Never upgrade an Operating System

Always do a fresh install. Or so they say. I should have listened. Instead, I decided to upgrade Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 with the built-in tool and it's been a disaster. First, it crashed half-way through and wouldn't let me back into the GUI. That's okay, I said: I'll just run the command-line upgrade utility. That worked, but the install is totally messed up. Even in "Ubuntu Classic (with no effects)" I'm getting all kinds of graphical anomalies. I'll do a fresh install from scratch. My only question is whether I'll install 11.04 again or go back to 10.10.

Upgrading wasn't really necessary either. I already have LibreOffice and Firefox 4 via PPAs and I wouldn't want Unity even if my current machine wasn't too antiquate to run it.

Update: I'm reinstalling 10.10. 11.04 simply doesn't work right with my hardware. Actually, my modern Laptop won't even boot the CD, which coupled with the video problems on my very old IBM Pentium 4 tells me that Natty Narwhal simply isn't ready for prime time. Not surprising considering that they decided to foist Unity, a Desktop Environment they made from scratch and that has no following, on everyone in this release. Making the release actually work is apparently a secondary concern.

Speaking of Thunderbird: There's an easier way to backup

Skip the copying to local steps until you actually need to restore the mail. Just tar or zip the whole backup profile after the download has finished and keep the archive for later. Then when you need it, unzip it, replace your current backup profile directory with what you just unzipped, and open Thunderbird. Since you last closed Thunderbird in offline mode it should still be in offline mode, so Use Profile Manager to start the Backup profile in offline mode and you shouldn't have a problem viewing and copying your old emails without Thunderbird trying to sync with whatever's on the IMAP server now. Until they kill Profile Manager in Thunderbird, that is. Then you'll need the standalone Profile Manager app as well.

What is Mozilla thinking?

They seem to be planning to kill off the Profile Manager feature quite soon. Idiots. Hopefully Thunderbird won't face the same fate in the near future, as that is where I use Profile Manager more (due to my use of a backup profile). Maybe that'll be the silver lining to their sidelining of Thunderbird (another dubious decision).

 

This should put an end to the birther pseudo-controversy

Of course it won't. They'll point out that the long-form birth certificate is obviously a photocopy (which it says on the document), will demand that the original be released, will ask what was on the other page that the curve in the image indicates is there, will find some clerical error to nitpick about, and in the last analysis will say: "He's the most powerful man in the world. Of course he can forge a birth certificate!"

Obviously the reason that Obama stooped to throw the crazies a bone is because Donald Trump took up their cause and made it mainstream. I strongly suspect that this will not be the end of it. Perhaps it will, though, push it back into the right-wing fringes where it belongs.

Update: See what I mean?

If I were British, I'd vote no on the Alternative Vote

I was always skeptical about it. It was rather difficult to find out just what was being proposed. This video does was the first clear explanation how it works (which is confirmed by the BBC, though the video oversimplifies things by having all the Greens put the Lib-Dems as their first choice, etc.), including the anomalous results that it can produce. Even if the possibility of actually hurting a candidate by putting them first is overstated, the system is still too complicated and has an element of unpredictability in it.

Here's what I mean: plurality voting, called First Past the Post in the UK, is like a two dimensional colored block puzzle where you try to make blocks disappear by pushing them around on a flat plane lining them up three or more at a time to make them vanish without being left with just one or two of any color. The Alternative vote would be a three dimensional version of that game where if you make blocks disappear on the bottom it can set off a chain reaction as higher blocks fall into the empty spaces forming rows of their own and disappearing leading to more blocks falling. That is difficult to predict. But in this case it's impossible for anyone to predict because the higher blocks represent other people's votes and are protected by ballot secrecy.

Don't be nice about WordPress Theme Ratings

There's an enormous sea of WordPress themes, and most of them are (let's be honest) dreck. The rating system doesn't do nearly enough to navigate said ocean as it is. By all means, don't be afraid to give one and two star ratings when they're deserved.

One of the greatest things about WordPress.org...

is the enormous plug-in ecosystem. Latest example: I wanted a way to backup and reimport my linklist (which I just added). I figured out how, using a direct link to the OPML file and the default Blogroll importer plugin, but that plugin blows away the categories. Since WordPress doesn't enable you to even add categories to links in batches, that's a real problem. Enter Import Blogroll With Categories. It solves the problem perfectly, even adding said cryptic link to the OPML file to the Links category in the WordPress control panel's sidebar.

I finally shifted the menu buttons

As you no doubt know if you've ever used Ubuntu Linux, they have a weird setup by default where the close, minimize, and maximize buttons on every standard window are in the upper-left corner instead of the upper-right. By the time I found out how to change that, I had already gotten used to that button layout. But now that I'm using Windows occasionally I find switching between the button layouts to be confusing, so I made them standard.

The New York Times doesn't allow comments on letters

I find that strange. Why not allow people to respond to other reader's responses to Times articles. Considering that comments are hidden from readers by default when they are allowed, this seems only reasonable and in no way disruptive.

This was prompted by this letter from a Catholic priest criticizing Gail Collins' recent column on Planned Parenthood funding. The letter itself is representative of how people of his perspective view the matter, but his criticism of Collins' is unjust. I actually think that both the column and the letter are right, to a certain degree. Undoubtedly, the first and foremost reason for the crusade to defund Planned Parenthood is because the anti-abortion activists view it as morally equivalent to the Third Reich (seriously, Godwin's Law is fulfilled every five minutes, or less, in that world). Giving money to Hitler is naturally unacceptable whatever Hitler wants to do with it.

Second is the dubious claim the writer mentions about how giving Planned Parenthood money for contraceptives, etc., increases subsidy for abortion (which assumes that the federal money will not be replaced with increased donations and that PP or donors would subsidize abortion less rather than let contraception and other things be subsidizes less, which contradicts their own demonization of the organization). Ironically, this contradicts the way the good Monsignor's own Church's organizations get money from the government without violating the establishment clause.Third, though, is the Catholic prohibition on contraception and the Evangelical opposition to anything that makes what they deem to be sexual immorality easier.

That's for the activists. For establishment Republican politicians, they pick fights on things like this to keep pro-lifers on the reservation after more than 30 years of doing uncommonly close to nothing on the issue (including thirty-three years of having seven or more Republican justices on the Supreme Court). Even if they didn't get even the Planned Parenthood funding cut, they can at least use the Democrat's fighting to defend it as a means of renewed demonization of them on this issue.

Yahoo Pipes is awesome

I'd heard of Yahoo Pipes many times, but I hadn't used it until now. I have to say that it is a fantastic product. There are some sites that still haven't gotten into the 21st century regarding site feeds. They've for what is all intents and purposes a blog, but it doesn't have a feed. Half an hour fiddling with Yahoo Pipes for the first time and I gave a site like that (Suikosource, a website devoted to the Suikoden series of video games which doesn't update regularly) an RSS feed. It's crude--I haven't figured out how to separate title and body--but it does what I need it to do: tell me when there's new content.

Tip: p7zip/7za for Linux CAN extract multiple encrypted files

The trick is that the password entered on the command line cannot have a space in between it and the -p flag. So "7za x -p12345 filename.7z" will work, but "7za x -p 12345 filename.7z" won't. No need to bring Wine and zmud into it after all. My mistake.

Eureka to premiere July 11

This is a bit disappointing, though not unexpected. The net effect of Eureka moving from a short 13-episode season to a long 18 and then 20 episode season is to get fewer episodes per year. That's perverse.

Governor Moonbeam Hoisted on his own Petard

Jerry Brown promised to send all tax increases to referendum, in keeping with California's culture of direct democracy. But it's California's culture of direct democracy that  produced Prop 13, which requires all tax increases and budgets to have two-thirds supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, which allows the permanent Republican minority (in a fit of extraordinary anti-tax fanaticism) to block putting an extension of already existing taxes to a referendum.

The part of Prop 13 that everyone associates with it is the property tax cap, but the more important part is the supermajority requirements. That's what helps make California ungovernable. Warren Buffett, while he was an advisor to Arnold Schwarzeneggar during his first run for governor, got blasted for suggesting throwing out the property tax cap (he said it "makes no sense"). Maybe the thing to do is keep the stupid property tax cap, no matter how little sense it makes, and restore majoritarianism to the California budget so that a permanent minority only interest in winning primary elections can't gum up the works constantly. Add in the abolition of the initiative process (with all initiatives in the past repealable by the legislature) and add in effective anti-gerrymandering laws and California (the legislative membership is incredibly static; not a single State Senate seat has changed parties in nearly a decade) might become a functional state again.

"Spending Reductions in the tax code" isn't Orwellian doublespeak

There are tons of things in the tax code that are arguably spending channelled through the IRS. Refundable tax credits definitely fall into that category since you can have a negative tax balance for the year (i.e., get back more than was withheld), though I'd agree that IRS de facto spending goes a lot further than just those. I take that to be what Obama was talking about when he used that phrase in the speech rather than his vow to allow the part of the Bush tax cuts that goes to the wealthy to expire on schedule.

How do you know a mainstream media article is on Drudge?

When all, or nearly all, of the comments attached to said article are contentless right-wing boilerplate. That just doesn't happen normally.

And yes, Biden was asleep.

Paul Ryan preserves Obamacare Medicare cuts

It's practically the only part of Obamacare that survives in his budget, according to the Washington Post. To quote Paul Krugman in regard to seniors voting Republican over the Obamacare Medicare cuts (when information on the Ryan budget first leaked and the cuts weren't even known): suckers. As if Republicans would ever be guardians of Medicare.

Tip: Adding a unlinked Menu to the WordPress Navbar

If you want to have an item on the navbar that is purely a menu and not also a link, add a custom link with any old url in it and then edit the item and delete it. Then you can put anything you want under it in the Custom Menu interface and the now-empty link will act purely as a menu heading.

U.N. Torture Investigator Denied Unsupervised Access to Manning

This story just won't go away. President Obama really needs to do more than just take the military's word for it. I was never uncynical enough to expect him to expose himself to the charge of weakness on National Security--he hasn't done a single thing like that after his first few months in office. But there's doing nothing and then there's blatantly doing nothing. This is the latter and it's incredibly stupid.

Ironically, Manning might have been treated better had he been caught in 2007 or 2008. Bush, buffeted by criticism over his official torture program enhanced interrogation program would have been a colossal idiot to let this sort of thing go on with a non-Muslim white American citizen. Wait, never mind. I take it back: Manning's lucky he wasn't caught back then.

Workaround to the Calibre double-l problem

I wrote about Calibre's double-l bug before where words with "ll" in PDFs would have the second l replaced by a blank space when converting to another format. Fortunately, I discovered a workaround. After I realized that not all PDFs were subject to this, I had a stroke of genious: what if I converted the PDF to a PostScript file and then back to a PDF again? It works! But only if you use pdftops for the initial conversion: pdf2ps makes a graphic-only PostScript file, which is no good.

Update: I thought I wrote about it, but can't find the post. Now that I think about it, I was writing a somewhat irritated post about the downside of open source endeavors being that failure of project b that project a is dependent on can lead to project a not fixing a really grating bug because the developer community is unwilling or unable to fix the bug for project b. Since I love Calibre, as it is a phenomenal tool provided totally free, I thought better of bitching about it and deleted the post either before publishing it or shortly after.

Apropos of nothing...

ABCNews is a very user-unfriendly site in terms of getting an entire article in one lump-sum. Even the print feature produces a quasi-framed window that is nasty to try to search through and the print-out has two columns.

One would think Palin of all people...

wouldn't want to flirt with Birtherism. Considering that much more reason to doubt that her stories about her son Trig Palin, whom she's gotten a lot of political mileage out of, than Obama's being born in Hawaii (which, as the article states, has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked, most definitively by the Hawaii Health Department and Republican then-Governor Linda Lingle).

Yet Another Free Email Provider

Opera, on the heels of their FastMail acquisition, decides to enter the free email space. Why? Between Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail (and a billion second and third-tier players) there isn't much point. This will be moderately popular among the Opera fanbase  and dead on arrival everywhere else.

Aside from offering free IMAP, it is more barren than Gmail was when I first started using it in May 2004 (which for those counting is less than two months after it's April 1, 2004 release). In dramatic contrast to Gmail, it offers nothing new than other free email services don't offer. Gmail was able to become a third player in a two-player field (Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail) by revolutionizes the entire online email world with mega storage and adding innovations in their conversation view and labelling system at launch. Opera Mail has nothing that others don't do and currently does it worse than the competition. As I said, dead on arrival (aside from people who already use Opera).

I'll believe it when I see it

British company claims it created a fuel that can be sold at $1.50 based on hydrogen that would run in gasoline engines. If this is true, it would be fantastic. It's certainly more believable than the Irish Steorn, which claimed to have created a perpetual-motion machine to produce unlimited free energy. Even if it were true, what does burning this stuff produce? Burning hydrogen produces water, which would ruin a normal gasoline-powered car.

Update: Their website has more details. First, the $1.50 looks wrong. The price of hydrogen given is $100 a barrel. Maybe they meant $100 buys a barrel of their special liquid hydrogen, as a barrel of oil does not translate into a barrel of gas, or maybe the article really meant £1.50 not $1.50. Oh, and their fuel does produce water vapor. Wouldn't that rust the engine and exhaust system from the inside out? Or is that what the cheap car conversion is all about?

Obama wins Virginia in 2008 and suddenly it's a swing state?

Perhaps the Washington Post should encourage its writers to do a little more research:

Donald Trump did it again this week, grabbing the spotlight from potential GOP rivals by snapping up a winery in Virginia, an important swing state,

Since 1952, Virginia has voted Republican every single time except for 1964 (when Barry Goldwater went down in flames) and 2008. I hardly call that a swing state. It's also too early to regard 2008 as anything other than a fluke brought on by the collapse of the global economy, critical Bush fatigue, and high black turnout.

Republicans holding up budget deal over Planned Parenthood

So says Harry Reid. I know why, too: if the Democrats reject the deal over Planned Parenthood funding, the Republicans can keep pro-life voters fired up for another ten years. They have to pull a stunt like this once in a while or abortion opponent might start going to cranky third parties. Even people motivated by religious ferver need to be thrown a bone now and then, or motivated by fury at the opposition sparked by the demonization of the Democrats that will no doubt follow in their quarter.

George Allen does have a history of race problems

But I don't think this should be one of them. It's just the sort of thing a certain type of guy asks when confronted with a certain body type. I'm a big guy and my uncles all assumed I was playing football (a sport I never had any interest in) while I was growing up and asked questions like that. I assume this is no different.

On a purely political level...

Taking this stance on the Continuing Resolution might be a mistake. Are they that afraid of a government shutdown that they're willing to take the blame for it. Their reasons are comprehensible: funding just the part of government that anti-government fanatics like is a terrible policy and will have bad consequences. But if the shutdown is going to happen anyway, isn't it better to have a longer one that the other side gets blamed for than a shorter one that you are blamed for?

As for the policy riders, they've already given up on closing Gitmo (which is a travesty, but unavoidable due to public opinion, gutless Democrats, and Republican demagoguery) and is it really worth coming out the loser here not to throw D.C. under the bus on abortion funding? They've only got three electoral votes, are used to getting thrown under the bus, and will still have a 99.99999999999999999999% chance of voting Democrat in the next election anyway. Especially if what The Weekly Standard says is true and Obama already threw D.C. under the bus on that issue in 2009.

The biggest objection is that they could come back next week and demand another 12 billion and the full funding of another Tea Party approved department (say, DHS or Justice). Then they'd either have to hold their ground and say no, and risk being blamed, or put themselves in an even worse position when the government shuts down.

Jennifer Rubin is either a moron or dishonest

She refers to Obama threatening to veto the latest continuing resolution "likely. . .the silliest move of this presidency" and refers to the resolution itself as a "no-brainer." That's just stupid. Obama may be making a political mistake not accepting the CR, but accepting it would probably be a worse one. Allowing the Republicans to fund only the parts of the government favored by their most extreme elements, the ones pushing this confrontation, would make an eventual shutdown more likely and make it last longer. If she can't see that, she's incompetent, if she does see it and still claims that the CR is a "no-brainer" and implies vetoing it is totally irration, then she's dishonest.

A question about the abolition of Medicare

It just occurred to me a minute ago: how is dumping the cost of people's healthcare in their golden years onto the private insurers going to affect the rates? I mean, right now Medicare pays all or most of the cost of taking care of the vast majority of senior citizens, which no doubt has a very positive effect of the bottom line for insurance companies and lets them charge much lower rates. What happens when they start getting customers that they will have to take care of until death?

I was right about the stopgap

The Democrats aren't accepting it. If they did, they would be enabling the Republicans to survive in a government shutdown longer by funding the Department of Defence, especially if it were followed by another stopgap funding, say, the DHS and/or the Justice Department. The Tea Party considers those three departments as practically the only legitimate ones in the government, after all.

Republicans' latest stopgap is absurd

12 billion dollars for one week? Including fully funding the Pentagon might be a wise move, politically. The Democrats would be stupid to accept that, since it opens the door to the Republicans only keeping the parts of the government they like working (thus lessening the pressure on them to avoid a shutdown), but the Republicans could easily demagogue the issue if they say that.

It's clear that Obama is eager to avoid a government shutdown. He wouldn't have accepted the first, unreasonable stop-gap measure that included cuts proportionate to what the Republicans ultimately wanted to keep talking. Ultimately he should find a way to offer the Republicans the number they want on his terms. If they refuse, he'll be in a much better position to paint them as lunatics in hock to the Tea Party hellbent on shutting down the government.

You mean it's not available in ebook form already?

J.K. Rowling is considering releasing Harry Potter in electronic format. Really, it's ridiculous that it's not in that form already. Legally, that is. In my wild, lawless youth, I read half of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on a Palm m100 series PDA while I was waiting for the hardcover to arrive from an Amazon affiliate (media mail sucks).

As the article writer pointed out, the latter four books really beg to be in digital form. Each one gives the whole Lord of the Rings a run for its money.

Paul Ryan's Medicare Divide and Conquer

To sum up Yglesias' point: replace Medicare with a private voucher program for people 54 and younger and you eliminate their motivation to support keeping it for people 55 and older. The same would apply to means-testing Social Security: it eliminates any personal interest motivation of those means tested out of Social Security from preserving it for those who still receive it. Instead of an insurance program, all of the sudden it becomes Welfare for the old. And we know what happens to Welfare in this country.

Is this the sexual equivalent of the one-drop rule?

Leading with "The dead keep getting outed:" Andrew Sullivan quotes a New York Times article speaking of an "early homosexual relationship with a white businessman." This comes after Andrew just had to walk back his absolute certainty that Gandhi was gay and take the position that we'll probably never know his sexual orientation.

The problem, as I see it, is first that Andrew doesn't really believe in male bisexuality, and second that he always favors evidence of homosexuality over evidence of heterosexuality (at least in famous people). In Malcolm's case, his six children (two of which, twins, were posthumous) were a little too much for Andrew (possibly in a more cautious mood after the Gandhi experience), but he still led with "outing" and held it open. Come on, the sexual relationship, if it happened, was when he was young with someone who was apparently powerful (meaning the relationship could have been a power relationship, or done for mercenary reasons, etc.). It is utterly unreasonable, given the weight of evidence against his being gay, to think it's really an open question. Unless one bit of gayness makes you gay as one drop of African blood made you black back in the era of Jim Crow (obviously with the reverse intent).

Single HTML Archives: Firefox's Superiority

Internet Explorer has had the ability to save pages as .mht files for over a decade. Approximate functionality has yet to make its way into either Firefox or Chrome yet, unfortunately. Very fortunately, there are extensions that do the trick. On Firefox there is the fantastic Mozilla Archive Format extension that not only allows Firefox to seemlessly read and create .mht files, but also lets it use the open and far superior .maf file format (and allows the conversion between .mht, complete web saves with folder created by Firefox, IE, and Chrome, and .maf en masse). MAFF files are universally readable once unzipped (they, like ODF and Microsoft OpenXML, are really zip files with a different extension) and can contain multiple tabs saved at once (great for sites that use pagination, like most newspapers). Oh, and it also saves the originating address of the page and makes it easily accessable when viewing. That in itself is invaluable.

Chrome's SingleFile produces a special single-archive html file. The good side is that its files are compatible with all major browsers without having to unzip. The bad side is that the whole thing is a horrible kluge. It's a mess all the way from the fact that the extension overloads a .html file with graphics and other non-html data to the need to download a second add-on to make it work to the ridiculous process you need to go through to save a file (read the instructions on the linked page; I can attest, it's even more of a pain in the ass than it seems). And Chrome still cannot read let alone write .mht files. If someone sends you one, you're out of luck.

That Terry Jones is suffering financially...

gives me hope for this country. I would have thought there'd be enough violently anti-Islamic nutbags out there to make sure he and his Church were rolling in dough for being willing to burn a Koran. Fortunately, that appears not to be the case.

GOP 2012 Budget outline leaked, dead on arrival

Yeah, a budget that institutes a phase out of Medicare, the gutting of Medicaid, the permanent extension of all the Bush tax cuts, and the cutting of the corporate tax rate is really going to fly. Nor do I think it will be a starting point for negotiations. The Republicans will never, ever agree to tax increases and Obama and the Dems aren't going to approve such drastic cuts when it won't even balance the budget for many years.

No doubt when they did in a non-existent hypothetical future, the GOP would take us back into mega deficits with more tax breaks for the wealthy.