I love a good rant, especially when it’s well justified. The carriers want to rip you off. When it comes to paying for tethering on top of your data plan, Mike Elgan hits the nail on the head telling you how it is.

What I don’t like about Gnome 3 desktop is how it hides everything from you under multiple layers of mouse clicks in order to try to simplify. But what it does is over categorize everything! This would work just fine on a tablet pc, but I’m on a desktop or full laptop and I consider myself a power user!

Here’s how to make GDM stop showing *every* user account at login screen by default. I don’t know why they released gdm with the broken gdmsetup and showing all accounts in the window by default.

Defining things like %_topdir and %_smp_mflags for all your rpmbuilds can be done in the hidden rpmmacros file in your build user’s home directory. The problem is portability. If you define unnecessary things such as %_tmppath, and try to use it in your spec files, everything will work fine until the day you or someone else attempts to build without having their rpmmacros set up quite the same way.

If you’ve been tricked into believing the lie that software piracy is a bad thing; somehow it’s morally wrong and should be punished heavily, then this little nugget from a story about Sony’s reboot of the Karate Kid franchise should help wake you up.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/tynt_copy_paste_jerks

John Gruber must get a lot more hits than me, because he’s really fired up about copy & paste hijacking.

When you copy some text and paste it somewhere else, do you expect to see the exact text you’ve copied? 5-10 years ago, you would say uh, yes. But today, the answer is a maybe at best.

You probably won’t be the least bit surprised when you get text formatting, a specific font, color, and maybe even a break line or graphic stuffed into your clipboard. This is very annoying in email when you’re typing in one font and pow, you paste something and the line spacing, color, font, size, and everything else gets garbled.

The latest trend in… well whatever you call this line of shenanigans, is copy & paste hijacking. Not only is a bunch of meta forced upon you, but now you have to deal with automatic link attribution?

Seriously… WTF? Enough is enough.

The first thing I do when I’m copying any text from a “fancy” site is copy it to a location where all that crap is dropped like the dead weight it is. The URL bar is a good start.

====Copy the dirty clipboard to the run window or … Read More »

I hate configuring things like GPS devices that run super restricted verisons of linux or some other OS. They never seem to deal with error handling very well. For example, here’s the oddball command for fetching ntp.conf and ntp.keys from a ntp server onto a Symmetricom GPS receiver. This is what you want to see, it just works. But in the many failures leading up to this configuration, it was finding problems fetching the files or having the correct access but it was happily coasting right along, overwriting its own configuration with jibberish and rebooting it self only to find the configuration was bollocks.