to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. Bastard company. So you're huge & miscommunications happen… so what? Remove the log from your own fucking eye.

“My wife received a commonwealth bank statement a few months ago, addressed to her old/parent's address, from 24 years ago. The envelope had a rust stain, as if the letter had been dropped and caught under a filing cabinet for all that time.

“Guess they must've moved the cabinet and found the letter...”

Sawed his head off with a sharp cheese knife even as onlookers pleaded desperately with him to stop. Mental health issues known for years, but never addressed. Poor fellow; poor boss. Sentenced to life, but the judge said to keep him in Broadmoor Hospital indefinitely.

Well worth reading; she's remarkably clear-sighted.

Mentally around nine years old with an iQ of 47, he really, really shouldn't be in jail. They need a solution for people like him. No one involved in the sentencing is happy with it.

I'm not sure I like the Mackinac Center—I'm not sure I don't either—but the Overton window is a concept which deserves much broader dissemination.

It's incredible to me how much support & demand there is for this brain-dead feature. This thread is filled with objections, all of them good, & the only argument in its favour is “Safari does it”. Fucking tools. Just because Apple neutered the three-finger back/forward swiping gestures in Lion & overloaded two-finger scrolling in Safari doesn't mean you have to make the same mistake.

Snow Leopard's three-finger back/forward swiping gestures worked in *every* application that had the concept of navigational history. Lion's Safari's two-fingered equivalent works exclusively in Safari, so other apps are left out in the cold… & it's not just an implementation problem: the stacked-pages visual metaphor Safari uses to make the gesture even vaguely comprehensible doesn't work outside a browser. Finder? System Preferences?

The support *is* the bug.

Orr sounds like a cad, but Fairey is a fucking hypocrite.

Don't flame him anonymously on the internet, email him & arrange to visit him for a cup of tea & a chat.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

I disagreed with him right up until the last paragraph, but upon finishing, while I still don't *like* the conclusion, I am forced to acknowledge that he's right. If given the option to change all iPhones by magical fiat, I would leave the alarms-in-silent-mode behaviour as it is.

An application's Info.plist can tell you *what* URL schemes it supports, but not anything *about* those schemes, which thanks to the proliferation of custom schemes on iOS is often undocumented. If you can find an application B which uses the custom scheme you're interested in from application A, you can copy A's CFBundleURLTypes & CFBundleIdentifier to your own application C, make C show you received URLs, install C over A, & use B normally.

Cute idea: a badge saying this is a proper program, not limited by Apple's stupid security architecture. I don't mind using the App Store when a program doesn't need anything Apple doesn't allow, but I would hate to be limited to it. I am definitely keener on non-App Store wares, too.

Back in the day it was good, the best even, & short-sighted devs made it into a zombie by refusing to develop for anything else. MS infuriatingly but understandably didn't bother improving it since there were no users jumping ship, & IE6 became the bane of web devs everywhere. Now there are developers doing the same thing for WebKit.

A wonderful snippet bit by binaryghost is, though I think I'll actually use Keyboard Maestro as suggested to channui. I'm hooking it up to Cmd+V, & putting the usual style-inclusive Paste command on Cmd+Ctrl+V. Unless I run into trouble pasting non-textual data, anyway.

I particularly agree with his disdain for “professionalism”. It strikes me that professionalism is usually a euphemism for having a pole rammed up your arse; I have deep respect for doing the right thing, but none whatsoever for professionalism.

“Be kind, work hard.” Altruism is the bomb.

Intents have been my favourite feature of Android for a while. This article by Alex Lucas is a nice, simple elucidation.

tl;dr: iOS Twitter 4 is a piece of shit. My thoughts exactly. I'm deliberately staying on the last of the 3.x line. I'll probably have to move to Tweetbot or Twitterific sooner or later, but dammit I'm holding out on Tweetie as long as I can.

This bullshit is so irritating.

A pretty good theory based on cladistic comparison: see the post for details, but basically it's a defence mechanism against over-enthusiastically parasitic fetuses. Not only does it explain menstruation satisfactorily, unlike any other idea I've heard, but the supporting evidence is good & the contradicting evidence non-existent.

On the fall of true academia—a blend of theory & practice giving way to mere impoverished practice—& the rise of mathematical formalism thanks to the unforgiving nature of the computer.

The body produces brown fat in response to cold or exercise. When exercised, muscle cells produce a hormone called irisin which turns white fat cells into brown ones. Brown fat is fueled primarily by white fat, not glucose. Of course, burning energy is no use if the fat cells still demand the same amount: it means you'll just need to eat more. But if brown fat actually sucks the fat out of white fat cells, the white cells will need less & hopefully decrease in number. This could lead to actual weight loss, unlike simply eating less.

I haven't yet found an app which doesn't override `POSIX file` to only work with strings, breaking with aliases or file refs. It works with all three when not inside a `tell application "…"` … `end tell` block. That is idiocy, plain & simple.

One Native American tribe, the Seminoles, aren't so native after all: they arose after European colonisation from a mixture of runaway Negro slaves & displaced members of other tribes. For as long as the tribe has existed, under both US law & the purview of history, black members have featured strongly. Many leaders were black. Despite this, some modern-day Seminoles want to exclude those Seminoles they regard as having “too little Seminole blood”, meaning “too much Negro blood”.

Beautiful.