The One With Aldacron

Chrome Dump

2008-11-16T01:03:51Z

For well over two months, I’ve been using Google Chrome in place of Firefox as my primary browser. I was quite impressed with it from the beginning. Two months on, the euphoria has faded. I still have a lot of good things to say about it. But some of the quibbles got on my nerves to the point that I just can’t put up with them anymore.

The biggest annoyance, by far, is a weird bug that happens when working with text areas. I do a lot of posting in blog comments and programming forums. I frequently encounter an issue where the caret and any edits I make (typing, deleting, cutting, whatever) are invisible when I move to a new line. The first line remains visible, but everything after is never seen. It’s all there, though. Highlighting all of the text, either with the mouse or with Ctrl-A, makes it visible. Then the problem starts again on the next new line. Since this happens everytime I post on a forum that I moderate, I’m really fed up with it.

I also have problems with both the Java and Flash plugins. Sometimes, Java applets and Flash videos just fail to load. When I view the same links in Firefox, all is as it should be. I don’t deal with applets much, but I do watch a lot of Flash videos as a result of visiting Reddit every day. When ~20% of them fail to load, I get annoyed.

Another issue I have isn’t so much a fault of Chrome as it is a result of my being spoiled. I had gotten so used to using the FlashGot plugin in Firefox that downloading large files in Chrome is excruciating. The other day I was downloading a hefty software development kit that really drove me over the edge. I decided to start using Firefox for large downloads. And that made me realize just how much more often I was already using Firefox.

I was already using it to write blog posts, since I use the wonderful ScribeFire plugin for Firefox. I was also been frequently opening it to watch Flash videos. These days, I’ve even been launching it to visit certain forums where I know I’ll probably be making a post, in order to avoid the text area bug. If I’m going to start using it for large downloads as well, I may as well just move back to it completely.

Though it may seem that the title of this post reflects the fact that I’m dumping Chrome, it actually has another purpose. Chrome Dump is the name of a nice little utility someone wrote in order to handle some features that Chrome is lacking. When I decided to switch back to Firefox, I thought I would take my Chrome bookmarks with me. As it turns out, Chrome offers no bookmark export feature. How they overlooked that one I can’t even guess. Chrome Dump with read the bookmark database for you and export it to an HTML file that can then be imported into FF (or any other browser that can import HTML bookmarks). Chrome Dump can also clear your browsing history, another feature that doesn’t seem to have made it into Chrome yet.

I’m sure Chrome will improve with age, assuming Google continues to put an effort into it. For now though, I just don’t have the patience for it. I’ll come back to it somewhere down the road and reevaluate.

Technorati Tags: Google, Chrome, Firefox, web browsers

Spam For the Hungry Children

2008-11-14T11:49:10Z

One of the downsides of installing widely-used blog software is the phenomenal amount of spam it attracts. I’m using a good spam package on all of my blogs, but now and again a batch of comments get flagged for moderation because they don’t score enough points for automatic removal to the spam bin. They’re generally some variation of ‘Nice site!’, ‘Thanks for the info!’, or ‘Great post!’.

Today, when logging in to the admin section on one of my blogs, I noticed there were 20 comments awaiting moderation. I scanned through them to make sure I wasn’t about to flag any legitimate comments as spam, when I noticed one I’d not seen before. Copy-pasted:

Please, do not delete the given message. Money obtained from spam will go to the help hungry to children ugandi

It’s the first spam comment to ever make me chuckle.

Technorati Tags: blogs, spam, comments

Palin Has No Shame

2008-11-09T06:26:11Z

Poor Sarah Palin. Those meanies from the McCain camp just won’t stop picking on her. They keep saying all those hurtful things about her. Like that she didn’t know that Africa was a continent, that she couldn’t name all of the countries in North America, or that she didn’t prepare for the Katie Couric interview. Of course, she’s not taking it lying down. No sir, not Sarah Barracuda. In a CNN interview, she made it known what she thinks of those McCain people:

I consider it cowardly. It’s not true. That’s cruel, it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional and those guys are jerks if they came away taking things out of context and then tried to spread something on national news that’s not fair and not right.

How rich is that? This from the woman whose rhetoric the Secret Service blames for an increase in death threats against Obama in the closing weeks of the campaign. It’s no surprise, though. She’s both Christian and Republican, two synonyms for hypocrite.

Meanwhile, the knuckledragging Palinites are steadfast in their support for the Queen of Unenlightenment. One group of them are on a search & destroy mission, seeking out those from the McCain camp who would dare to tarnish the reputation of their mistress, hoping to blackball them in the Know-Nothing Party. I hear the Princess of Incomprehension is counted amongst their number.

Technorati Tags: politics, Sarah Palin, Republicans, Operation Leper, Sarah Barracuda, Michelle Malkin

The Hypocritical Bigoted View

2008-11-06T06:19:29Z

Whenever someone holds a bigoted belief toward a certain group, the logic they use to support their point of view is often twisted and in opposition to reality. This is especially true in the gay marriage struggle. Frank Shubert, co-chair of Proposition 8, demonstrates this quite clearly in a quote from an LA Times article on Prop 8:

Now, if they want to legalize gay marriage, what they should do is bring an initiative themselves and ask the people to approve it. But they don’t. They go behind the people’s back to the courts and try and force an agenda on the rest of society.

There are two points in this quote that are absurd and fly in the face of reason.

First is the assertion that bringing this issue to the courts is going ‘behind the people’s back.’ One of the primary functions of our court system is to uphold the rights of all American citizens. This includes deciding whether citizens are entitled to certain rights under existing US or state laws/Constitutions and whether or not laws are constitutional. The courts have a long history of doing so. When the majority of people support the suppression of a minority’s rights, it is the duty of the courts to protect those rights. Otherwise, freedom fails.

Second, legalized gay marriage does not ‘force an agenda on the rest of society.’ This is an argument that drives me to the point of rage, mostly because it is often used by those who do wish to force an agenda on society. I would love to ask Mr. Shubert how many heterosexuals he believes would have been forced to marry a same-sex partner if Prop 8 had been passed. No one, and I mean no one, would be forced to do or accept anything if gay marriage were legal. Heterosexuals would be free to go about their lives just as they do now. Bigots would be free to continue to be bigots. They would see same-sex couples just as they do now. The difference would be opaque to them — some of those couples would be living with the same legal benefits that heterosexuals get when they marry. If Mr. Shubert feels revolted when he sees same-sex couples, he would still feel revolted, but the fact that they are married wouldn’t change anything for him.

On the other hand, denying same-sex couples the right to marry does force an agenda on a segment of scoiety. This actively prevents same-sex couples from receiving the legal benefits that marriage brings. It treats them as substandard members of society. As if they aren’t full citizens and somehow don’t deserve the same benefits as their heterosexual peers.

This is an argument I’ve seen again and again. You can see another form of it later in the same article, in a quote from a 34 year-old Mormon woman:

We aren’t trying to change anything that homosexual couples believe or want — it doesn’t change anything that they’re allowed to do already. It’s defining marriage. . . . Marriage is a man and a woman establishing a family unit.

By putting it that way, she can convince herself that she’s not a bigot. She isn’t denying anyone anything, just defining marriage. But that’s exactly what makes her, Frank Shubert, and those like them hypocrites. They are denying homosexual couples something.

I suppose my problem is that I can’t reconcile how anyone can profess to love freedom while desiring to supress the freedom of their fellow citizens. My brain just isn’t wired that way. I actually have the ability to, you know, reason.

Technorati Tags: California, Proposition 8, gay marriage, same-sex marriage

Hope

2008-11-05T04:28:13Z

As I write this, CNN has projected Barack Obama to be the next president of the United States of America. All of the worries and the fears Obama supporters have felt over the past few months, more intensively perhaps over the past few weeks, can be put aside. The Republicans didn’t steal the election. There weren’t a large number of people saying they would vote for Obama then voting for McCain because of race. There was no mass rush of idiots who believe Obama is a Muslim/terrorist/socialst. All of the ‘real America’, ‘Joe Sixpack’, ‘Hockey Mom’ rhetoric fell flat. This year, people actually cared enough to come out and make their voices heard. There was an unprecedented movement online and, it would seem, a surprising number of voters actually were informed voters.

At this moment, I’m listening to John McCain begin his concession speech and it’s quite gratifying. He’s being gracious, though, in spite of all of the past few weeks of venom from his campaign.

Now we can move forward and begin to put the past eight years behind us. We still have a little over two more months of Bush remaining. He can still do something disastrous, but I believe it unlikely. Now we can look forward to seeing our reputation restored abroad, our liberties restored at home, and our faith in government rebuilt from the ashes of the Bush adminsitration’s failure. More than anything, we can now find our lost pride in being Americans.

I know some people voted for Obama only out of frustration with Republicans and still have no confidence in him. But I have hope. The future has been bleak from the perspective of the past few years. Now, it looks a bit brighter. I was disappointed when Gore lost in 2000. I was dumbstruck when Kerry lost in 2004. In retrospect, without eight years of Bush we would not be celebrating President-elect Obama today. Though it’s horribly unfortunate that it had to cost so much in blood and treasure to make it so.

To the future!

Technorati Tags: politics, Barack Obama, United States, president, Democrats, Republicans

More of ‘Peaceful’ Islam

2008-10-30T06:56:49Z

In Somalia, we get another example of how wonderful the ‘peaceful’ religion of Islam really is:

A woman was stoned to death for adultery on Monday in an Islamist-controlled region of Somalia. Somali human rights officials said the woman, 23, had been raped, but the Islamist authorities determined that she was guilty of adultery. She was buried up to her neck and stoned after a crowd of thousands gathered at a soccer field in the town of Kismayu, which is controlled by the Shabab, a radical Islamist group.

It is absolutely imperative that we in the West do everything we can to keep this Sharia law bullshit utterly out of our cultures. The people in the UK, where a form of Sharia has taken hold, need to stand up and kick it out. There’s no place for this sort of barbaric madness in any civilized society. If you still aren’t convinced, I direct you to Pat Condell.

Technorati Tags: religion, Islam, Muslims, Sharia Law, stoning

Go Vote

2008-10-29T18:47:49Z

The Problem With America…

2008-10-21T03:03:04Z

…is that there are too many people like this woman:

The fact that gullible ignoramuses like her can affect the outcome of a presidential election really gets to me.

Technorati Tags: politics, religion, mythology, Christians, Christianity, idiots

An Insult? Get Real!

2008-10-10T05:10:42Z

Around the blogosphere, and on Facebook, there has been an ongoing discussion regarding a point in the second presidential debate when John McCain “insulted” an audience member. A recent post on the Daily Kos says:

Remember the moment during the Town Hall debate, when McCain fielded a question from a young African-American man? Remember how he prefaced the answer by saying “You probably never heard of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac before this”?

Meet Oliver Clark. Here’s what he’s saying now, in response to this historically-insulting encounter.

The post then quotes Clark’s response to McCain:

Well Senator, I actually did. I like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent person. I have a bachelor degree in Political Science from Tennessee State, so I try to keep myself up to date with current affairs. I have a Master degree in Legal Studies from Southern Illinois University, a few years in law school, and I am currently pursuing a Master in Public Administration from the University of Memphis.

Personally, I’m a bit baffled by all of this. I’m certainly no fan of McCain. A McCain victory next month would be disastrous for the country’s future. But, really, what is so insulting about that question? It really is a safe assumption that the average American had never heard of Freddie and Fannie before they were all over the news. And, I’m sorry Oliver, but intelligence has nothing to do with it. It’s about knowledge and information.

Someone with an interest in financial news, who follows the financial market, will certainly be aware of the big players. Such people would have have known about Fannie and Freddie long before news of their impending failure was plastered all over the media. I fail to see what having a Masters in Legal Studies has anything to do with it. Does the Legal Studies program at Southern Illinois University teach students about Fannie and Freddie?

Of course, some people want to call the question racist. Clark himself hints at it in another comment quoted in the same blog post:

In defense of the Senator from Arizona I would say he is an older guy, and may have made an underestimation of my age. Honest mistake. However, it could be because I am a young African-American male. Whatever the case may be it was somewhat condescending regardless of my age to make an assumption regarding whether I was knowledgeable about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Really, you’re going to go there? It has nothing to do with either your race or your age. And it was not a condescending remark. If you had snagged 100 random people off the street in any town in America last year and asked them about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, what percentage do you think would have known what you were talking about? Perhaps if the street were Wall Street the number would be high. But elsewhere?

I’m not trying to bash Oliver here, but one thing I hate to see my fellow liberals do is making a controversy out of a non-issue. That’s what Republicans do. And this really is a non-issue. McCain wasn’t trying to insult anyone. His only crime is that he made an assumption. Though in this case I think there’s a pretty solid basis for it, it’s probably best not to voice assumptions about anyone as a political candidate — particularly in the charged environment of this particular campaign. I’m sure you remember what happens when we ass-u-me (and if you don’t, I’m not being condescending or insulting by voicing such my assumption that you do). Let’s channel our rage at real insults, shall we?

Technorati Tags: politics, John McCain, Oliver Clark, Daily Kos

Funk Vigilante: Worst President Ever

2008-10-09T07:24:50Z

Funk Vigilante have put together a song and video that, I think, accurately expresses what a number of patriotic Americans feel (I mean patriotic in the real sense of the word, not the deranged version the Republicans hijacked). Political issues aside, it’s just a damned good song.

Technorati Tags: Funk Vigilante, Bush, politics