Less please

I’ve been thinking on this for a while and I’ve decided I want a web browser that does less. I don’t want one that suggests URLs based on my browsing history. I don’t want one that guesses what I’m looking for as I type into the address bar. I don’t want one that tries to open embedded media without first asking permission.

I do want something that is W3C compliant. I do want one that throws up barriers to cross-site tracking as the default mode.

Firefox is now suggesting pages to visit based on history. It caches the most common sites and displays a graphical representation of them in the default tab content. It guesses what I’m looking for as I type. It’s starting to feel a bit too intrusive. Chrome is no different in this respect. In fact with the tight integration with the googleplex, it is probably even worse. Opera is just, well, Opera. Safari isn’t exactly cross platform. Just about all of the other major/minor players also fall into that bucket. Internet Explorer is the historical devil.

I guess maybe what I want it to go back to using lynx, only with more pointy-clicky. And maybe some syncing between instances.

Keeping up

I’ve replicated a goodly bit of build infrastructure at the home front now and have poked holes into the LAN so it is available to the outside world. It’s a bit exciting if you’re into this kind of thing.

Confluence:
http://fales.wales:8899/
Stash:
http://fales.wales:7990/
Jenkins:
http://fales.wales:8888/
Tomcat:
http://fales.wales:8080
Apache:
http://fales.wales
Artifactory:
Need to set up port forwarding first

I still haven’t decided on the bug/issue tracking software I want to use. I’ll probably fork over the $10 for the Jira 10 user license. After all, I’ve already forked over $20 for the Confluence and Stash licenses. Having an issue tracker is going to be way nicer than trying to load the whole of a project into my brain whenever I get a chance to work on things.

Another cool thing I discovered is that Confluence now has Evernote integration. Damn it’s good to be an Atlassian Gangsta.

Dirty Tricksy Sneaky Sneaks!

I swear that some folks I work with believe in their heart of hearts that my teammates and I spend our days randomly futzing with the configuration of things. They encounter a behavior they don’t expect and–boom–“why did you guys change $THING?”

$THING has remained unchanged ever since we set $THING up for $SPECIAL_GUY. Nothing has changed. Nothing.

Except that it is about half an hour later than when $SPECIAL_GUY interrupted me in the first place. But at least I know that $SPECIAL_GUY now understands that time is linear and that an event watcher cannot retroactively watch for an event in the past. Well, at least I hope $SPECIAL_GUY understands this. I’m not holding my breath however.

Better than anticipated

Back in the day I’d digitize stuff by taking audio off my receiver and run it into the audio-in on my computer. I was lazy the other day and decided I wanted to try to pull sound directly off the sound card. And that’s how I found Audio-Recorder [1]. It’s easy enough to install and I was able to pull sound directly off the sound card. Nice.

Then I started playing with the Source configuration. It detected all of the expected /dev foo coming off my audio card. Then I noticed it also detected RhythmBox and Spotify as audio sources. I accidentally left it configured to Spotify and wandered off.

This evening I was listening to They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln [2] album on Spotify on my phone. I was rocking out to Mr. Me when I got home so transferred my Spotify session to my workstation downstairs. Bigger and better speakers, the better to share with Elizabeth. That was well and good.

After dinner and then some time sitting out in the rain with my lurvly bride I went down to the Man Cave and started puttering around–listening to the rest of Lincoln on Spotify. I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye that the system tray icon for audio-recorder was glowing. So I opened the app, and lo, it is dutifully recording songs off Spotify as I play them. And stuffing the resulting files full of metadata. And organizing them by track name inside folders for each artist. Didn’t even ask it to do this for me.

Brain asplode! I can own the entire Spotify catalog by doing nothing more than queuing songs up and playing them 24/7. At least until I run out of disk. And now I’m one happy Fezster.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~osmoma/+archive/ubuntu/audio-recorder
[2] http://tmbw.net/wiki/Lincoln

Boring old man stuff

Here’s a question I never thought I’d have to ask: Why do medical-grade, 30-40mmhg compression stockings have to be so bland? All of the boring ‘B’ colors are represented; black, beige, and navy blue. They do have white for the dashing, athletic types, but that’s it–and–whitey tighties for legs? Ick.

I would be way more likely to wear the damn things if I could have plaid, or argyle, or striped, or Jackson Pollock styled socks. I want crazy colors and wacky designs. I’m not embarrassed by needing the damn things, I’m embarrassed because they’re all designed to hide embarrassment. Screw that. I wrecked my circulation skateboarding and I want something that celebrates that. Throw some skulls and anarchy symbols on those babies. Tie dyed ’em and decorate them with dancing bears. Cammo print them in green, blue, or orange colors. Something! Anything!

You do this for flimsy, whinging athletes and their “performance” stockings and sleeves. Why not for those of us who actually need serious calf-squeezing augmentation to keep us from karking it due to DVTs?

So, medical equipment fuddy-duddies out there, fix this shit. Stat.