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This.

(is he gone yet?)

The only PHP devs using git are all super professional with the patience of saints?

As a college student using a free prime subscription, it's kind of lame that it's paid only (I understand their reasoning though).

My only other concern is how they're delivering the videos. Is it just flash? Or is it some crazy Silverlight+DRM thing like netflix? If it's the former they could attract some Linux users who can't use netflix.

Xmonad is nice, but Awesome's tags beat it IMO. You don't really have multiple desktops, you have multiple tags. Each window can have multiple tags and there can be multiple tags visible on the screen at any moment. So what you end up seeing is a union between all the windows with any of the tags that are set to be visible.

Awesome is both really minimal and really extensible. By default you don't have anything, and you build it up to how you like it with lua and a couple of libraries that expose bindings to things like desktops and tags.

Well, nothing really compares to Awesome's tagging system (and I say that after only managing to survive a few days in Awesome, I need a bit more structure by default).

I'm not really sure why, but Spaces just feels inferior to basically every multiple desktop implementation I've used on Linux. There's just not enough of a UI for it, and it's clunky to use. On Linux using multiple desktops is smooth and natural. On OS X, it just feels weird.

If you think that VLC is a good Quicktime alternative you should try out mplayer. There's an awesome Mac gui for it called MPlayer OSX Extended (http://www.mplayerosx.ch/). It's a lot more streamlined and will play at least everything that VLC does.

It doesn't even take prolonged periods (for me at least).

I was participating in an obfuscated code contest a while back (making a simple command line multi-function calculator), and since I knew I couldn't compete on line noise I decided to try obfuscation through architecture. Somewhere around writing a RightSideOperandInterface (so I could catch division by 0), it managed to get into my head that it was actually more robust and extensible than doing it any other way. I came to my senses slightly after submitting it.

I'm using Chrome on Linux and I have to hold both of the shift buttons for it to work. It would be utterly impossible if I wasn't using a trackpad.

That would be the 'cmath' module.

I'm not really sure of the accuracy of any of its claims, but it certainly looks interesting.

I've been writing some code for people working in bioinformatics recently. It's pretty similar.

See also: working computer made inside of Dwarf Fortress (http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/15/colossal-turing-mach.ht...)

Backdoors for the government into all encrypted services required by law? I don't see what could possibly go wrong.

Forward and backward buttons can actually be extremely handy, when not used for that purpose.

If you map them to something else (say... modifier keys), you can do all sorts of useful things. Like hold down one of the buttons and click on files to select more than one. Or activate Spaces if you click the middle button, but activate Expose if you click the middle button while holding the back button down.

If back/forward buttons had to stay back/forward buttons I'd agree that they are pointless. They don't though; they can be super useful.

I do this all the time. A couple of interesting ones came up while volunteering recently.

Assembly line style processes are just like shell pipes. I get data, process it, another step.

The same project I also got to act as an accumulation buffer. As things were produced I collected sets of 10 at a time of them and gave those to someone else who counted and stored them. He didn't have to walk as much and they were easier to count.

It seems to be AGPL licensed. I'm wondering how that will affect adoption.

Also good are nymph, zephyr, and syzygy.

For you vim-lovers out there, DrawIt accomplishes most of the same things: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40

I guess I'm in a minority here. I rarely have more than 5 tabs open. I can honestly not fathom ever needing to use more than 50.

To the people who use gigantic numbers of tabs, what does your browsing workflow look like where you end up with that many?

I don't even think it was one-sided. Most of Python's strengths had a "retort" afterwards explaining how that feature was in PHP 5. A good number of those even had 'counter-retorts'!

I remember reading about how LLVM would be better able to interface with IDEs than gcc because it was library based rather than a giant monolithic system. It's interesting to see how this has been applied.

It seems to me that the logic behind the problem solving going on in Mongrel2 has been 'how can I make this into a problem that's already been solved?'

I think that seems like a pretty good methodology in a lot of cases actually.

There are significantly more package managers than apt and rpm. If languages each have their own package manager and library installer, it's only one thing for the writer of the library to deal with.

If it was left up to the OS's package manager the writer would have to maintain 10 to 15 different packages, or get other people to. Would you rather deal with one gem, or bento package or one each of whatever rpm/apt/yum/pacman/brew/macports/pkgsrc/... use?

If different OSs all converge to one package manager in the near future, then, great! we can use that. Until then though, I think language specific ones are just fine.

I think there are two big reasons that Ruby isn't on the iPhone. For one, MacRuby is still in development and isn't stable yet. For another, the Objective-C GC isn't running on the iPhone, which is what MacRuby uses. As the project matures and the iPhone gets better hardware, I think Ruby will start to show up on it.

You'd think so, but when I was doing some quick testing with just one window and multiple tabs it only refreshed the current tab. Doing some more tests now with multiple windows, it seems to only refresh the active tab of the back-most window in the stack.

I think that's rather counter-intuitive, but I doubt it'd be much of an issue in practice.

If you're on Linux and use a different browser you can do the same using xdotool.

    autocmd BufWriteCmd *.html,*.css,*.haml :call Refresh_browser()
    function()! Refresh_browser()
        if &modified
            write
            silent !xdotool search --class google-chrome key ctrl+r
        endif
    endfunction

Assuming you could convince everyone that this was a good idea and that anonymity/neutrality wouldn't be an issue, the federal government is the last group of people I'd trust designing this scheme to.

I've gotta say, this was both informative and amusing to read. I wish I got to read articles like this more often.

It looks a lot like Markaby or Haml.

Everyone seems so concerned about the Linux desktop. I don't see the problem with Linux as being the dekstop itself. Coming from using only OS X, think that the problem is the applications available to run on the desktop. In my experience, there are no Linux apps that match the ease of use and well-designed-ness of whatever the closest analogue would be on Mac.