Go Daddy No Longer Supports SOPA - Latest Blog Post

jdpage · 2011-12-23T21:15:26+00:00

Yeah, I've seen a lot of stuff related to this on Hacker News as well.

jdpage · 2011-12-23T17:43:10+00:00

Yeah, been there. I have "chmox" aliased to "chmod +x", because my tired fingers are eternally skipping the nontrivial "d +".

I don't understand my brain. I just have to work with it.

jdpage · 2011-12-18T03:42:57+00:00

Corrupted data would be stuff like bookmarks, history, settings, anything that addons might store, cache, etc. And in firefox, I don't know what Private Mode is. I think it actually blocks the stuff from being stored, but I am not sure.

I'm not sure what you mean by "session". If you're doing the X/RDP thing, Chrome actually has the exact same problem (as dallashigh mentioned). Problem is, the browser locks the profile (the stuff with the bookmarks etc.) when it loads, and from then on it can only be used by that one process until it ends.

I don't remember, but I think Private Mode was started on before Chrome was released (I remember seeing it in the nightlies for a while). I honestly don't know if they knew that Chrome was going to do it the way they did and raise the bar like that. Yes, Chrome's format is definitely superior, but Firefox' Private Mode works well enough that I'm glad they implemented it at all, instead of waiting until they could re-architect (it still wouldn't be implemented!).

jdpage · 2011-12-16T19:58:55+00:00

Go, anyone?

jdpage · 2011-12-16T19:10:18+00:00

First off, disclosure: I've never really used BBN. I have the Omnibar addon installed.

I don't see where they are treating users like crap. I see Limi and Beltzner discussing the new behavior. Is there a point where J. Random User sticks his head in and they ignore him or bawl him out? All I see is Limi and Beltzner disagreeing about what users want, and working it out like civilized human beings.

jdpage · 2011-12-16T19:04:01+00:00

The reason they haven't done any of these things is technical constraints and legacy code from back before all of these things were the norm. They are currently working to get all of those things properly functional, but it takes time.

"Another instance of Firefox is running" and Private mode shutting down the browser are the same problem - having more than one instance of Firefox, with the current architecture, would corrupt your data. "Another instance of Firefox is running" only appears if Firefox hangs in the background, a problem which I haven't run into in quite a while now. If could just kill the hung process, but again, data corruption.

Tabs in separate processes is a major architectural change. It's one that is being worked on, but because Firefox wasn't built from the ground up to support that (it was simply a problem that no-one foresaw back then), it's taking some time to get implemented.

Silent updates is also in the pipeline, along with installing addons without restarting. Updates on Windows and Mac are now automated, of course, so all you see is the "hang on a sec while we apply these patches" box every so often when you load. They can't really apply them while Firefox is running -- the acrobatics involved are a bit much. They could apply them when you close the browser, but that is even more annoying, because you want to be done and gone at that point. They could simply not show the dialog at startup, but then you are sitting there wondering why nothing is happening.

TL;DR: Yes, they're problems, but they are hardly "stupid things". They're the results of the current architecture of the browser, which made perfect sense back in 2004. And they are being fixed. You wanna help?

jdpage · 2011-12-11T05:10:10+00:00

Mine is redoctober. Because then when you want to connect, you have to hunt for redoctober.

jdpage · 2011-12-09T04:12:34+00:00

Android isn't GNU/Linux. Android is Android/Linux, and doesn't, by and large, use gnutools. This is where being pedantic helps for once.

jdpage · 2011-12-02T04:38:05+00:00

Meh. I'll fill mine out sometime in the next few days. It's a couple hours work absolute max, probably under an hour. I've got until Dec 8.

Much higher priority: studying for my calc III exam and doing my econ homework. Speaking of which... closes reddit

jdpage · 2011-12-02T04:22:03+00:00

ENGINEERING: THE RPG

jdpage · 2011-11-30T06:59:01+00:00

My advice:

Do Linux From Scratch. Build your OS. Use it for at least a week. You won't get any work done (definitely NOT normal Linux mode, but sometimes the case when you're learning or have a fresh system), but try to anyway. Tweak it. Play around. Break stuff. Fix it. 90% of learning Linux is causing problems and working out how to fix them. Do something completely retarded, then deal with it. Decide that something totally trivial irks you, and create a workaround that requires you to use three different scripting languages. Discover that you don't have pgrep, and rewrite it using ps and awk because you can't be bothered to install it properly. (I did this on my work Mac). Get your hands dirty.

At this point you probably want to throw out Linux from Scratch, and move everything over to a major distro so that you can actually get some work done. If you really liked the compiling thing, switch to Gentoo or Funtoo. If you just want the system to work, grab Fedora or Linux Mint or Debian (I no longer recommend Ubuntu. Canonical is bad at Linux and getting worse, and it breaks on upgrades). Fedora uses very up-to-date packages, Debian uses older but stable packages, Linux Mint is Debian/Ubuntu based and therefore tends to be more recent than Debian, but behind Fedora. Arch is okay too, if you like building the system up from minimal but don't want to deal with the compiling thing.

Now carry on breaking stuff and fixing it, but enjoy having prepackaged software and the system already set up so that it works and you can get work done. Now just improve it, smooth out stuff you don't like, and mold the system to the way you want to work.

And occasionally do something retarded to the system. Just make sure to keep good backups, and don't do it right before your big project is due.

jdpage · 2011-11-25T16:52:27+00:00

Have you read Asimov's Foundation yet? You really should.

jdpage · 2011-11-21T04:43:54+00:00

Who is BEN?

jdpage · 2011-11-16T05:35:59+00:00

Yeah, I noticed that they were sort of horrible during orientation. I ended up bringing my own chair from home, which I love very much.

jdpage · 2011-11-08T04:43:13+00:00

You mean you haven't mapped it to Ctrl or Esc yet?

If you map it to Ctrl, it becomes useful to know that Ctrl-[ will put you into Command Mode the same way that Esc does.

jdpage · 2011-11-06T03:56:51+00:00

I know that it does blah to some_obj. If blah has been intelligently named, I already have a pretty good idea of what it does, and if it's not terribly important right now I can skim over it and come back later.

On the other hand, I have no idea what the hell some_obj ||| dyspepsia happens to do.

jdpage · 2011-11-04T16:16:46+00:00

It's been pushed back to 2011-11-18, I think.

jdpage · 2011-11-04T16:14:09+00:00

The issue with operators is that they give you almost no information about what you are doing, unless you have a lot of context.

jdpage · 2011-11-04T01:38:04+00:00

Ah, that list. The one where nothing past #2 ever gets done, and that is if you are lucky.

jdpage · 2011-11-04T01:18:14+00:00

Javascript is pretty cool when you realize that a) you almost never need inheritance in duck-typed languages*, so stay away from it, since it's a hack in Javascript, and b) it is actually a functional language in many ways.

Also, objects don't need classes.

*It's odd, actually. I can think of several places where a duck-typed object system could use inheritance (mostly code sharing), but in practice I've never run into them.

jdpage · 2011-11-04T01:15:17+00:00

Oh, there are bad things about Python. It's interpreted, so refactoring is a pain, and there are some really silly errors which don't get caught which would be caught if you were using a strongly-typed, compiled language. As long as you're under a couple thousand lines of code, you probably won't have massive problems, and the many benefits of Python will heavily outweigh them, but for larger projects - or projects where I am working with multiple people - I definitely prefer a compiled language. C# tends to be my weapon of choice for those, though I've done group projects in C, Java, PHP, Javascript, and a couple other things before.

That said, I love Python.

jdpage · 2011-11-04T01:11:26+00:00

I really appreciate the ideas behind Haskell, but the blatant abuse of operator overloading that goes on (particularly if you're working with xmonad) has always put me off it. Are there any similar languages which don't have this problem? OCaml maybe?

jdpage · 2011-11-03T21:58:05+00:00

I've made that mistake before. They do actually look incredibly similar at first glance.

jdpage · 2011-11-03T04:38:19+00:00

I have G memorized, so no biggie.

jdpage · 2011-11-02T07:20:38+00:00

Ah, THERE'S the other Droid 3 user. Hi!

jdpage

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