making a custom control

self-kill background processes

surprise! Sarah Palin makes no sense.

"[T]here's nothing sadder than a party girl who clearly hates the scene, but feels like she has to keep acting like she loves it anyway. There aren't enough special effects in the world to cover that up."

iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch wallpapers for the rest of us.

"It’s easy to talk about Steve’s paranoia and how that forces him to keep the project small, but, in truth, the secrecy is more of a useful by-product of the way he manages new projects, rather than the central goal. Steve assembles and motivates a small team of young geniuses, then sets them to work for “90 hours a week and loving it.” The results are highly-integrated designs that far outpace the competition."

"“Contempt for the user” is showing a meaningless error message with tech jargon in it, written by engineers who are so familiar with the program that they’d be happy if the error messages were just a 4 digit code that you looked up in a book (or, better, memorized)."

"What they wanted was Big Brother government using all its power to root out and find illegal immigrants looking for jobs. These were people who would applaud government monitoring work places, setting up ID check points, having the police randomly stop people in the streets to check their "papers" to make sure they are "legal" residents. These are the type of people who as children, thought the hall monitors were good guys making sure everyone had a "pass" from teacher. I would call them closet authoritarians except I don't think they're in the closet."

The South were the ones who made the Civil War about slavery within their secession statements.

"Treason in defense of slavery is not a subject matter appropriate for any freedom loving people to celebrate. The Civil War had good guys and it had bad guys. The good guys were the ones who won."

"To argue otherwise demonstrates a shocking lack of understanding over exactly how morally deficient any society is that treats human beings like livestock. Slavery is wrong, whether slavery is justified through racism or not. The end of slavery in America is not to be qualified by how long racism continued (continues) after slavery ended, because slavery in and of itself is an evil."

"A quick warning about this: the WiFi connection can take 10 seconds or more to wake up after the device is woken up from sleep. If WiFi is not available, you may want to set a timer and try again for the next 5-10 seconds before presenting an error."

"What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is."

"By preaching personal responsibility as a solution, we’re saying “some person—who is not me—should worry about this.” Demanding personal responsibility from somebody else justifies our own irresponsibility. It allows us to ignore the problem."

Filed for future reference, though. Can't say I particularly agree, though.

Charles Darwin, who was very interested in shyness, correctly diagnosed it as a form of “self-attention” — a preoccupation with self. How do I fit in here? What do they think of me?

"I then log on to the Internet (which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration) and post on freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how government involvement in healthcare is SOCIALISM which is BAD because the government can’t do anything right."

Nasa's programmers

Merlin Mann on Lady Gaga's Bad Romance

Did not know that it was illegal for gay men to donate blood.

animating purchase to a shopping cart, a la iTunes Music Store

"The pessimistic dig on Apple, says Gruber, is that it's a supremely well-organized company organized around one irreplaceable guy. The optimistic view is that Jobs has structured it to run like his other company, Pixar, which manages to turn out hit after hit, year after year, without a charismatic celebrity leader."

The great philosopher and activist Abraham Joshua Heschel said, "Few are guilty; all are responsible."

"Too many people, when asked for their opinion, dissemble"

"There was also one statement on the list that people wanted to talk about more than any other. So much so that towards the end I was saying to people: “Please, let’s not talk about that one, I’ve heard enough already.”

The statement in question was the title from from one of al-Jazeera's Doha Debates and it said: "The family is a major obstacle to reform in the Arab world.""

"Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide."

"Obviously this scriptment would have made a five hour movie. Things needed to be cut. I just wish Cameron had been able to keep the decent story and rounded characters along with his deeply designed world. But when you're spending that much money, it's the story and characters that get canned before the FX."

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better.

A handwritten PDF about education and programming.

The first thing I ever heard about Americans was that they all carried guns. Then, when I came across people who’d had direct contact with this ferocious-sounding tribe, I learned that they were actually rather friendly.

Yes.

One of those rare good articles from Techcrunch

"But Roughgarden believes that biologists have it backwards. Given the pervasive presence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, same-sex partnering must be an adaptive trait that’s been carefully preserved by natural selection. As Roughgarden points out, “a ‘common genetic disease’ is a contradiction in terms, and homosexuality is three to four orders of magnitude more common than true genetic diseases such as Huntington’s disease.”"

"When bin Laden attacked us in the 1990s - several times - in an attempt to raise his own stature in the Islamic world, Bill Clinton dealt with Osama like the criminal he was. He enlisted Interpol and the police and investigative agencies of various nations, brought in our best intelligence agents, and missed bin Laden in a missile-launched assassination attempt by a scant twenty minutes (bringing derisive howls from Republicans that he was trying to "wag the dog" and deflect attention from the Monica investigations)."

"The myth that Reagan brought about the end of the Cold War has become so entrenched that it is no longer even questioned. Next time someone makes that assertion, pose this one-word question: “How?” "

“As I write this, there's an insane red dust storm that's sweeping over Sydney. I found out about it by seeing a Twitter post from @cityofsound. I'm based in San Francisco but found it so extraordinary I decided to go and see if I could spot pictures coming in and make a little gallery out of them.”

"Take for instance the kiss a dog gives you when you come home. It looks like love, but it could also be hunger. Wolves also lick one another's mouths, particularly when one wolf returns to the pack. They can use their sense of taste and smell to see if the returnee has caught some prey on its journey. If it did, the licking often prompts it to vomit up some of that kill for the other members of the pack to share. The kiss dogs give us probably evolved from this inspection. "If we happened to spit up whatever we just ate," says Horowitz, "I don't think our dogs would be upset at all."

"Beck has an audience that’s been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda."

"Developers seem to be of the mindset that being in the App Store is a black & white issue. Meaning that if you’re in, your app MUST sell for a few bucks at most and it’s a failure if it’s not in the top 100. And worse, Apple should be doing all your marketing for you.

This is the biggest crock of shit I’ve experienced in a long time and all the whining by developers has been a complete embarrassment to the community."

"My overall opinion of SousChef is that it’s nice software with a variety of bugs. Not worth $30 me at this point due to said bugs."

"You want to know why nice guys finish last? It’s because they aren’t willing to take a chance, they’re too tied to their rules. They see their girl at her most vulnerable moment, and instead of doing what they perceive as a dick move, they put their arms around her and they hold her. They listen to her weep and they don’t take control of the situation. She’s too precious to cut off. Let her weep. "

Excellent nitpick of Snow Leopard.

drutil tray eject

Look for the PLU codes on the labels stuck on your fruits and veggies.
A four-digit number means it's conventionally grown.
A five-digit number beginning with 9 means it's organic.
A five-digit number beginning with 8 means it's genetically modified.

Operation Interdumb

"The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union."

"Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth."

Fantastic investigative reporting.

Has a variety of open-source software for crash reporting on Mac OS X.

Beth made a great point that he's still living off the scraps of consumer culture. He's not exactly self-subsisting.

"I loved people — everyone from the counter clerk to the old friends I bumped into on the street. And I loved to go for walks and exercise in the gym and — even though there was no one around to see me — groom. Yes, groom: shower and shave and put on nice clothes and comb my hair and clean up my nails and so on, all things a month ago I would have said went against my very nature, things I never did before voluntarily."

A google custom search.

"Remember, they need you more than you need them. Hiring and interviewing people is incredibly time-consuming and expensive. It takes a lot more time and money for them to interview you than for you to go on the interview. They need to fill this position, but you don’t need to be the one to fill it: you can just as easily take a different job."

Stephen Fry is so awesome.

Fantastic article about isolated confinement in prisons, and how tortuous they are.

Valgrind is so useful omg.

"[Oprah's] most ardent fans regard her as an oracle. If she mentions the title of a book, it goes to No. 1. If she says she uses a particular wrinkle cream, it sells out. At Oprah's retail store in Chicago, women can purchase used shoes and outfits that she wore on the show. Her viewers follow her guidance because they like and admire her, sure. But also because they believe that Oprah, with her billions and her Rolodex of experts, doesn't have to settle for second best. If she says something is good, it must be."

People on craigslist agree to be photographed.