Fugato

Another thing I dislike: when computers make people wait for them.

[If you do not use the Firefox browser, this won't be interesting to you]

The SwitchProxy extension, if you have it installed, does an automatic update check when Firefox starts up.

That’s fine, except it is apparently done on the main startup thread or something, because it blocks Firefox completely until it finishes. That’s pretty bad when, as today, the SwitchProxy website is timing out. Firefox is effectively paralyzed for several minutes after you start it up.

Solution: Tools -> SwitchProxy -> Preferences, uncheck “Notify me of updates.”

Whoops. Jeremy, you’ll want to fix that! :)

One thing I dislike: when people make others wait for them.

But that’s just a mild dislike in general. I hate it when I’m the one guilty of it. Which has been happening a lot recently.

I’ve had a couple of hectic projects at work lately, with frequent context switches and frequent changes in requirements, so there are always people waiting for my stuff for longer than they should have to wait.

And now I sent an email to all my students saying they shouldn’t expect their grades before New Year’s Eve; they took the exam on Dec 21 and I haven’t had time to finish grading it.

Gaah, that sucks! Sorry folks!

[Warning: this post is in technese; if you don't maintain a WordPress install, you will probably not be interested.]

I finally upgraded my WordPress installation to WordPress 1.2.2, something I’ve been putting off because I had made a bunch of code modifications in my installation that I knew would conflict with the upgrade, and I was too lazy to do the merge.

My laziness didn’t subside; I just installed the new Gentoo ebuild for WordPress without intending to update my live web with it just yet, and whoops, it updated my live web automatically. (To avoid that, you need to set the vhosts USE flag — lesson learned). So my blog was broken. To fix it, I did the upgrade to 1.2.2, and in the process cleaned up my code modifications in the form of a proper patch.

WordPress admins may be interested in the patch; it wraps HTTPS around the admin interface and the login and registration pages. So readers access the blog and post comments through plain HTTP, but writers go through HTTPS when sending their password and performing administrative functions. This decreases the possibility of a visit from the internet bogeyman. It may be unnecessary, but I did not feel like proving that to myself. And there may be better ways to do it, but I didn’t bother to sit and ponder them. Lazy, remember.

Get it here: wordpress-1.2.2-httpsify.patch. And please send any suggestions or corrections my way.

Yes, I work in marketing now.

I’ve been a techie since before I can remember.

• I wrote a program for drawing on the TV screen with a joystick, on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum when I was 10.
• For the past four-and-a-half years (and for three of the four summers before that) I’ve been working full-time as a programmer (or software engineer, when I want to sound fancy, although engines are rarely involved).
• I have an MS in electrical engineering.
• I read dozens of software development blogs.
• I write software for fun in my spare time.
• I run a webserver for myself and several friends.
• On my home computer I use Gentoo linux, not Windows.
• I read Dilbert, chuckling in a particularly gleeful oh-how-deliciously-superior-I-am way whenever marketing stereotypes are featured.
• I’m sitting at home blogging at 6pm on Dec 23, when I should be in a panic-stricken shopping spree in a mall somewhere.

But I took a job at the web department of a bank in the beginning of this year. And today this web department was merged into the marketing department.

To my loyal readers: happy holidays, both of you. If you need me, I’ll be over here in the Identity Crisis Counselling corner, working on this.

☺

A couple (triple?) of interesting things:

• Two instances of Christian Psychosis:
  • a Psychosis Lite™ instance (most likely harmless), and
  • an all-out cuckoo case (wouldn’t want this guy near me without proper precautions.)
• The etymology, polysemous uses and sociolinguistic significance of the word “dude.”

Two things.

First, among all the different kinds of things I’ve undertaken in my life, writing an exam is the second least enjoyable one. The least enjoyable one is grading an exam. I’ve just finished writing one, and the joy of having finished that task is, as usual, overshadowed by the dread of having to grade it real soon.

[Sweeping generalizations are fun. If writing or grading an exam is the worst experience of my life, I guess I'm doing fairly well. It isn't, of course. Any day now I'm sure I'll get slapped in the face with something far more brutal than writing or grading an exam, and I'll get the above statement shoved right back in my face. But I'll let it stand for now.]

Second, I’m deeply worried about the integrity of my food finickiness — in particular, my olive antipathy. Today I tried eating olives — both in a salad and by themselves — and I completely failed to feel disgusted.

Maybe they were just unusually dull-tasting olives, devoid of that usual level of objectionableness that I’ve come to expect from my periodic give-olives-another-chance-although-you-know-how-it-will-end charade. Maybe my taste buds just happened to flake out at the same time. But I can’t shake off the fear that an integral part of me, a chunk of the core of my very being, is on the brink of being lost forever.

The other day it was sushi. Long back, it was coffee, and even further back, red and white wines. If I had gotten into the habit, way back in the day, of betting against various hardly-edibles and hardly-potables in inverse proportion to my perceived probability of ever consuming them, I would be bankrupt many times over already.

I suppose it is about time to start accepting that eventually, in some arcane twist of psychological development, I shall end up liking sun-dried tomatoes.

On that day, I will not have lost a battle. I will have lost the war. This new Gulli has been insidiously infiltrating my mind for years. At that point, he will have taken over.

Feel free to call me a geek for liking these:

• Google can make suggestions as you type — are their servers not busy enough?
• Aurora photos — at our latitude, who needs hallucinogenic drugs?
• BioMotionLab "Walker" — How Do You Want To Walk Today?

The happy couple. Don’t mind the Clint-Eastwood-at-high-noon look. He just has the sun in his eyes. He is not at all planning to kick your ass.

This blog entry has less to do with Mauritius than with what my sister Dóra and her (then) boyfriend Jón Ívar did there a couple of weeks ago.

They went there for a conference and a holiday, and came back husband and wife.

Planned it for months, didn’t tell anyone, just went ahead and wed on the beach, and then got back and dealt us all a classic “oh, by the way…”

Cool!

They’ll do a ceremony and party here at home too, so that friends and relatives don’t miss out. But sneaking away to a romantic remote outpost and tying the proverbial knot before anyone knew — that agrees with me somehow :)

And Jón Ívar has my unreserved approval. The finest black-belt ob/gyn nice-guy I know. That’s some range, folks: he can kick people’s asses and deliver people’s babies. These two sets of people hopefully do not overlap much. And if either one (ass-kicking or childbirth) causes grievous bodily harm, he can patch it up afterwards with laparoscopic reconstructive pelvic surgery too. A man of action, but also a man who tidies up after himself. A man to my liking.

But of course he is. My sister ain’t no fool.

Firefighters battle the flame of the loins of an intimidatingly tall Indian woman by instructing her to assume the Salamba Sarvangasana pose, known to relieve tension.

And they say Indian women are reserved and conservative…

Indian firefighters have no idea as to how to react to strange phone calls from young ladies asking them to ‘extinguish the flame of their loins.’
[...]
… be it day or night, the content of the message remains the same: ‘Can you extinguish any sort of fire? What about the fire of passion inside of me? Come quickly, I am all on fire.’

Original story — from the one and only Pravda, sort of.