git checkout -- <path> applies the index version of that path to the working tree.

trap 'rm -f "$Tmp" >/dev/null 2>&1' 0
trap "exit 2" 1 2 3 13 15

counternotions: "Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it." http://t.co/R3qNxRuJ (!)

Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.

And, with respect, I encourage you to consider doing the same; especially if that all-you-can-eat buffet of snark and streaming produces (or encourages) anything short of your “A” game.

But for my doomed attempt at convincing you of how to arrange your life, I suggest a solid interest in, oh, three or five Big Things. They will compete for your attention, and the vagaries of fate will lead you toward one, then another. Things you learn in the first will improve you in the second, then bring you to a whole new third. You will be a happier and better person for branching out a bit.

A blog isn’t about the feelings of the company, but rather a personal look at the writer. You can’t assign a blogger a story and hope the audience doesn’t get the fact that they have no idea what they’re talking about or worse yet, they don’t really care.

Keep spammers/bastards from scraping your site and wasting your bandwidth.

I’ve never visited the Core Data hand-holding playground, but it sounds fun. Instead, the Instapaper app’s database layer is written directly against SQLite’s C API. The server-side code is all in PHP, and before moving to the sugar coated painted kingdom, I spent 4 years writing the PHP back-end code to a little site to handle thousands of dynamic requests per second.

In all these cases, the thing that the experts created was meant — quite consciously — to negate the society around it. Brasília was the anti-São Paulo, for instance. Only by relocating to an unoccupied spot in Brazil and starting afresh could the experts create the world as “science” told them it was meant to be made. The consequences were predictable ... a city in Brazil that only survives because people color outside the lines.

If you have only just popped it and the terminal is still open, you should be able to see the hash value when you popped it...

Unfortunately, version numbers in Perl aren't boring and easy. Instead, they are complicated and confusing. Every Perl programmer needs to understand at least some of this complexity. Otherwise, you can make life difficult for yourself or others without realizing it.

In this article, I'm going to explain what I think are 'good practices' for dealing with version numbers in Perl. I'm going to point out what I think are 'bad practices'. In the end, I'm going to make some recommendations that I hope people will follow for their own sake and the sake of others who work with their code.

I believed, along with all the other adults in my life, that my melancholy and sensitivity were part of my “special” make-up, that they were gifts to celebrate, not neuroses to treat. And should I take meds that helped me laugh and play and design cool barrettes like the other girls, well, then I would lose my depth.

But the novel indications concerning the responsiveness of plants, their interactions with the environment and with one another, are sufficient to undermine all simple, axiomatic solutions to eating in good conscience. When it comes to a plant, it turns out to be not only a what but also a who — an agent in its milieu, with its own intrinsic value or version of the good. Inquiring into justifications for consuming vegetal beings thus reconceived, we reach one of the final frontiers of dietary ethics.

I recently mentioned in passing that if I was building a file based blog engine today, I would do a number of things differently than they are now. Given that file based blog engines are eternally popular, here's my list of those things.

Related entries, tags, categories.

But if you’re in a CS program that happens to be awful, there’s no way you’d know it as an 20-year-old undergrad. This means that consumers of the resource (which in an economy usually punish substandard products by taking their business elsewhere) are really a captive audience. This is one big reason why all universities are slow to adapt and reform in general.

Only Apple retail stores or Apple Authorized Service Providers can unlock these computers protected by a firmware password.

git switch <branch>
git sync
git publish <branch>
git harvest <branch>

You encrypt your data to protect it from spying eyes, including the government’s. Can you be forced to decrypt it and thus incriminate yourself? A US appeals court says NO. This may drive the full-disk-encryption market.

Clark ran the game in similar fashion, setting its pace with on-the-fly mastery. He often would give the players brief cues to help them settle into the rhythm of the game. “A little louder, please,” he’d say, or he’d advise a nervous player to ease their agitated pace and approach each word with calm confidence. Clark was the rare host who would tell players when they had no longer had a realistic chance of winning, and he’d encourage a sure loser to stay focused and use the remainder of a hopeless match to prepare for the next one. These quick gestures were always friendly and delivered in good cheer, but the unstated goal was to keep the proceedings moving, always, always.

Links to testers for Java, Flash, OpenDNS, and all kinds of other stuff.

One baleful consequence of trying to use the that/which choice to fix a punctuation problem is that students are likely to learn the alternative rule, the Relative Punctuation Rule: use a comma with which, no comma with that.  Now, since virtually everybody uses some restrictive which in speaking and writing, this alternative rule actually INDUCES incorrect punctuation with restrictive which.

A signage typeface is all about the moment — when you come close enough to the sign that it just becomes readable. And it’s here where you can actually make a difference.

Learn how to import Enrollment Profiles created in Profile Manager into Apple Configurator, then install the profiles onto devices.

Learn how to use Apple Configurator to deploy copies of paid apps using redemption codes purchased from the Volume Purchase Program (VPP).

I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment.

Virtually every feature in PHP is broken somehow. The language, the framework, the ecosystem, are all just bad. And I can’t even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic.

There's no way to do this in Server Admin, grrr.

Dr. Neff's research shows that far from encouraging self-indulgence, self-compassion helps us to see ourselves clearly and make needed changes because we care about ourselves and want to reach our full potential.

Just as ops is working to break down barriers with their developer colleagues, community managers are also working to unite with the developers and product managers who create features for their members.

We can help them get it right more often, and we can learn from their methods.

I’d take a real hard look at Grip Rite galvanized zinc coated sinkers. They’re a classic design, the sharpest nails made, and have amazing microcontact. Plus they’re hand assembled in Germany, not mass-produced in Taiwan.

The microphone on the top is a tiny hole next to the headphone port. When you hold the iPhone up to your ear and speak into the bottom microphone during a phone call, the top microphone is used to perform some noise cancellation trickery.

I shudder to think what a 24 or 27 inch display using the same technology as the current iPad would cost right now. But until the iPhone and iPad, near as I can tell, nobody else was even trying to improve resolution on computer displays – even though all the existing HCI research tells us that higher resolution displays are a deep fundamental improvement in computing.

The Internet seems to be a very dangerous place, and most Internet users probably feel that they could spend more than half their waking hours just installing patches and responding to warnings — unless they just put their heads down, ignore all that noise, and try instead to get their work (or play) done. I am sympathetic to this mindset. The problem is, the Internet really is that dangerous, and people really do need to pay more attention to the dangers of unpatched or infected computers.

Longer term, we can expect a more cautious societal background, with slower change. More dispossessed youth feeling put-upon by their long-lived elders (as is particularly notable in Greece and Italy. Politics may well slowly swing back towards a pattern of state provision of social services by mid-century; the alternative will be serious civil disorder as the surplus labour left high and dry by the receding tide of automated industrial production revolts.

transparent proxy over ssh