Miéville on Tolkien
Hell freezes over: China Miéville (better known for excoriating Tolkien in the past) has a piece out with 5 reasons Tolkien rocks. Money quote: “Tolk gives good monster”.
(Also, if you haven’t already, go read Miéville’s new book The City and the City. Now.)
Useful Windows Shortcuts: Win+B
Lifehacker recently pointed to a very useful new Windows 7 shortcut that vertically maximizes windows — really useful on laptops with 800 pixels or less of vertical real estate.
In that spirit, here’s another useful “shortcut”: Win+B gives focus to the “show hidden icons” button on the system tray.
This works on Windows XP and Vista as well, but is especially useful on Windows 7 because 7 corrals tray icons into their own box, where they’re not easily visible.
After pressing Win+B, press Enter to reveal the hidden icons and press the cursor keys to cycle through them (caveat, the highlight effect is really quite subtle on the RC and easy to miss).
Installing Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope on a Sony Vaio
Installing Linux on laptops still isn’t as easy as it should be. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 (”Jaunty”) on a Sony Vaio today, only to find that
- WiFi — on an Atheros AR242x controller — was working, but very slowly. I got no more than 23-80kB/sec on a 12Mb/sec connection, and frequently got as little as 1 kB/sec.
- Video effects weren’t supported on the Intel GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (they were supported on Vista and Windows 7) because of a known bug.
I fixed the wifi by using the Windows driver for the Atheros AR242x with ndiswrapper as described here. (Although the page says Jaunty doesn’t have this problem, it did.)
The video effects were fixed by following this thread from UbuntuForums.
Looks like the year of Linux on the desktop/laptop is still a few years off.
Google UK as a Search Provider in Firefox and IE
The default Google search built into Firefox (at least in British builds) goes off to google.com and is then redirected to google.co.uk. Problem is, sometimes the redirection stops working and it stays with google.com — usually clearing cookies solves this problem. This means you lose the benefits of country-specific search. Installing this Google UK Search Provider will make sure that searches from the Firefox search bar go to Google UK every time. Also works with IE 8 (and any browser that supports OpenSearchDescription files).
Using the Flickr API with Python’s FlickrAPI
Python FlickrAPI is an easy-to-use library for accessing Flickr from Python apps. Here’s a simple app prints the thumbnail URL for a photo, give a list of photo URLs.
The Perils of Grammatical Gender
At lunch a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of doctoral students and postdocs what the gender of Schorle is. Much inconclusive discussion resulted. For one postdoc they’re both feminine (die Apfelschorle, die Weinschorle); for another, they’re both neuter (das Apfelschorle, das Weinschorle); and still another has die Apfelschorle but das Weinschorle. The German Wikipedia, de.wikipedia.org, says that the term Schorle, in a different formation, dates back to the 18th century, and that the word is feminine, except in southern Germany — where Freiburg is — where occasionally, rarely, it is neuter.
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Visions in the Tundra
Michael Lewis has an excellent, long (16 pages) article about Iceland in Vanity Fair — Wall Street on the Tundra (via Paul Kedrosky). Read it all:
…you can’t help but notice something really strange about it: the people have cultivated themselves to the point where they are unsuited for the work available to them. All these exquisitely schooled, sophisticated people, each and every one of whom feels special, are presented with two mainly horrible ways to earn a living: trawler fishing and aluminum smelting. … At the dawn of the 21st century, Icelanders were still waiting for some task more suited to their filigreed minds to turn up inside their economy so they might do it. Enter investment banking.
And don’t miss the little gem about Iceland’s huldufolk (hidden people) tucked away in there:
[Iceland's President] Olafur Ragnar Grimsson theorizes that the surfeit of spirit-beings stems from Icelanders’ abiding sense of loneliness and isolation … Public opinion polls and academic studies show more than half of all inhabitants think it possible or probable — 10 percent call it “certain” — they share their island with otherly beings, ranging from grumpy glacier-dwelling trolls to occasionally gregarious hidden people. … Earlier this year, Iceland’s highway agency had to change the course of a new road leading out of Reykjavik after citizens protested that the original route would disturb an elf’s lair under a big rock. “There are people who believe in elves, and we try to show respect for people’s beliefs,” said Viktor Ingolfsson, an official of the department. “If that means building around an elf stone, we try to accommodate.”
As superstitions go, huldufolk are pretty innocuous. But you have to wonder if the commonplace acceptance of illusory beings made it slightly easier for them to believe in illusory wealth.
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“Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.
She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons – because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin. … She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that ‘We Shall Overcome.’
A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.
America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do.”
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Not as Annoying
Windows 7 wins a ringing endorsement from MSNBC: “Next Windows won’t be as annoying”.
Jokes apart, Microsoft tends to do lousy .0 releases and very good .1 releases. And Windows 7 == v6.1. Who knows, maybe I won’t have to switch to Ubuntu after all.
