Missy passed away Friday evening.

We made the difficult decision to put her to sleep after a battle with mammary cancer.

Missy was a wonderful influence on our family. Some of us disliked dogs, but Missy changed our minds. She was the most loving and thoughtful pet I've ever met, and also the smartest and most quiet.

We adopted her around age seven. Missy had already been spayed but we were unsure of when. Spaying early greatly reduces the chances of cancer.

People in Gainesville - especially people on campus - ignore this simple courtesy by strolling on the left side of the sidewalk, "owning" the sidewalk by walking right down the middle, or weaving back and forth and cutting people off.

Hate.

Disregard your inner monologue

This amendment may demonstrate to some folks around the state and around the country that the office of the governor of Florida is a very prestigious and honorable office and is certainly deserving of an honorary degree.

~ Rep. David Rivera, R-Miami (via "UF college could be named for Jeb Bush")

Repeat after me: The office of the governor cannot receive a degree.

You know, because IT'S NOT A PERSON.

State legislators: maybe you could focus on real issues instead of spitting in the faces of a hundred or so professors?

It says a lot about U.S. News and higher education in general that we are willing to play dead most of the time just so this magazine can sell the one issue a year that makes a lot of money.

~ Michele Tolela Myers, President of Sarah Lawrence College (via "Would U.S. News Make Up Fake Data?")

There's no doubt that cycling on the roads is dangerous. I know all too well that cycling near cars requires caution and constant attention.

However, I don't appreciate being screamed at by cyclists who assume everyone is going to turn in front of them. Some drivers do pay attention and some of us even check our blind spot before making turns.

Being defensive is one thing. Being an asshole is quite another and riding a $2000 bike on the road without a helmet doesn't give you the right.

I've come to terms with the fact that using Linux takes effort. It's worth it, though, because Linux shifts the balance in my favor: If I don't like one component, there's probably another that works better. Linux as a whole is not tightly coupled.

GNOME, though, is trending in that direction. With each major released of the GNOME desktop, components are becoming more integrated. Sensible defaults are one thing; coupling unpolished components and calling it a cohesive desktop is another. The balance is no longer in my favor.

I've ranted before about such components of the GNOME desktop that support common workflows like chatting online or playing a video. Granted, Gossip is an optional component of the GNOME desktop AFAIK, but gnome_url_show is not. Totem is part of GNOME proper and from an end-user standpoint failed. If I want my mom to run Linux on the desktop, This Is Not Acceptable.

Take screensavers as another example. All I want my screensaver to do is blank my screen, require a password to return to the desktop, and turn off my monitor after an hour or so. No flashy RSS readers or particle trails for me.

XScreenSaver achieves all of these things quite well and even manages to disable itself when I'm playing a video. (Well, to be completely accurate, mplayer et al disable XScreenSaver.)

So what's the reason for ranting? gnome-screensaver was recently forced onto my desktop as part of GNOME 2.16. It "replaces" XScreenSaver but only superficially. None of my preferred video players know how to disable gnome-screensaver yet (perhaps because gnome-screensaver uses DBus, and not everyone wants to use DBus?). This Is Not Acceptable.

Perhaps most amazing is the fact that this problem has existed for at least a year (as evidenced by an Ubuntu feature request for an "unbroken screensaver"). The issue was reported nearly nine months ago as GNOME bug 335149. Various patches exist for mplayer; none seem to have been applied to the mainline yet.

If you're going to make it hard for me change one component for another on my desktop, the new component damn well better behave very similarly to the previous one. Like, say, maintaining the XScreenSaver API until DBus becomes more commonplace.

Are soccer moms really that worried about running over kids?

And are kids really stupid enough not to know when to get out of the way?

Making your minivan sound like a fucking bulldozer will not solve these problems. In fact, it will only serve to piss off your neighbors.

You do not choose your destiny. It chooses you; and those who knew you before fate took you by the hand cannot understand the depth of the changes inside. They cannot fathom how much you stand to lose in failure, that you are the instrument of a flawless design, and all of life may hang in the balance. The hero learns quickly who can comprehend and who merely stands in your way.

I know it's not a major work or anything, but I enjoy improving user interfaces where possible. Even command-line interfaces. Contributing to open source projects also makes me happy. :)

I walk to my car and start driving home. By the time I was 90% of the way there, my car's gas warning light comes on. Weird, because there was at least enough to make it through the week this morning (er, afternoon).

Luckily there's a gas station within a mile or so of my apartment, so I turn around and head that way.

I get there, start filling up, finish. Only 8 gallons: weird. Stupid gas gauge.

While I'm filling up I notice the front tires are a little low (oops). I drive over to the compressor, muttering something about being charged 75 cents for five minutes of electricity. How much does it cost to buy a car that regulates tire pressure for me?

I fill each tire. I reach the last one - the rear passenger tire - and notice that the valve cap is missing. WTF?

Target's not too far from the gas station, so I drive down there. (I needed a few other things anyway.) When I reach the parking lot, a sense of dread hits me. The parking lot is pretty full. It's the day before classes start. I have to deal with … people.

Can't complain about $2 for a tire gauge and four valve caps, though. Okay, I can … the tire gauge is plastic made to look like chrome. Cheap bastards.

So yeah, I hate cars. I also hate people who take my car's tire valve caps.

The formula is being tested as we speak

Upgrading requires two steps: one for the "system version" and another for the "software version". No problem, right? Well, you have to reboot the appliance in between these two steps. Which requires physical access.

Yeah, instead of programming a "reboot" button into the Web interface, Google decided to give you a "shutdown" button and instructions to pull the plug after waiting "several minutes for the system to shutdown". (For your reference, Google, all the reboot button has to do is system("/sbin/shutdown", "-r", "now"); instead of system("/sbin/shutdown", "-h", "now");.)

Sigh.

The thing is, I would never have discovered this issue had I:

1. been running stable releases of DBIx::Class
2. not added a new unique constraint to one of my Podbop tables a couple of days ago

It took me a while of staring at the generated SQL to understand the bug. When a table has two or more unique constraints which share at least one column, the WHERE clause ends up looking like:

WHERE ( … first unique constraint … ) OR ( … half of the other unique constraint … )

This gives us a pretty good chance of returning the wrong row. Whoops.

I can hear the programmers saying, "Sounds like a lack of test coverage in DBIx::Class…" Well, yeah.

What amazes me is that it hadn't cropped up in at least one application out there. I know people are testing the development releases of DBIx::Class, but I guess no one had more than one unique constraint on their tables.

Well, it's code I contributed, so I better fix it. :-)

I'm going hunting

We met one Tuesday each month at one woman's house, or the clubhouse in another's subdivision. The group never met at our house. We weren't that well-off, and our house was too small for the number of people.

I don't have many specific memories about Tuesday Group, though one really sticks out. I was playing with a few kids on the host family's giant trampoline. After stepping down, a high schooler decided to test me. He asked me if I knew the definition of a light-year.

I was ashamed of myself, to be honest. How could I not know something so simple?

Looking back, I wonder if he was making fun of me because he thought he was smarter than me. (I hear he works for Google now, so hey.) I was a pretty rambunctious kid, so maybe he was getting back at me. Perhaps his little sister (who I had crushed on at one point) asked him to humiliate me. Maybe he was teasing me because he was teased at school that day. Who knows?

What bothers me the most is that I can't read or hear "light-year" without remembering this experience.

The following package will be installed or updated:
 svk
The following 115 additional packages will be installed:
 algorithm-annotate-pm algorithm-diff-pm apr apr-dev apr-ssl apr-ssl-common apr-ssl-shlibs aprutil-dev autoconf2.5 automake1.9 bfd-pm bison class-accessor-pm class-autouse-pm586 clone-pm586 compress-zlib-pm586 cyrus-sasl2-dev cyrus-sasl2-shlibs daemonic data-hierarchy-pm586 data-uuid-pm586 db43-ssl db43-ssl-shlibs db44-aes db44-aes-shlibs devel-stacktrace-pm encode-pm586 file-chdir-pm586 file-type-pm freezethaw-pm gawk gdbm3 gdbm3-shlibs getopt-long-pm586 gettext-dev glib glib-shlibs gmp gmp-shlibs guile guile-dev guile-shlibs html-parser-pm586 html-tagset-pm html-tree-pm586 io-digest-pm io-pager-pm io-string-pm ipc-run3-pm libapr0-shlibs libaprutil0-shlibs libgmpxx4-shlibs libmpfr1 libmpfr1-shlibs libtool14 libtool14-shlibs libwww-pm586 libxml2 libxml2-bin libxml2-shlibs locale-maketext-lexicon-pm586 locale-maketext-simple-pm m4 neon24-ssl neon24-ssl-shlibs openldap23-dev openldap23-shlibs openssl097 openssl097-dev openssl097-shlibs perlio-eol-pm586 perlio-via-dynamic-pm perlio-via-symlink-pm pkgconfig pod-escapes-pm pod-simple-pm python-nox python23-nox python23-nox-shlibs python23-socket-nox readline readline-shlibs readline5 readline5-shlibs regexp-shellish-pm ruby18 ruby18-dev ruby18-shlibs svk-pm586 svk-pm586-bin svn-client-ssl svn-mirror-pm586 svn-simple-pm586 svn-ssl svn-ssl-dev svn-ssl-shlibs svn-ssl-swig-pm586 svn-ssl-swig-pm586-shlibs swig swig-shlibs system-openssl-dev tcltk tcltk-dev tcltk-shlibs term-readkey-pm586 texinfo text-aligner-pm text-diff-pm text-table-pm time-date-pm uri-pm586 vcp-pm586 xml-autowriter-pm586 xml-parser-pm586 yaml-pm

Oh. My. God. Must install Gentoo on PowerBook.

Further, the Bloglines crawler is rather rude, which was more recently noted by James Farmer and Matt Mullenweg.

I'll be installing Plagger the next chance I get. The slides from miyagawa's presentation from YAPC::NA 2006 piqued my interest. I'd be willing to bet Plagger gets support for the Atom threading extensions before Bloglines. :-P