decklin

I think you might want to try http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/ or http://help.twitter.com/.

OK, this finally motivated me to make a userscript that replaces Scribd links with Google docs (I didn't realize it was so easy to construct a link to their viewer).

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/63596

I'm sure Scribd works just as well if you have Flash installed, but I don't. I like my local PDF viewer but I have to admit sometimes not having to download the file is nice.

I think the obvious conclusion would be that people upvote things without reading them.

I would have trouble explaining this to my parents, or anyone not familiar with how cookies or "cloaking" work. I just heard the BBC world report (radio) summarize this coverage a few minutes ago; it made it sound like

- Google copies and stores news articles and serves them to users

- Google decides when users have to sign in upon visiting third-party news site.

These misconceptions are great if you're Rupert Murdoch. In reality, the change in Google's policy is minor:

- You are permitted to serve different content than the bot got (i.e. make them sign in) if the cookie on the other end has already requested 5 (or whatever) articles

- You could do that before, of course, but you would have gotten delisted for cloaking, just as with Google's web index. This is a new exception to that rule.

Laypersons have enough trouble understanding that news sites are not obligated to serve their content to Google. Making the issue more complicated (even if this isn't very complicated to us) may not be a good PR move.

"And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication."

I stopped there. Why give this man more attention?

Despite what you might expect, there is actually a fascinating article behind this poorly-titled link; it starts at the fifth paragraph.

Yesterday, I was thankful for not paying any attention to the news while I cooked, served friends, and then relaxed. I turned the radio off and didn't check any websites. It was nice.

I don't mean to be callous about Mr. Woods' injury, but is this example really important? To put it a better way: it is of zero (maybe negative) value to me to hear "X happened to celebrity Y", or "celebrity Z died", for that matter, 45 minutes earlier than I would have otherwise. What would be of value to me (and seriously, I would pay a lot for this) would be some kind of magic device that filtered out such items out of my media consumption and coughed up a precis on Saturday afternoon after I do the crossword.

I cannot pass this without pointing to the definitive reference on the subject: http://www.jerkcity.com/jerkcity381.html

I, too, have been saying this for several years now. I think it's worthwhile to remember what we fight for (peace) and why we thank our veterans for doing it; WWI didn't turn out to be the war to end all wars, but maybe that day will still come.

(Beats spending the day grumbling about how I am still opposed to the US being in Iraq, at least.)

You should do this one: http://xkcd.com/33/

You'd think The Economist would bother to actually check instead of saying "let's hope the people who make the rules at the TSA don't read this particular xkcd comic."

Here is the TSA's response: http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/10/response-to-bag-check-cartoo... Randall replied in the comments.

Bleah. This calls for some deconstruction: http://blog.rupamsunyata.org/2009/10/23/score-5-privileged.x...

Same here. On a keyboard, I touch type with ten fingers, and on my phone, I use two, which is pretty much how I stumbled along with QWERTY before I decided to learn Dvorak, so it really doesn't bother me at all.

try "altscreen on". (see also the -a option, and http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/html_node/Window-T...).

Sup (http://sup.rubyforge.org/).

What in the world does this person's experience however many years ago compiling Gentoo have to do with "linux on the desktop"?

M-. also takes a numeric argument (M-number or ESC number) to yank the nth word instead of the last.

C-x C-e to open up the current command in $EDITOR. For previous commands, fc N M where N and M are numbers or search strings (opens the range of commands in your editor).

I'm quite happy with them. Since I signed up in 2008, they've increased the base storage once:

http://blog.linode.com/2009/04/23/33-additional-disk-space/

I was with him until he blamed the Macintosh. If "basic computer skills" are things like saving a file in a particular path, what is bad about an interface that makes that abstract concept more accessible to most people?

(But I guess I'm thinking of the original, spatial Finder, not the current one. I am not an Apple user.)

Personally, I'd argue you do want to keep track of whether you are in a repo or not, since including that pipeline in your PS1 always forks three processes on every prompt. And if you're going to do that in your shell, it's good to have separate commands for each task.

For the case of not being on a branch, the output of 'git branch' is not very useful. I am currently using 'git name-rev --name-only HEAD', but the contrib script has an even fancier mechanism (via 'git describe') for coming up with something to display when HEAD isn't a symbolic ref.

It's better to use a plumbing command for this sort of thing; git-completion.bash (http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=contrib/comple...) has a thorough example. (The actual command called is 'git symbolic-ref HEAD'.)