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.