If it *is* Biden…

…that would be pretty cool. Biden was always my second choice during the primary season, over Dodd, Giuliani, McCain, Richardson, Clinton, Romney, Huckabee, Paul, Edwards, that crazy anti-immigration guy who stuttered and looked like he would cry when the moderators wouldn’t let him finish what the fuck was it oh yeah Tancredo, um, Hunter, the UFO dude come on I almost have it whawhawhawhat was it god dammit he’s that guy from like Ohio hard to spell oh yeah Kucinich, and uh… that Alaskan geezer who filibustered (props) back in the Vietnam times uh uh uh Gravel, haha holy shit that actor cigar guy Fred Thompson and… well really I can’t remember any of the others without thinking so hard it hurts, and my blog is not reason enough to do that

(BTW, I hope it’s obvious that the above list is not in any kind of order.)

We’ll know soon, in any event.

My Japanese iPhone sucks, wah

After the servers stopped crapping out, and the line of people waiting to buy subsided, I finally got my Japanese iPhone. Anybody on the Internet already knows about the hardware (yep it’s great, despite a few remaining standout flaws, which have already been hashed to death).

But there are a few Japan-specific bits of suck:

  • In the USA, AT&T kinda sucks. SoftBank, the Japanese carrier, sucks substantially more.
  • The kludged-up メール “implementation” is as shitty as could possibly be designed–literally worse than nothing–and in Japan this feature is very nearly as important as the ability to place a call. Apple should have postponed the iPhone Japan launch rather than shipping without this capability[2].

Let’s take them one at a time:

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my new iPhone sucks, wah

So I updated my iPhone (US original model) to the just-released iPhone OS 2.0. Now, just like hundreds of billions of other people around the world, I can only call 911. Pretty fucking lame.

Great_nowmy_iphone_sucks_even_more_than_my_mac3thum.png Great_nowmy_iphone_sucks_even_more_than_my_macthum.png

(Clarification: No, this phone has never been hacked or jailbroken. Apple’s servers just (predictably) shit all over themselves when faced with the load of the over-hyped and under-engineered launch.)

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PECKERWOODS BETTER HIDE TONIGHT (!)

Either my TV is mysteriously fucked up and suffering some kind of weird psychoemotional electrical distortion, or, more plausibly, all of the MSNBC anchors and commentators are fucking clearing their quavering throats and failing to hide the fact that they are on the verge of tears as they announce that Obama is the first colored fella to achieve the position of having a serious chance to maybe beat a haggard-ass confused Republican octogenarian caught up in the worst Republican slump the modern history of American presidential politics.

Matthews! Brokaw! Even uber-cynic Olbermann! They look like the junior high school girls volleyball team arriving for practice one morning to find Bubbles the bunny rabbit mascot dead in his cage.

OK, finally here’s Russert. As usual, he’s saying blaaah blah blah blah blaaaaah. But not crying. Oh, and here’s Maddow. Definitely not crying. Okay. Maybe that quavering sound was just interference from a solar flare, or something.

Well, I’m not crying either; I am shooting my gun straight up in the air and shouting FUCK YEAH FUCK YEAH OBAMA OH EIGHT I TOLD Y’ALL BITCHES YEE HAW over the P.A. system. Fuck yeah.

power windows for your Mac

From the Ars Technica review of Safari 3.1 (emphasis mine):


I now think Apple is actually pushing to make [Safari] a truly competitive Windows browser. Case in point: Apple fixed it so that you can resize the window by grabbing any part of the Window: top, bottom, left side, etc. When 3.0 beta came out, it behaved like the Mac version, only allowing you to resize from the bottom-right corner.

Well, that’s all fine and well for the five people who use Safari for Windows; meanwhile, I wish Apple would fix this on the Mac, and not just for Safari. Window resizing is one of those little things about the Mac that sucks in a big way. Like the one-button mouse before it, the inability to resize windows from any edge is a fucktarded travesty of design that has somehow survived over a decade too long.

As with right-clicking, I understand that it may confuse some people (e.g., the senile, the brain-damaged, etc.) to be able to resize a window without dragging the fucking mouse cursor across 30 diagonal inches of screen to click the single unambiguous resize knob at the very bottom right corner. Fine, then: make it an option.

fucktarded1.png

I want to shrink my frontmost editor a little smaller so I can refer to the one directly behind it. This the default procedure: down, right, click, hold, up, left, release, up, left, click, hold, down, right, release.

To have something as fundamental to computer use as resizing windows remain dumbed down to this extent is just stupid. (There’s a corollary, which applies even if this issue seldom affects you personally. If, upon considering the user with dozens or hundreds of windows open, you are unable see the obvious utility of being able to resize and re-arrange those windows without making these incessant mouse-trips to the bottom right corner of each window, then you are stupid.)

Happily, though, just as with the Mac’s embarrassing single-button mouse debacle a decade ago, there is a cheap and reasonably good third-party solution available, if you are willing to spend a few minutes and dollars on it: MondoMouse.

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2.0

Well, we finally released this crap, whew. I haven’t worked that hard since I was like, in my 20s and shit.

blink faster

The languid pulsing of the insertion-point cursor when editing text is an aspect of Mac OS X that has bothered me for years, but bothered me to such a tiny degree that I never bothered to find out if there was a way to fix it.

But today I finally asked the oracle, and inside of ten seconds had my answer. The NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriod default seems to work in most Cocoa apps, Xcode included, and the value seems to be in milliseconds. So a simple:

Mac-Pro:~ mason$ defaults write -g NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriod 187

…and voila! No more sllloooooow hypnoooootic bliiiiiiinkiiiiiing…

Barack good; Hillary bad; positions orthogonal.

I strongly support Barack Obama. I strongly dislike Hillary Clinton. But these positions aren’t connected, contrary to the widespread assumption reiterated most recently today by Bill Press.

Okay, sure, the fucking whore radio host was wrong to call the fucking whore candidate a "fucking whore" on the air. Whatever, dude. But the increasingly common assumption he makes — that the reason that people are anti-Clinton must be because they are pro-Obama — is bogus.

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more Mac OS X 10.5 full system crashes

All right, my new and not-quite-improved 8-core Mac Pro is really getting into the spirit of this Apple Bug Friday thing! That is to say, by hard crashing Mac OS X 10.5 in new and exciting ways, so I don’t have to waste my time hunting for those bugs to file.

I think he’s probably trying to apologize for all the trouble he’s given me since I got him. You know, kind of like those cute disemboweled-and-decapitated-gopher gifts that your cat leaves on your doorstep to prove her love.

So, from my Mac(s) to yours, here’s the second way I have found to hard crash a Mac from a userland application this week. Introducing bug number 5842835. Judging from the kernel panic, the hoodlums from the loathsome “NVIDIA Drivers” gang just might be at it again!

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my new Mac sucks, wah

Lame. I really wanted to love this Mac. After spending a couple months traveling the globe (cool), and therefore suffering in the underpowered hell-world of laptop computing (lame), I was ready to get a workstation with real power to shuffle my daily bits around. So I bought the 2008-model eight-core Mac Pro. I loaded it up with many gigs of ram, a few terabytes of internal RAID, a couple thirty-inchers, and then stood back thinking, “Now here’s a computer suitable for a man of my stature. Yes indeed, I am going to love it.”

But this Mac, I don’t love. Because it crashes. The entire system crashes, in various ways, on a regular basis. And in the year 2008, that is simply not okay.

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