I love open source software. A lot.

There are times, however, when a silly lack of attention to detail drives me absolutely nuts.

Software applications come with a lot of options, usually set to reasonable defaults. Can you ever think of a time, in using a normal desktop application, where you would want the ability to change the default setting, but in doing so, forever lose the ability to revert back to that default setting?

Well, Firefox and gnome-terminal think you do, when it comes to colors.

Let’s start with Firefox. I’m not a fan of visited links having a different color as normal links. I like being able to change this setting so that they match. What I found out last time I did this, though, is that the default colors for visited and unvisited links aren’t available options in the color palette that appears when you click to change these.

Seriously, look:

You’ll note that none of the available color boxes are highlighted. That’s because that default blue color is not one of the options. In other words, once you change it, you can never change it back (though, I imagine, you could by digging through your profile or about:config or something like that – but not with the GUI you just used to set the color).

Sure, some blues are in the same ballpark, but why in God’s name is the exact default blue not even an option??

Same thing goes with the visited link purple:

None of those purples you can click on are the same as the default. And once you click on one and save the change, there’s no going back. Why??

It turns out this problem exists in Opera too, although to a much lesser extent:

The default blue still isn’t an option in the default clickable palette. (Yes, the blue in the first column, three spots down, is very close. It’s RGB 0,0,255 and HSV 240,255,255 instead of the default’s 0,0,204 and 240,255,204, respectively). But at least I can type in the RGB and HSV values if I know them and get the color back. In Firefox, all I have in that GUI is the clickable palette, with no apparent way to ever get the original color back.

(Chrome/Chromium, meanwhile, don’t even offer changing link colors as an option, though there is an extension that lets you do it).

And for the second half of this braindead-fest, we have gnome-terminal. Now, I’m not sure if this is a default in gnome-terminal itself, or if this is the doing of the Ubuntu package maintainers. But in gnome-terminal in Ubuntu, the “Default” profile has a Custom color palette:

If you click on that drop-down box where it says Custom and choose another palette, you can never, ever, ever get back to the default color palette. You don’t even have the ability to hit Cancel. Once you click on something other than Custom, whatever was set in Custom gets sent right to /dev/null.

So, for my sake, I went through the palette and recorded all of the values:

Column 1:
#2E3436
#555753

Column 2:
#CC0000
#EF2929

Column 3:
#4E9A06
#8AE234

Column 4:
#C4A000
#FCE94F

Column 5:
#3465A4
#729FCF

Column 6:
#729FCF
#AD7FA8

Column 7:
#06989A
#34E2E2

Column 8:
#D3D7CF
#EEEEEC

What we have here are two examples of Humane Mouse Trap usability (I just made that up). You know the traps, the ones with the door that only can be pushed inward, never back outward:

Shame on you, Firefox, and shame on you, gnome-terminal. While these are far from the biggest usability problems in the world, they’re just so mind-meltingly stupid and unnecessary that they can’t help but rile up my anger.

On Twitter, @philcooper asked me:

OK, so technically he didn’t ask me specifically. But I think it’s safe to say that there was an implicit “*Legion*! Yousosmart! Helpme!” at the front of it.

The answer is, yes @philcooper, Windows and the NTFS filesystem support symbolic links (or “junctions”, as they call them). However, Windows Explorer has no friggin clue how to create these by default. It is not enlightened like bash. Luckily, the Link Shell Extension exists to allow you to create these links from an Explorer context menu.

Basically, what you need to do is:
1. Install Link Shell Extension
2. Right-click on the source folder you want your link to point to, and select Pick Link Source
3. Right-click inside the folder where you want to create your new link, and select Drop As… Junction

Bam! You now have a symbolic link.

Why would you want to do this? Well, the reason I bothered to learn how is the same as @philcooper’s reasoning: to store savegames in Dropbox. Not every game supports savegame storage in Steam Cloud yet, so we must engineer our own solutions if we want to bounce from desktop to laptop (to laptop, to laptop…) and always have our savegames on hand. In fact, it was this post on the Runic Games forum explaining how to do this for Torchlight that got me started. (Ironically, I think Torchlight actually supports Steam Cloud now).

I have a Dropbox folder named Saved Games. When I first start a game and create my first save game, I cut-and-paste that entire savegames folder into Saved Games/gamename, then right-click on it, Pick Link Source, and drop a junction right where the savegame folder used to be.

Yesterday, the wife and I drove out to Sunnyvale (right past Yahoo! headquarters) and went to WeirdStuff. WeirdStuff is like an old computer and office version of an auto parts pick-and-pull.

I brought home a much-needed file cabinet:

Stacey got a chair for her classroom:

The sign got upgraded:

At the company I work for, we’re hiring for a web designer position. As the person who will be getting this person (or persons) up to speed, and handing over some of my non-coding workload, I have been evaluating the resumes and portfolios of work as closely as my boss has.

One applicant really took himself out of the running because of the lone picture of him on his home page (which served as his portfolio). The picture was of him at his computer, wearing something looking like a Mexican wrestling mask over his head, with sunglasses over the mask. It’s hard to do the picture justice in text.

EDIT: After going back and forth over it, I decided to post the picture, but only after copying it over to my blog instead of hotlinking directly to it (so as to not expose the poor guy’s homepage URL):

The photo really chased off my boss and the other designers. They’re very concerned about personalities of the “tech” people they bring in, as they had a very bad experience with the programmer they had before me (which is what led to there being an opening, and me stumbling into the job). We’re not a stuffy corporate environment; our office is decorated like a jungle, and I get to come into work every day wearing shorts and with my (well-behaved) dog, who spends the day curled up under the adjacent desk. So it’s a bad thing when the way you present yourself chases off this group of people.

OK, given that my last few blog posts include professed “love” (we’ll call it love) of the 17-year-old redheaded German curling girl, and a photo of the “sorry, no EBT” sign on the door of the nearby 7-11, I’m probably not speaking from high ground here. But think about what you put out there, especially when you’re applying for a job.

While browsing the web on my laptop at Panera Bread in Gilroy, I encountered a very strange content block when trying to load the homepage of the KDESVN project:

KDESVN? Nudism?

My SVN client usually just crashes.

EDIT: When I got home, I just had to double-check the site:

Hmm. I’m just not seeing it.

EDIT #2: Mystery solved. If we look at www.alwins-world.de, we find a photo gallery with:

PROTIP: While I’m all for photos of nude females, it might be wise to host your open source project on a different domain, for reasons exactly like this. Come on. A domain name is $10.

I’m always pitching the Big Love idea to my wife. Why put up with me all by yourself, when you can have some teammates to help manage my needs? Astonishingly, she still doesn’t see it as the way to go. Nevertheless, I am always on the lookout for new talent to add to this team.

I saw one as I watched the German women’s curling team. Here’s to you, redhead:

(The young one in the front, not the kneeling banshee in mid-scream)

Her name is Stella Heiss. Actually, her last name is “Heiß”. I’ve always wanted a chick whose name requires Unicode. She’s also only 17, so she can spend a year in the minors before we call her up to the big leagues. Her dad is former German ice hockey national team goaltender Josef Heiß.

I’m not alone in liking Stella. Bleacher Report ranked her #7 on their list of Hotties of Olympic Curling. (Stella’s teammate, Melanie Robillard, ranked #1, and with good reason. But redheads hold the key to my heart.)

(Melanie and Stella)

Stella is most certainly welcome to bring Melanie along.

(Melanie and Stella bookend a group that drops off severely between the endpoints)

Snapshot of a sign taped to the door of the 7-11:

Is 7-11 really the place to be spending one’s EBT money?

Best of all, the sign originally just said EBT, without “(food stamps)” next to it. It was necessary to clarify.

It’s amazing how many hits I still get from this nearly 5-year-old post.

Apparently the rest of the Internet likes Shirley Manson grabbing her chest as much as I do.

With my iPod out of commission, I decided to give Last.fm a shot for my work music needs. I’ve been having my music players scrobble what I listen to for a long time, but I had never really used the “listen to your library” option from the site itself.

It was fun.