(And now, a cathartic "I hate this company and I am never patronizing them again, please don't either" post. I should have done ones for at least Speakeasy/Covad and IBM's server division last year. Ah well.) I went to go register a new domain yesterday (announcement soon! Probably this weekend). I've been using Joker for a while, IIRC on the principle that the cooks were using it so it must be decent enough. While registering, I had a bunch of problems with the horrid, useless "Verified by Visa" popup [1] that you see everywhere these days, and eventually this must have looked like suspicious activity to the bank so my card was declined. I only actually found this out when I got mail saying my order was canceled. Okay, sure. I wrote back and explained what I thought was going on and that I'd like to resolve it. Another half hour later, I got this response:

Hello,
please use
   https://joker.com/goto/support/
for all support inquiries.
Regards, your Joker.com team

This is complete and utter bullshit [2]. If a company is going to mail me, I expect to be able to mail them. I have a mail client; it manages communication the way I want it to, and runs my preferred editor to compose messages (which is, in fact, how I am writing this very blog post). I am sick of dicking around on JavaScript-requiring web forms that all work differently and typing in postage-stamp-sized little textareas. Anything I do type in them is lost, because unlike my email client, web forms don't save sent messages unless the authors feel like letting you have a Cc:. When a company forces me to do this, I take it as a sign of disrespect. I tolerate a web browser [3] for reading pages; "applications" are universally painful [4]. One of the things I used to like about Joker was the PGP mail interface. AFAIK, they have not killed it (I didn't bother to check), but with automatic "we don't want to listen to you unless you inconvenience yourself" bounces like this, what's the point? I surmise that there is, or was, some smart person there who understood how (and more to the point, why) to hook a pseudo-mailbox up to a software system, and that they have been overridden by someone in management who realized it's much easier to have dime-a-dozen webmonkeys hook a form up to the same system since 90% of users just don't care (and even people who do notice and dislike this, but are not as inflamed as I, have come to expect it because everyone else refuses mail, so, y'know, pick yr battles son, etc.). Not the sort of culture I put faith my in. The irony of it all was that I was registering this domain to run a service I had decided to create specifically because of another site refusing mail and directing me to an even lamer web form. That would take incoming mail and, you know... process it with software. Suffice it to say, I am no longer going to be their customer. In deciding who to use instead, I figured I'd do a survey of where the domains in that "Subscription" column [5] on Planet Debian were registered, but... WHOIS is basically useless. Every server just returns free text, formatted differently by (apparently) every implementation under the sun. Cheaply parsing something out from .com/.org/.net is possible, but InterNIC kindly blacklists your IP after making more than a few requests in a few minutes. I guess I'm just gonna go with Gandi (but other suggestions would be welcome). In somewhat unrelated developments, I went to nic.at to update my nameservers for Where the Bus At? last week. There was no authentication or anything on the request form, so I just filled it in and sent it off. I got some automatic mail saying I need to print out a PDF, sign it, and fax it internationally. Annoying, and hardly as secure as mailing them with PGP, but whatever. But then, also yesterday, I got another mail saying the update was complete (lo and behold, it was). I am now somewhat concerned about the security of my domain: it seems like anyone can come by and put something in the form and if I'm not around to notice the courtesy mail and ask that they stop the request, it'll eventually go through, no questions asked. I have not yet written them to figure out what the deal is, though. Kinda burned out. I guess I didn't really have high hopes for dealing directly with a ccTLD registrar (this was the first time I've done it... I can't believe I blew 60 on a cutesy domain name) rather than a reseller who competes in a market, but then, I go and google "domain registrar" and look at all the AdWords dollars spent trying to compete with GoDaddy [6] and just kind of want to put my head in my hands. On DJB's DNS pages there's this bit about setting up a domain. It doesn't say "How to (buy register whatever) a domain name". It says, "How to receive a delegation from .com". Which is of course, how it works. And what I want to buy. I don't want "parking" or even gratis nameservers. Just a delegation from .com. Please. No AdWords came up when I googled for that phrase to copy the link. Sometimes I guess markets just sink to the bottom. Anyway. I feel like there's a free-software angle here. My continuing irrational hatred of using other people's forms, web-based mailing-list substitutes, nameservers, etc. stems not so much from their suckage but from the fact that there is no longer any software there, in front of me, for the four freedoms to possibly apply to. Being able to run your mail reader for any purpose doesn't win you much if no one uses mail. I don't really know what to do about this.

[1]

It was only twelve dollars! If I go to hipster market or some other place with brand-new POS systems they don't even make me sign a paper slip for less than $20 or so. But this is the sort of thing dreamed up by people who think good security is setting a cookie to denote that I've answered "what was your first dog's name" or whatever. IF YOU WANT TO BREAK INTO MY BANK ACCOUNTS: I've set the answer to every single one of these questions to "security theater". Easy to remember.

[2]	Not to mention a glaringly RESTless URI.

[3]

Also, as a rule I normally try not to have anything up on my desktop that I can't close and re-open at any time, thanks to screen, MPD, emacsclient, actually using my browser's bookmark function and resisting the lure of tab-bar.js, etc. Web browsers are supposed to suck at preserving state; HTTP is stateless. See also here (and for further reading on that in the Haskell world, check out Yi. I'm hoping to switch to it someday).

[4]	Debbugs, for example, may not have the slickest interface, but if I want to do flags, labels, archiving, threading, or whatever, I can; I'm not at the mercy of some front-end web developer. But we've all heard this litany before.

[5]	Thanks, Hpricot!

[6]	Even if GoDaddy's customer service were completely hacker-friendly, I would not use them, because their president Hates America.

There was a lot of political talk last week in the US about this guy "Joe the Plumber". I'm really quite mystified by the (lack of) Democratic response to this one; it seems like a perfect opportunity for the Dems to explain what their ideals actually mean, after years of complete inarticulacy. The Republican party, and conservatives in general, have somehow successfully sold their platform of, as Robert Reich brilliantly put it on the Daily Show last week, "socialism for the rich and capitalism for everyone else", to poor but socially-conservative citizens for quite some time. They've convinced people to vote against their economic self-interest, and cut taxes on the rich instead of themselves. Is voting for policies that directly benefit you less necessarily bad? I don't think so. In many cases, selflessness and altruism are better in the long run. Conservative economic policies speak to a sense of right and wrong that give people a feeling of purpose, and so an incentive to create: this is mine, I made it, you can't take it away. In a theoretical sense, leaving more wealth in the hands of the rich should "trickle down" to society in general, by providing more capital, and thus creating jobs, etc. However, I do not believe that this is why Americans, specifically, tend to support conservative economic policy. The USA has this idea of the "American Dream", pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, if you will, and striking it rich through hard work and character. It's advantageous for conservatives to sell this idea because it makes people think "tax the rich? What if I get rich?", which is a sort of enlightened self-interest, arguably. And it gets poor people to vote for them. What makes this "plumber" thing interesting to me is that is should demonstrate where this approach ought to fall down, logically and emotionally. But it does not. Here is the problem. A working stiff who earns "five figures", such as myself, generally makes that money by going to an employer every day, performing some services for them, and then drawing a paycheck. Where this money comes from is abstracted away (this is the marvelous thing we call "business"). Let's say you want to sell the "American Dream" to this person. They get their paycheck every week, and there's a chunk taken out of it by Uncle Sam. Maybe they're saving up to start a business, or go to college, etc. They sure could do it faster if taxes weren't so high. So you remind them this: when you do strike it rich (since this is America, where anyone can strike it rich), do you want those taxes to be even greater? This story contains a lie of omission, probably the greatest lie ever told in US politics, and one that has almost universally succeeded as far back as I can remember. And that is: when you do make that jump to where our hypothetical Joe is, making just over a quarter-million dollars, that it's not going to look any different. You'll get your paycheck from some abstracted source, just like before, but more will be taken out unless we stop raising taxes on those higher income brackets. There will be some node higher up in the tree for that wealth to "trickle down" from; you could say it's implied, even, that wealth is created at the root and destroyed at the leaves. What's wrong here? Simple: a self-employed plumber does not have a paycheck, except maybe to him/herself for accounting purposes. They collect their income in the form of payments from customers. They don't have an abstraction: they hire more labor and become the abstraction. If their customers have no money, the abstraction leaks, their employees have to be laid off (and then can no longer afford plumbing services themselves). The success of the plumber depends as much on how many people are able to pay them as it does on his costs (such as taxes). We want to make sure those customers can still pay. This is, in theory terms, the idea of demand-side or Keynesian economics. (Not really exactly. I took about two econ courses. But bear with me for a moment.) Now, you can argue demand-side vs. what we would call supply-side economics, which is the idea that no, first you have to stop taxing Joe so he can hire people so they have money to go buy things, for ages. People have made whole careers out of it. I am not here to do that. What I am here to wonder out loud is: why is this argument not happening, now, in our public sphere? Even if only as a small plot point in one Presidential campaign? There are very good arguments for both sides (I agree with the Keynesians, myself), and they should be what this debate is about, not digging up dirt on some guy whose real name, horrors, might not be "Joe" or protests about all those you-know-what poor people getting "government giveaways" that are disturbingly close to racism in my opinion. When I turn on talk radio I hear zombies, unable to string together any thought more complicated than "Democrat == higher taxes on everyone" (which would be depressing even if the claim were true). It begins to get unsettling when you understand your opponent's argument, and yet watch them completely unable to articulate it. When they deal with this by appealing to fear and thought-killing sound bites, it gets alarming. Obama has backpedaled whenever the whole issue has come up. In the last debate, he was saved by merely shutting up and letting out enough rope for McCain to hang himself. Not very inspiring. As a result I hear repetitions of Obama's phrase "spread the wealth around" constantly met on the airwaves with... silence. He won't touch it, and honestly, I can't blame him for not wanting to fan the flames of class warfare with only two more weeks left to stick it out. But I don't understand why, and why a single person on the left hasn't had the faith that this idea can be discussed in our society. I think that, whichever side you are rooting for (and yeah, I am for the Democrats), the Democrats should have won this point readily. Not to belabor the point, but it really amazes me that they have not. It wouldn't have taken much. Here's what you do: go to Wherever, OH with your crack PR team and find several of "Joe the Plumber"s customers. Interview them all. A few of them are, in this economy, going to be really hurting. If you're lucky: Remember that Joe owes taxes to the IRS. Very possibly, someone owes Joe money! That would be a coup. You just put them in front of the media and the whole thing sells itself. Mary needs to make these repairs... if only her tax credit were larger... etc. This would not settle the argument, by any means, especially not for political junkies. But it would begin it. We could talk about policy, whether one way of "spreading" things will result in more wealth to spread than another, instead of red-baiting. I feel a bit ripped off that we haven't even gotten that much. The theory part is pretty much irrelevant to most people; that's fine. But they deserve context. I can only assume that my ("my") party is still either terrified or stupid. I hope winning the Presidency changes that somewhat. That whole right and wrong, purpose, "noble cause" thing, right? Right, guys?

Seems like it's been ages since I've been able to do this (probably because it has!): I've released a brand-new piece of software. Njiiri is a client for MPD, using GTK+, written in Ruby. I don't see a lot of desktop apps out there using Ruby, so this was a new and fun experience for me. I've tried to make it as "boring" as possible, in the sense of looking vaguely like a proper, HIG-compliant GNOME app, with (appropriately) no pointless configuration knobs. The browser, in particular, is a mostly pixel-for-pixel clone of the standard file-open dialog. And it's accessed by a big toolbar button with a stock "Open" icon. Basically, if desktop software makes me think ("oh, I'm in iTunes, all the controls work differently, let's adjust our approach"), it's failed. For me, anyway. So, I'm pretty happy with the direction I'm going (even though I'm very much not there yet. I haven't hooked up search, for example). One of the things I like about MPD is that it gives me the freedom to remove things if I want to. And I like removing things; small is beautiful. For example, I originally had no place to stick a crossfading control in, so I was going to just dump it. If you need it, "mpc crossfade" is a terminal away. (It turned out that it did eventually fit nicely into my layout. I'm a bit obsessive about aesthetics.) In a similar way, I've avoided duplicating anything I do with homegrown scripts or mpdtoys; there's just no need. What I want out of a GUI frontend is a sort-of tangible way to manipulate things when I feel like looking at them visually for a bit. Then I close it and move on. MPD certainly isn't the most wonderful implementation of a system which allows that, but the client ecosystem is quite diverse and I'd say it deserves a look if any of this sounds interesting to you.

In related news: with sup out of the way, I have returned to packaging Mnemosyne, the program that powers this blog. It is also in NEW, so expect to see it soon. (Like sup, which is packaged as sup-mail since sup is the Software Update Protocol, it is mnemosyne-blog since mnemosyne is the program formerly known as PyQt MemAid.) If you're just joining us, Mnemosyne compiles a Maildir into a static site. You can use it for a blog or just about anything else where a traditional CMS would be overkill. It's all XML and Python-extensible. The documentation kind of sucks, though, so I'm also hoping I get some more users from this to tell me what to fix. It hasn't otherwise seen much action since the beginning of 2006. Drop me a line if you have any feedback! (If it's not obvious, I think blog "comments" in general are pretty worthless. But with some craftiness, they could certainly be implemented within Mnemosyne as it stands. As could a general mailing list archive, etc...)

After some weeks of final testing, I've just uploaded packages for sup-mail to NEW. I'm pretty excited about this. Sup is a console-based MUA, like mutt (which I have used for many years). A few things distinguish it from most mail readers targeted at geeks like us:

• Sup has no folders, a la Gmail. After watching many friends and even fellow hackers switch to Gmail, I have to admit: this literal hierarchical organization thing doesn't scale. I was planning to totally redo my mail folder system Any Day Now for about six months prior to starting on this. It was never going to happen.
• Sup uses a Ferret full-text index to make this approach plausible. Search is super fast and beats (for me) both any kind of "organization" I could have disciplined myself into and the fine-grained control of something like mutt's search. It's sort of like git: until you do it, you don't realize how much more productive you can be when previously-expensive operations become instantaneous.
• Sup works with threads, not messages; this is another thing Gmail got right. I used to waste brain cells thinking about which messages in a thread were worthwhile enough to save or not. Given the absurdly cheap price of disk relative to what we can type out in plain text since, like, a decade ago, this is crazy. In the index, I only have to look at whether a thread has new chatter or not, not its size, shape, or where the new messages are relative to it. All that's in the thread-view buffer where I actually read content.
• Sup is written in Ruby. Back in the dawn of time, I used Gnus, and while I wasn't very good at elisp, the hackability afforded by being written in a high-level language was very nice compared to programs mostly implemented in C (even if they had a tacked-on scripting language). Plus, I love Ruby right now.

Despite all of those wins, sup currently has many drawbacks, and I don't recommend it for everyone. (And I mean everyone who thinks that the above are good ideas and are interested in using it; plenty of people, I'm sure, already think everything about this is idiotic, not new, or inferior to their preferred MUA. That's fine! You can ignore it all.) Here's what's still problematic:

• At version 0.6, sup is very much not-yet-1.0. While it handles insanely large amounts of email without breaking a sweat, I still keep an additional backup of everything. (If Ferret crashes, the original copies of mail will be untouched, but it never hurts to be paranoid.)
• The flow of data from your physical mail store to the sup index is currently one-way only. Actually removing deleted/spam messages is a big hack (if it works at all), and labels/flags/etc live entirely in Ferret-land. If you want to manipulate an actual mailbox, mutt is still the tool for the job (and then, you need to re-sync sup). This is probably the deal-breaker for most of us. I jumped in anyway because I feel like it can be solved (or more likely, made irrelevant) later.
• William (upstream) is currently re-designing the whole thing from scratch, replacing the index library with Sphinx, and decoupling the index from the console frontend. As a result, the previous item is pretty much a non-priority (and bugs in general are not going to get the same amount of love as usual). I am hoping that we end up dumping mail into the index directly, then writing more frontends to write to Maildir backup, serve as webmail/whatever, but this is a long way off. On the plus side, thanks to Thrift, they will not be limited to Ruby.
• Ruby's ncurses library still doesn't handle Unicode correctly. It can be patched (still doesn't work totally right), but I'm trying to find a more permanent solution for Debian.

So, if you're interested enough that you want to deal with these warts for now, apt-get install sup-mail (as soon as it hits the archive) and join us! Hopefully being in Debian will increase the userbase and get things fixed faster. If you're unsure, stay tuned for the next-generation version later. (There are screenshots and a few introductory docs over at Rubyforge that illustrate and explain all this in more depth, which I recommend checking out if you're still saying, "...huh." Me, I'm a sucker for any piece of software with a manifesto.)

"Obama had the additional skill of criticizing George W. Bush."

Basically: yes. And that's what passes for politics over here, folks. Sorry about your economies and all that.

So today I recieved another batch of backscatter spam (it comes in waves; my email address will forever be on these lists). Normally there are several rejections from mailing lists where only subscribers can post, etc. But this time:

The following lines in your email message did not appear to be
Lyris ListManager commands and were skipped:
> unsubscribe confirm
>  -> You did not specify a valid mailing list name to unsubscribe from.

Disturbing. Now they're trying to take me off legit mailing lists! Perhaps they think I won't notice and it'll reduce the amount of ham I have for my Bayesian filter. Little do they know I'm still subscribed to -devel :-)

This is is a wonderful metaphor: "looking in the fridge every few minutes and hoping that something tasty will appear". I may be thick, but Planet does not appear to store any information about how often a feed ought to be polled (my blog seems to be hit every 20 minutes even when I'm AWOL). I use rawdog, which does. When adding a feed, I make a vague guess at how often I want to poll it, and then periodically adjust the time based on how often updates actually happened. This is done with a terrible, awful, ugly hack that reads the database[1] and spits out the config file with new-and-improved times. Pretty dumb, but good enough "for now" (apparently I haven't touched it in over a year). rawdog will also automatically update feed locations if given a 301. Since it already rewrites the config for that, I might try to merge time updating into the core someday, but no one has demanded such a feature AFAIK.

[1]	And by "database", I mean "pickle", since Adam doesn't want any fancy dependencies. Despite how slow this ought to be, the combination of optimized (such as it is) feed-polling and ever-faster CPUs in my web servers have made it fast enough for me not to care.

$ hg ci
abort: cannot commit over an applied mq patch
$ hg qpop
abort: local changes found, refresh first

Obviously, I just need to RTFM, but I still find this amusing in an existential sort of way. (If I write a replacement for mq, please shoot me. I have too many things to do already.)

I've seen this before, and I'm sure a million people have blogged it, but it never stops being funny: Lambdacats. (thanks to Nikolas Coukouma on Twitter)

New Filco keyboard! Do want. (There is a good explanation of mechanical keyswitches at ErgoCanada. This is a "light tactile" board. Opinions, as they say, will vary.) I may be just a little too into this. My girlfriend laughed at me when I actually bit my lip upon determining firsthand that the ICA had aquired, for their iMac-populated computer lab, 20 or so of the out-of-production tactile version of another particular keyboard I'd been coveting. But I couldn't help it. (Don't worry. We laugh at each other a lot.)

Debian shall soon have a Conkeror package, thanks to Axel Beckert who takes a minute to break down the current keymap. Naturally, you have to poke fun at vi users here. But wait! I am a vi user! What can I say, except maybe

1. Emacs (the rudiments, anyway) is like riding a bicycle
2. When I say vi, i mean vile, not vim. vim gives me hives. vile is teh awesome.

I am working on a set of vile-ish bindings, and I can't say I feel any pressing need to stick hjkl in. You could start from there, but that's missing the point, I think. (You know what's also awesome? My email is still down, so I won't even have to delete flames from people who take their choice of editor/browser Very Seriously until sometime tomorrow.)

I spent some time banging my head against SSL certificate stuff this weekend in the hopes of implementing a Really Awesome Solution to this awful Firefox security theater thing everyone was complaining about, but I didn't get anywhere. However, I noticed something interesting: Mozilla does not trust the CAcert root certificate. A number of useful sites, like Freedesktop.org's bug tracker, use a CAcert-signed certificate rather than a self-signed one. I really know nothing about this organization, but they seem to have their stuff together, and if you run a largish free software project, you could potentially save a lot of people the trouble of checking yet another self-signing CA. Around the lab, or in one of my tiny projects, I don't think I'd bother, but it is free. Anyway, we ship their root CA thing in Debian, and OpenSSL stuff picks it up fine. Mozilla's process is somewhat more mysterious. There's an apparently hardcoded list of the usual thugs from the Verisign/Thawte/etc protection racket, and then there's a database in each user profile for whack-a-mole stuff. There is not, shockingly enough, somewhere for an operating system to set system certificate policy. (I guess there is not much room for an operating system in the Mozilla world-view at all). So you have to shove it in there once for every user times every single profile. Here is the command to do it.

1. apt-get install libnss3-tools
2. certutil -d $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$HLAGHLLAGHGAAHLGALHHGHLAGH.default -A -n 'CA Cert Signing Authority - Root CA' -t CT,C,C -i /etc/ssl/certs/root.pem

It's only slight pain relief, but it's something. You can also not install certutil, and click through ten million dialog boxes to import it, but screw that. UPDATE: A commenter points me to StartSSL, another service that may deserve a look here, and is on Mozilla's good side. It appears to be an unholy mix of things that sound awesome (client-side certs for OpenID, web-of-trust identification) and things that seriously skeeve me out (trademark symbols everywhere, Aladdin dongles). They, uh, also have a Linux distribution. No, really. UPDATE 2: James Andrewartha points out that we should eventually see Mozilla move this stuff out of libnssckbi.so and into SQLite, which sounds like a big win for us. Hopefully before that time I will figure out how to get sqlite(1) to work on my cookies.

I always feel like tar ought to say:

tar: data.tar.gz: inconceivable time stamp 1969-12-31 19:00:00

But it never does.

So I always knew that my ThinkPad's display sucked. But now I have scientific proof! (Long-winded post about my job follows.) I was running some timing tests at work on the code for a psychology experiment. This involves quickly presenting a stimulus to the subject, then measuring reaction time and synchronizing with EEG readings. Nothing very complicated, but accurate timing is essential; you don't want another variable confounding your results. So I have this photocell device that sends a signal to a Mac through the EEG hardware when there is really actually physical light coming off of the screen, not just when I told the computer to display something. Now CRTs, of course, are actually scanning (with an electron gun) the display at 75 or 85 Hz or something, not constantly pumping out light to the whole screen. This means 12 or 13 (or whatever) ms between refreshes. So if you want something to appear for 100 ms, you have to fudge a little, and make it so that you get maybe 8 or 9 scans. You can synchronize your presentation to the refresh so this is feasible. But how long the subject really perceives it ultimately depends on how "flickery" the monitor is at a given refresh rate. LCDs, on the other hand, do not have this problem. They actually do produce light constantly -- their refresh rate is pretty much always only 60 Hz or less, but you get the same(ish) output over the entire cycle, instead of in blips that give the illusion of a constant image (in fact, as Matthew points out, they can continue to hold the same image for even longer periods between refreshes. Can't wait to try out that patch). And luckily for us, 6 cycles are in theory exactly 100 ms (in practice, it's close enough). Or so I thought. I could not, no matter how many times I banged my head against it, get consistent results between our laptop (also a ThinkPad) and any external display. For reasons I do not entirely understand (probably scheduling issues), on CRTs I was getting one extra cycle, so I had to reduce the time by one to compensate. This was done for published studies years before I arrived at the lab, so (for the sake of not introducing additional variables) there is an extremely large disincentive to go back and fix it the Right Way, whatever that is. Our laptop's internal display was producing results that were skewed like those of a CRT. I thought for a minute I was going nuts from testing all day, but it kept happening. Curious, I swapped out the lab's T60 for my faster T61 and (to rule anything else out) killed all my other processes and wrote a fresh PyEPL script that did nothing but repeatedly blink some text for 100 ms. Here is, on the external VGA port, a cheap old 15" Dell LCD I pulled from the server room: (These images are from the Mac, which is still using System 9.something. I had to remember Command-Shift-3 to take a screenshot and use StuffIt to get them off of it. Srsly. I can't remember the last time I used StuffIt.) And here is a CRT, showing the refreshes: (The DIN3 line is the actual signal, and the others are integrated over some number of milliseconds to compensate for scanning and attempt to get a usable number. Of course, this is done in hardware, not synchronized to anything else.) Now, this is the one that blew my mind. The ThinkPad's internal LCD: You can see that 60 Hz is spaced much farther apart, and that there are 6 cycles as intended, but. It's acting like a CRT! On the refresh, it puts out enough light to trigger the photocell, but inbetween, nothing. I ought to be noticing flicker and/or getting headaches all the time, if this is truly the case. (I guess I did get glasses for and because of staring at computer displays all the time. Should update my hackergotchi.) I have to admit I do not understand what is going on here at all. But it seems like making any assumptions about a display is (as the voice in my head was telling me all along) a very bad idea. Perhaps someone can email me some clue. But at least I have some hard data to validate my subjective opinion of the ThinkPad's internal LCD. Anyway: I still recommend the ThinkPad, even if the display is awful. I have a nice external monitor connected through DVI to the dock at home, and I mainly use a laptop so I can get out of the house and go hack outside or in a coffeeshop (not ideal lighting). The build quality, keyboard/trackpoint, performance, and the fact that Debian (testing or unstable, anyway) Just Works are all higher up on the list for me. I do wish I could afford the new lighter one, though.

Today, like any other day, I started Firefo^WIceweasel. I mapped it at the bottom of my window stack. It promptly raised itself. I closed everything and tried opening a new homepage. Nope, that's fine. I tried again with two tabs saved. It raised itself again. I have been watching variations of this bug regress for eight years now and I am tired of it. So I installed Conkeror. After a good three-year run of being able to sit down at someone else's random PC and say, "hey, a web browser that nearly works as well as mine" (since it is, you know, the same one), I look forward to being utterly fed up with how primitive the rest of the world is again. And what are we in this for, if not that?

I had this crazy idea a few months ago which Joey's post about muscle memory reminded me of. For those not in the US, our keyboards have and ~ on the key to the left of 1. I prefer this key to be Esc. Long ago I simply swapped the two keys, but the original "Esc" key is always in some weird and inconsistent place and reaching for ~ became as annoying as reaching for Esc. (I suppose I might not care if I didn't use a unix shell or regular expressions or bit masks or...) So, noting that I mostly only wanted that key for ~, and not , I came up with the following (in xmodmap form):

keycode 49 = Escape asciitilde grave Escape

This means: if you just hit the key, it does the Right Thing (Esc, as if I were on a real unixy keyboard). If you hold Shift and press the key, it also does the Right Thing (~, as if I were on a PC). But what to do about , or Shift-Esc, which are no longer possible? We make them the alternate graphs (just old down AltGr. I think the xkb option to put this on right Alt is "grp:switch"). I honestly use those two infrequently enough that I don't care about having to remember the extra bucky. (I tend to type $(cmd) in the shell, and not cmd , because I use the former in scripts and I always found the latter harder to read. I suppose I would care more if I used Lisp or Haskell or...) What I like most about this solution is that it lets me use the same muscle memory on all my hardware. Never mind weird Esc positions; laptop vendors still can't agree on the correct order of Fn and Control. But you don't have to care if you put Control on Caps Lock. Same idea. It does feel a bit like cheating, but it has made my wrists far more comfortable. Oh, and to wean myself off the key way out in the corner:

keycode 9 = NoSymbol

Now the question, of course (getting back to Joey), is what would happen if my "new" Escape key broke. I guess I'd have to keep the laptop at home and plug in my Happy Hacking Keyboard :-)