June 2011
2 posts
GNOME 3 is not designed for people →
Language Log: Don't know much about psychometrics →
Language Log’s Mark Liberman reminds us of the importance of well-structured tests and reasoned analysis of their results:
The education professionals will see things in terms of the urgent need for more of their guidance in reforming the educational system. The domain experts will point out that their vital field needs more emphasis and more funding.
As for the politicians,...
May 2011
8 posts
"our broader design goals"
…I thought it would be a simple matter of configuring the Launcher bar to pop up somewhere else on the screen. Like the right side. Or the bottom. This would be simple, I reasoned, because any other Linux distro I have used would let me do this.
Brian Profitt ran afoul of Ubuntu’s new “There’s only one way to do it” design philosophy when trying to move the new...
Skype for Asterisk will not be available for sale... →
Microsoft’s hobby is buying things and making them less useful.
Apple-fying your software doesn't work if you...
John Poelstra doesn’t like that Gnome 3 suspends the computer when you close the lid of your laptop, and there’s no way to configure that behaviour.
Well, there’s no way to configure it in the GUI, which is basically the same thing.
Poelstra has this to say:
This is going too far. I’ve never liked the suspend-on-close behavior, but I tolerate it on the MacBook because...
ZDNET's Ed Burnette on the Android data leak scare →
The story is getting a lot of attention because it was noticed on Android, but it’s not, in fact, an Android vulnerability. It’s a security bug in any program that does not encrypt its authorization tokens.
[…]
Should you be worried? Until a patch is available (either through the Market or an Android update) the problem can be avoided by not using the affected applications in a...
is changing language tantamount to changing math? →
Turns out it isn’t.
3 tags
Configurable NotifyOSD Bubbles For Ubuntu 11.04 →
Canonical appears to have given up on providing an easily-customized Gnome-based desktop environment, so it’s good to see modifications like this coming from the community.
Clippy's back →
Perhaps the cartoon search dog from XP will return in a feature length film to coincide with the launch of Windows 8?
check. check. sibilance. sibilance. check.
Photo: Sound check #3 by teeba
This blog’s ten months of dormancy ends today! You’ll note that the URL is now cooldry.ca, a major upgrade from the old cooldry.tumblr.ca.
Since I last posted here, my life has changed drastically:
I got married
I flew in an airplane
I joined an organized sports league
Some things have stayed the same:
I still live in the same house in the same...
July 2010
1 post
a conversation about transportation with Sherry's...
Nephew: What kind of truck do you drive?
Me: I don’t drive a truck.
Nephew: Well then how do you get to work?
Me: I ride my bike.
Nephew: [facial expression indicates mind is blown]
To be fair, in Utopia, everything with four wheels is called a truck, except things that I call “four-wheelers”, which the Utopians call bikes.
May 2010
2 posts
suit to kill
My dad needed a suit on account of certain people are getting married. After hitting the usual suspects on the main drag and finding a very promising suit at Moores, we hit the Big/Tall store in the south end of town just so we could say we’d done our due diligence. Also because that store is Starbuck’s-adjacent. My parents love that place now. It’s like I don’t even know...
March 2010
7 posts
I dreamed this and everybody wants to read about...
I was hanging around in a cul-de-sac that was very similar to the cul-de-sac where my parents live. All the garage doors were open, and all the garages had cars in them, and all the cars were stacked on top of things. One garage had 50’s-era Corvette propped up on two chest freezers. Another had two Pontiac Grand Prixs stacked one on top of the other, both a little crumpled and crushed....
How to upgrade Deluge BitTorrent client in Ubuntu...
Deluge is a BitTorrent client available for Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS X. It is my preferred client for Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the version (1.2.0) included in the repositories for Lucid doesn’t want to stay running for more than half an hour on my machine.
The quick and simple fix is to add the Deluge team’s PPA (personal package archive) to the list of repositories in...
Ray Kurzweil on Avatar: This movie is not very... →
“Why, when we read left to right is the most destructive action first?”
– Ivanka Majic, on the serious thinking that went into the decision to rearrange window controls in Ubuntu Lucid [via ars]
Benjamin Humphrey: 16 things that could be... →
“It’s not easy for the average user to change [the window controls] back to the right (Gconf is NOT easy!)”
Benjamin hits on a few things I had noticed, and a number of things that passed me by — I eschew gnome-panel and its terrible applets, and they feature heavily here. One thing I had missed is that the new window control placement and order breaks many existing themes.
...
How to Fix the Window Buttons in Ubuntu Lucid
Window buttons in Ubuntu have always been at the top right of the window, arranged, left to right, Minimize, Maximize and Close. Like so:
In the most recent Alpha release of Ubuntu, the window buttons have been moved to the top left of the window and rearranged, like so:
Here is how to move the buttons back to their original location and order.
Press Alt-F2 and run gconf-editor
In the tree...
ubuntu finally replacing xsane scanning app with... →
This is good, because xsane is friggin’ complicated and gnome-scan never really got off the ground.
February 2010
6 posts
here, rub this on these and then strap them to...
We went cross-country skiing at Tiffin Conservations Area on Saturday. It was my first time ever and Sherry’s first time in 15 years. It is like fast hiking in snow with occasional falling down. I snowplowed down a gentle slope and Sherry announced that I am now ready for downhill skiing. I demurred.
Later I fell and smacked my left knee on my ski but it was still a whole pile of fun. The...
4:30 pm February 14th. Express check-out line at...
The line is packed with well-dressed people buying flowers and chocolate and gourmet food items. Scallops and prosciutto. Fancy cheeses. Romance and its attendant consumption are in the air. I am buying 1.5 litres of Miracle-Whip mayonnaise substitute, and 1.5 litres of Miracle-Whip mayonnaise substitute alone.
Their eyes are asking if it’s for erotic purposes and my eyes are saying...
borrelli told me to listen to this: metric –...
I’m listening to albums that Borrelli has recommended and posting my thoughts and feelings and snappy witticisms and paranoid conspiracy theories about those albums here.
I am not a dancing man. I am not comfortable with my body. I am not adept at initiating and modulating the sorts of gyrations and undulations required for the act. I don’t have the guts to just get out of my own head and...
impending 7-disc Thrush Hermit box set to include... →
WHERE IS MY WALLET I CAN’T FIND MY WALLET.
Lifehacker advocates bathroom match-burning to... →
There’s a guy at the office who does this and it freaks me the hell out. I’d really much rather a bathroom smelled like feces than fire. At least there’s supposed to be feces in a bathroom.
borrelli told me to listen to this: neko case –...
I’m listening to albums that Borrelli has recommended and posting my thoughts and feelings and fanciful speculations and darkest fears about those albums here.
This album’s thesis is that a woman is a fierce beast or a machine with fast-moving parts or an area of closed, circular fluid motion rotating in the same direction as the Earth’s rotation. You shouldn’t turn your...
January 2010
1 post
borrelli told me to listen to this: the pains of...
My friend Mike Borrelli and his special lady Megan have a late-night radio show on CFMU in Hamilton. The show is called myboytheriotgirl and they play all sorts of new music in the “indie” “genre”. Often the music is really good and I talk to them on the internet about how good it is, like the time I heard “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” by the Mountain Goats and I...
October 2009
1 post
September 2009
3 posts
this movie was not very realistic
Driving home from the movie theater last night around midnight, I tuned the radio to the CBC. I do this whenever the four rock radio stations on the car’s presets are aligning in a perfect storm of “ordinary people having a conversation about a product or local business and one of them is way too excited about it” commercials or when the two local stations are both playing the...
August 2009
9 posts
20X3
This article from Chartattack about The Constantines’ sophomore album appeared in my newsreader as a “new item” and I briefly panicked and wondered if I had Life-On-Mars‘ed back to 2003. I checked my collar and my pantlegs for tell-tale widening before realizing that a) it was just a CMS glitch and I am not unstuck in time and b) I dress the same now as I did six years ago...
July 2009
3 posts
June 2009
7 posts
The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna →
“In other words… the only species that “dolphin safe” tuna is good for is dolphins! The bycatch rate for EVERY OTHER species is lower when fishing dolphin-associated tuna vs. floating object associated tuna! The reason for this is obvious- floating objects attract everything nearby, while dolphins following tuna doesn’t attract any other species. If you work out the math on this (and you...
crisis on infinite faces
It’s true. I shaved off my beard.
I hadn’t planned on making it permanent, I just had a skin problem under there I thought the world deserved to see. But this clean-shavenness has resonated in a way I could not have predicted. Corwin has launched an in memoriam photo group on the flickr. People at work think Sherry made me do it. Sherry wakes up in the morning and scowls at my bare...
you kids wanna see a dead body?
Sherry and I went to Guelph Saturday night for a Buck and Doe/Jack and Jill/Stag and Stagette/Mare and Stallion/Air and Space party for my friend Katie and her fiance Joe. We dropped off Cloey with Sherry’s mother and hit the road…
SOUTHBOUND!
To the Royal City, where the Parkview Motel overlooks something that the locals call a park but that we recognised as a cemetery.
Seriously,...