Tidbits from the Dungeon

What do you call a locked-down private social networking system? How about PriSoN. -- Wes Felter

There's loads of intelligent life. It's just not screaming constantly in all directions on the handful of frequencies we search. -- Randall Munroe on extra-terrestrial intelligence.

I can Google for 11 hours in minutes and I can Google for time in Singapore but what I really want to do is to Google for 11pm Singapore in San Francisco. Any Googlers care to implement this?

I wish kernel updates didn't require me to reboot.

antrix@cellar:~$ uptime
 11:23:33 up 37 days, 15:18,  1 user,  load average: 0.24, 0.07, 0.02

New utility of the day: unclutter. Why isn't this functionality built into kwin?

Since Firefox doesn't have a built-in save session feature, I workaround by F12 -> killall firefox-bin -> launch firefox -> restore session. It works, but I feel weirdly dirty doing it. :-/

Friend of mine who flies BA jumbos had a screwdriver that came with his fancy sunglasses confiscated at a US airport a couple of years ago. It wasn't just that the screwdriver was less than 2 inches long. It wasn't just that he was 1st Officer on the flight - what really made him decide that the whole world had gone crazy was that he knew that when he got to his co-pilot's seat there was a 2 foot fire-axe behind his head ... -- Pete Berry

One wild rumor said that the BigFoot was spotted using the Sigma DP1 to take portrait pictures of the Loch Ness monster. -- 1001 Noisy Cameras on Sigma DP1 rumours

Facebook suffers a severe reverse network effect: the more people who join, the less useful it becomes. -- Ben Brown

I tried the new LightZone beta for Linux last night. It looks good but was glacially slow on my home PC. So I went out today and bought more RAM to bring this system up to a 3GB total. With that, all four slots are occupied and the only way to upgrade further would be to throw out the 512MB chips. I don't think that'll ever happen considering the difficulty I had in finding DDR2 667MHz RAM today; by the time I get to thinking about upgrading to 4GB, DDR2 667 will no longer be sold!

I wish there was a glossary available for Maverick's World.

Spent a few minutes figuring out Google Charts API by trying it out in my peastat instance. Very low effort, as promised. For those interested, there's a Python version of the Chart API docs' simpleEncode JavaScript method in pea.py. Now the question is, how do I turn off axes rendering to get true sparklines effect?

Update: I changed the chart type to the undocumented type lfi and the axes lines have disappeared!

A friend's email sig reads:

---

Sent from Sony Ericsson K750
* All opinions expressed and mistakes made are the fault of predictive text input.

I'm out and about for the next three weeks - a couple in the US of A and then a single in Japan. I hope I get some sight-seeing done!

If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. -- Natan Sharansky

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. -- George Bernard Shaw

Trying out DISQUS comments integration with Tidbits.

While reading about Leopard's new Time Machine and the folder view for snapshots that it creates using hardlinks, I immediately thought the same should be possible with a FUSE filesystem that uses rdiff-backup's backup repository metadata. As is often the case with my ideas, someone has already implemented it! ;-)

Commenting on Apple not shipping Java 6 with Leopard, John Gruber says Java isn't an engineering priority for Apple and they decided to allocate resources elsewhere in order to ship an already delayed product. I quote an interesting part:

Several irritated Java developers suggested that I'd feel differently if it were a developer runtime that I personally cared about - that I'd be irate if, say, Perl or Ruby or Python were dropped or degraded in Leopard. But that's not a good comparison; Perl, Python, and Ruby pretty much compile out of the box on Mac OS X. Apple doesn't have to do much at all - at least relative to Java - to include them on Mac OS X. Why? Because that's how these tools are designed and engineered - they're made to "just build" on any Unix-like OS. It's not Apple's responsibility that Java isn't like that - it's Sun's.

Err, if it is Sun's responsibility, then why not let them ship Java! ;-)

I started upgrading my home desktop to Ubuntu Gutsy last night. The upgrade failed mid-way leaving the system in a fairly inconsistent state. I traced it to Bug 146943 and posted a help request there. Frank replied and now, thanks to a little hand holding from him, my desktop is running just minted Gutsy!

I accidentally carried a small bottle of water on board my last flight and felt curiously happy after realizing the fact. Now, while getting my carry-on scanned, I over-heard a lady apologizing for accidentally leaving a bottle of water in her purse.

How can a bottle of water cause such emotions? What I'm trying to say is that I don't like where the world is headed.