Spam too good to ignore. Apparently, I still have a Xanga account:

ME: “You’re retarded, and you’re hurting my arm.”
WIFE: “I’m not hurting your arm!”

I hate when podcast providers title their podcast feeds with anything other than the name of their show.

Unfortunately, in iTunes, it is not possible to rename podcasts.

The dude who wrote this meta.stackoverflow post, however, has done something about it.

He made podcast-rename.appspot.com, a little web service running on Google App Engine, which takes a podcast feed URL and a title that you type in, and serves up that same podcast feed with your title inserted in place of the original title.

This is especially useful for podcasts that add a lot of junk into their title, or related podcasts which maddeningly fail to set a naming convention and follow it. The latter is the case with the podcasts for the Johnjay & Rich radio show. Half of their podcasts have “Johnjay and Rich:” at the start of the title, and the other half have the segment name only. So, in iTunes and on an iPod, the ones that don’t have Johnjay & Rich at the front are scattered away from the rest. Very dumb, but what can you expect from a Clear Channel production?

Thankfully, this dude’s little Google App Engine project takes care of the problem. Here’s to you, guy who is as anal about podcast organization as me. You’ve earned the title:

When the iPad came out, I expressed concern and disappointment over its highly locked-down nature. Obviously, the iPhone is too, and that’s one reason why I am a big Android fan and supporter. But a locked-down smartphone is one thing. A device that can serve a family’s general home computer use (email, web, etc) being so restricted is, in my mind, another.

On top of that came the new, more restrictive iPhone OS (which is what the iPad runs too) SDK agreement, which essentially terminated the ability to write iPhone and iPad software in any language other than C, C++, or Objective-C. The languages I prefer, namely Ruby and Python, were no longer welcome.

These concerns and disappointments remain as strong as ever.

However, while my intention was to wait for a good Android tablet to come along, life threw a curveball. My boss decided to reward our little core team for a job well done on our big annual job, and she bought us each iPads.

The night before, I had taken my wife to the Apple Store to buy her a 13″ MacBook Pro, which is the same laptop I have.

Between the complaints above and Apple’s decision to sue HTC over phone touchscreen patents, I had suggested on Twitter that I might abstain from Apple products in the future. Now the view from my living room couch was two 13″ MBPs and an iPad. Clearly, I was failing.

Now, despite my recent misgivings about Apple, I did have some interest in the iPad. Specifically, I wanted something like it for an ebook reader. I have many books and whitepapers in PDF format, and I wanted a nice little tablet that would make reading them much more enjoyable (I had been reading them on my netbook, which was OK but not fabulous). While the e-ink ebook readers are tops in reading comfort, they don’t offer much more than black text.

The iPad’s IPS LED display may not be e-ink, but it is more comfortable to read than older LCD computer screens. With a 99 cent purchase of GoodReader, the iPad has provided the PDF eBook reader I wanted. I expected it to succeed in that capacity. But the iPad has succeeded in other ways that I did not expect.

Like many observers, I saw the iPad as a strange middle ground between a smartphone and a laptop, with netbooks crowding that middle ground even further. And as the owner of an Android smartphone, a netbook (EeePC), a 13″ laptop (MacBook Pro), a 17″ laptop (Sager), and a desktop PC, it was hard to see where the iPad fit, outside of the ebook functionality.

But upon using it, I found the iPad succeeded in two unexpected spaces:
1. As a social computing device
2. Touchscreen applications impractical for smartphones

I got the first hint of the iPad as a social computing device from this Gamers With Jobs post, where the poster mentioned how nice it was to shop for apartments with his girlfriend on the device, passing it back and forth. I was reminded of that today when reading this blog post, where the author comments on how the iPad has become the kitchentop family computer that everyone simply picks up and uses, and shares.

Since getting my own iPad, I’ve observed this myself. The thing just begs to be passed around. Right down to details like the screen’s extremely high viewing angles, it’s made for casual, shared use, in the way that even a netbook isn’t.

I like the observation of that blog post:

Our iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries are our personal devices. We wear them and they are with us everywhere. Our iPad is our family computer in way that the kitchen macbook never was.

This has spilled over to work. I bring my iPad to work, as the others who received one do as well. Rather than trying to hold up a laptop to show a webpage at a meeting, someone can punch it up on their iPad and easily hold it up or pass it around.

This is the closest image I could find to people sharing an iPad

When people say that it’s an overgrown iPhone, I think they are only thinking of the device as a single-user machine. They’re not thinking of dropping it into the middle of a room of people. The device size, screen resolution, and screen quality (especially those viewing angles) make it a whole different beast in a group setting.

The other area where the iPad surprised me is in touchscreen applications that just aren’t viable on a small iPhone screen. One of the ones I’m using at work is iMockups. It’s a $10 app that uses drag-and-drop touch functionality to allow users to quickly make mockups of webpages and web application UIs. I can’t imagine trying to make a webpage mockup on an iPhone touchscreen (or my Android phone), but the big iPad surface and screen resolution allow the kind of precision that makes this task possible.

And, of course, that social, bring-it-to-the-meeting nature of the iPad means I draw up the mockup on the iPad, then bring it to the meeting to pass around.

I’m sure part of my satisfaction has to do with not having to justify its price tag. Having it bought for me takes the “is it worth it?” question completely out of the equation. Naturally, a lot of tech devices look good when cast in that light. But I don’t think I can put myself into that cost/benefit headspace at this point, so I won’t even try. All I can say is that the iPad has definitely talked me out of the “overgrown iPhone” mindset. Using it has made clear to me where it fits in the computing spectrum, where before it seemed to be a device without a home. When looked at not as a personal computing device, but as an ebook reader plus as a social computing device, the iPad’s home becomes clear.

NetBeans, the open source IDE, may be a very good piece of software. In fact, I’m sure it is. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to get started using it.

Why? For one reason – bad fonts!

That may be a petty reason for not using something, but when one writes code all day, it helps to have the text look nice. Having bad text that will piss me off is just going to ruin my day a little bit, every single day.

The problem is that the Java Swing GUI toolkit, which NetBeans is written in, does not use the native font rendering like SWT (which Eclipse uses) does.

NetBeans:

I’ve clicked a GNOME menu so you can see the difference side-by-side. Notice that the NetBeans window menu looks like scraped dog crap compared to my nice, thick, don’t-kill-my-eyes-with-paper-thin-lines native GNOME fonts.

I’ve tried plenty of /etc/netbeans.conf settings to try and fix this.

-J-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd (or "on") #does not do sh*t
-J-Dswing.aatext=true #does not do sh*t
--laf javax.swing.plaf.(bunch of things) #changes decorations but does not do sh*t to fix fonts

Nobody deserves this sh*t.

Now we look at Eclipse:

Native fonts FTMFW!

On Twitter:

legion: I get the so-called "NoSQL" databases in high-scaling apps, but do any of them make sense in tiny apps where SQL might be overkill?

CouchDB: @Legion I was designed scratch for scaling down, running on mobiles, etc.

legion: @CouchDB Yeah, but you're a TALKING database! That's creepy!

This is on the glass door of the local Pizza Factory.

The synopsis, from the site’s homepage at PureFlix:

Sarah Collins is a young woman on the elevator of success, poised to attain her dream of an executive corner office. There’s only one thing that’s going to keep her from getting it, an unexpected pregnancy.

Sarah is now faced with a moral and potentially career ending choice.

She is torn between keeping the life growing inside her and her legal right to abort the baby. In the midst of her turmoil, a mysterious stranger foretells the coming of three visions that will challenge her heart.

With financial pressures mounting and her dream career at stake, what will Sarah choose?

What, indeed. My guess is that she has the baby, and after about 5 minutes of peril, the pendulum quickly swings to “happily ever after”.

The girl on the poster looks 17, but it’s 32 year old Aussie Christian pop singer Rebecca St. James – who I have seen before and who is pretty hot.

YouTube has TRAILAR!:

I took this photo on my shoddy phone camera while filling up my truck with gas.

It’s a guy, with long hair, jeans and no shirt, sitting on a stool out behind a little hippie clothing shop. He was sketching a drawing of, I think, some random bush in front of him.

If we assume he smoked some hemp beforehand (and I’m sure we can), that’s Santa Cruz in a nutshell right there.

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.