Category: Personal

Comment Sickness: Note To Potential Commenters

I’m dreading checking my comments, because, as I mentioned, they seem to get sicker by the day. I’m going to try to cut back on some of the worst offenders, by outright banning words that I imagine will be far more common in the urschleim than in real people’s comments. Comments with these words in them (even as partial words) will drop straight into the primal ooze, instantly deleted without even being queued for moderation. I think probably banning the f-word will get rid of most of them. Going to give that a try. Apologies to friends leaving posts with casual profanity who get them deep sixed for that reason. Try to clean up that pottymouth.

I had several other words that seemed obvious candidates for banning but many words are really nasty in one context but perfectly normal in another. Or they may occur as parts of innocent words or phrases. A friend named kept getting her emails returned by a corporate email filter and experimentation eventually proved it was objecting to her last name, Van Dyke. That kind of thing. If I ban the most common slang term for micturation, as I was tempted to by a particularly vile comment spam, I will never hear of anyone “pissing and moaning” in my comments, which seems like overkill.

I think I’m probably safe putting the kibosh on “shemale” though. Let me know if that inconveniences anyone, kay?

UPDATE

I think I’m going to give some plugins a chance before I try to come up with words to block myself.  Starting with Akismet and  thinking about Bad Behavior.  So if you want to use naughty words in comments you should be cool if you’re not an evil spambot.

Memory + Parallels = Giddy

I just downloaded a 15 day free trial of Parallels Desktop for Mac. Man, this is NOT going to make it any easier for me to escape servitude to the non-free software of Steve for the happy lands of Linux. Not now that Bill can move in with Steve. And heck, Linus can too.

Seriously, this is wonderful. More wonderful to me than VMWare, just because it’s easier to use and much cheaper. (On the upside, VMWare doesn’t seem to care how often you keep requesting a 30 day trial license key, while Parallels is more persnickety. I grabbed a 15 day free trial key weeks ago and didn’t have enough memory to do much with it at the time, and I had to go scrub config files to get it to accept a new 15 day trial license. But Parallels I can afford to buy now that I’m confident in how it works with the trial license and all.)

Oh yeah — I finally found myself in a financial position to upgrade the memory on my memory-hungry macbook — from a barely adequate 512M to a much more pleasant 1.25G. That’s what inspired me to make a go of Parallels.

And it’s hitting me that developing windows software with a mac running Parallels is potentially a totally different thing than just developing on Windows. I can stay in one environment to edit code — just edit it in a shared directory, and edit it in Aquamacs or Carbon Emacs. I don’t need an email client or jabber client installed on my win machine. I don’t need to synchronize my bookmarks between browser installs on my win machine and mac machine, because I only really need to use the browser in one. I have been using cvs and ssh on cygwin on my windows dev machine for code checkout and synchronization, but I don’t need that either. I can check out code using the cvs/ssh stuff on my mac, right into a shared directory. I can probably get away with mingw for compiling the C/C++ portions of software there.

The number of things I still do need to install on that machine for it to be good for work is surprisingly, surprisingly small.

And of course I’ve made a copy of the VM/HD with my basic install of winxp on it, so I can create a variety of VM’s for special purposes, like if I ever get into that whole crazy “PC gaming” thing that the kids talk about these days.

Man, that’s a lot of links. Maybe I’m feeling giddy about the links because I’m typing this all up in Ecto and it’s just a few keystrokes, I don’t have to type <a> and all that jive. Get the link on the clipboard, select the text, and command-shift-u.

Damn you, Steve.

For a non-giddy-fanboy estimation of the glories and perils — mostly perils — of going the way of Apple, see this apple hate rant. And Mark Pilgrim’s bailing out of Appleville. I love me the Linux, and if it weren’t for good fortune in my employment which allows me to justify a purchase like Apple hardware, I’d probably be happy to muddle through on low-end PC hardware and a nice install of Ubuntu Linux. But hey, this is where I happen to be right now.

Did you notice I bothered to put categories on this post? That’s cause I’m editing in Ecto. On my Mac.

My Name, It Is Sam Hall

Ed very sad.

I just wrote several thoughtful paragraphs about my experience with something of a creative drought through most of 2006, then lost it with an accidental page-back or page-forward thingy I couldn’t recover from in OmniWeb.

OK. Here’s the file I was going to post: Sam Hall. The first ukulele song I’ve recorded, and very nearly the first I’ve played, in many many months. From the chords on Alligator Boogaloo’s uke songbook.

Gotta get to bed. Maybe I’ll write up what I can remember tomorrow.

If you’re not familiar with my glorious one-take-wonder uke songs from back when I used to post them here, they’re not being posted because they’re “good” but because I enjoy making them and like to share. Download if you want the experience of sitting in the living room with a not particularly skilled ukulele player playing while he reads chords and lyrics off a web site. Don’t download if you don’t.

Nighty night!

AFTERTHOUGHT: I have had the song “Harris and the Mare” by Stan Rogers in my head tonight. I’d love to play that. Anyone know where I can find chords for it?

You Make Money With That?

As folks who know me know, I work from home.  “From home” often means “not from home, from someplace else which has wifi connectivity.”  One of those places is McDonald’s.  I was working in the McD’s on 44th near Clyde Park, doing my thing, whatever, when this ostentatiously well dressed guy sporting a couple gold rings approached me and said, “Hey, you make money on that thing?”  I said yes, I sure did.  He was thrown off his stride by that statement.  When he un-confused himself, he launched into a brief spiel about this business thingy that he was involved in and recruiting for, and which he wanted me to know was not a pyramid scheme.

I nodded and smiled; after a few minutes he gave me a card with his name and a website and a guest password I could use to get in and look around.  I haven’t gotten around to it yet.  I think I still have the card.  You know, just in case I want to make money with my computer doing some kind of business which is described only in very vague terms but is not a pyramid scheme.

OK. Back to making money.

Reddit

Thinking aloud about reddit.
I have a love-hate relationship with news site reddit.com. It contains a ton of interesting links, many of which I’ve reposted here.  It is a reliable place to read about new appalling things done by the government, and to read about offbeat programming languages like Python and Lisp (both of which have at different times been used to run the site itself).

The site has the wonderful feature that you can moderate sites up — like “digging” on digg.com — or down. Somebody posts something stupid, you can hit the thumbs-down arrow and nuke the guy’s karma.  Post something awesome and you get karma.  (What is karma good for?  Nothing, really.  It’s just a number.  It doesn’t affect you in any way except as a badge of honor or something.)

The “new appalling things done by the government” thing is maybe a bit more than I need right now.  I’ve been getting political on the blog again, which is a danger signal to me that I’m maybe not feeling very well depression-wise, you know? There’s a lot of that on Reddit. (To be fair, there’s a lot of that all over the news too.) I could limit myself to just the Programming Reddit I suppose… But part of the fun of Reddit is that you get all kinds of stories on it.  JUST the programming — well, for that I’d just go to lambda, the ultimate weblog. In fact, many highly rated links on reddit are things I saw two years ago on lambda, the ultimate.

I’ve played the “submit links to reddit” game and accumulated some karma.  I never know though what’s going to be wildly appreciated and what will be loathed. Watching my karma take hits from people who don’t appreciate my link-posting GENIUS is a little stressful. Watching similar topics come up again and again on the front page — even when I might have appreciated those topics the first half-dozen times –  is way tedious.

But absorbing.  It’s like a video game you can’t win, you can’t even get past this one level, but you can’t quit either.  Grr.

I think I may have to cut myself off.

Will I have to wean myself from Metafilter too?  They have a lot of stuff that depresses me too.  And they have that hateful habit of posting sentences where every single word (if not every single letter) is a different link.

Maybe I’ll have to go back to bOINGbOING…   Or pick up Table of Malcontents… Or even (I’m not proud) fark.com. I dunno.  I learn a lot of neat stuff from Reddit’s links, but man.  The voting, the karma, it’s a bunch of nonsense that sucks you in. I don’t need that.
Oh, btw — concerning Digg, this is the secret formula:  digg : reddit  :: slashdot : kuro5hin.  Just so you know.