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An Introduction to Lua

I gave a presentation at the Pro Forum last week on Lua. Below are my slides and notes. Enjoy!
IT Pro: An Introduction To Lua

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By q – May 26, 2010

Oh the humanity!

Liz usually posts stuff like this, but since she’s out of town it’s up to me. The cedar hedge is finally down! Now for cleanup!
image

Posted in Family News, Life.

1 comment

By q – May 25, 2010

On IP Law

This is in response to this post

First off, I’m a supporter of Lessig, the Creative Commons and the general “copyleft” movement, and I’d like to point a few items that you seem to be overlooking. I hope you will give the points I raise some real consideration. Continued…

Posted in Life, Media, Politics, Tech.

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1 comment

By q – May 12, 2010

Contemplating Facebook Suicide. But…. Why?

I mentioned in passing last night that I’m thinking of closing my Facebook account. Since then, a handful of people I interact with have asked me why I would consider doing that. It boils down to privacy and Facebook’s lack of respect for its users. Combine the two, and the cost/benefit ratio of using Facebook isn’t that compelling. It’s morphed from a nice way to keep in touch with people into an attention sink run by a company that has decided that what I want as a user is less important than maximizing the value of my profile to their business partners. Rather than rewrite a lot of stuff that has already been written (probably better) by others, I give you links:

The EFF on Facebook’s privacy changes in December. I had always been a little skeptical of Facebook, but had previously decided it offered enough value for the potential reduction of privacy required to use it. This set of changes got me really wondering just how trustworthy they were. I’ve been slowly mulling that over since then.

Then Zuckerberg (Facebook’s head honcho) came out with this little gem. This made it clear that his (and by extension, Facebook’s) view of privacy is a far cry from my own. More fuel to the “can I trust them?” fire.

Finally this week, I found this Wired article and this really interesting visualization. The trends here are clear, and I agree with the Wired author Ryan Singel that there must be a better way to do the things that I use Facebook for, and that I’d rather be part of that movement than add to the inertia of the 1800-lb gorilla.

Anyway, that’s why I’m considering it. I probably won’t do it any time soon, but I expect it will happen.

Posted in Life, Politics, Tech.

1 comment

By q – May 11, 2010

The Long Promised Jewelry Post

Many of my friends know that I’ve been doing some metalsmithing lately. It’s something I’ve always had an interest in, but lacked the tools to do it. Since discovering the Craft Center at the UO EMU (The EMU page has a hilarious video of the UO acapella group On The Rocks doing a Lady Gaga montage right now, it’s awesome) I’ve been able to work on it pretty regularly. I’ve really enjoyed it. Here are the results of my work so far:

Sprout Pendant with Opal
Sprout Pendant with Opal
Sprout Pendant with Peridot
Sprout Pendant with Peridot
Petite Cedar
Petite Cedar

Copper Spiral with Onyx
Copper Spiral with Onyx

Posted in Crafting, Family News.

2 comments

By q – May 2, 2010

Nexus One is Here

Just a test post to see how this works…
Here is a picture of one of the pendants I’m working on.
image

Posted in Tech.

4 comments

By q – April 16, 2010

Ubuntu 10.04 Is Lovable Afterall (AKA Second Impressions Are Important Too)

So I’ve continued to use the 10.04 Beta 2 installation over the weekend, and I’m finding a lot to like about the soon-to-be-official LTS release of Ubuntu after I fixed the titlebar button problem I ran into the other day. I still say that was a very bad call, and I hope they reverse it at the 11th hour, because it will do nothing but bad things.

To fix it, enter the following into a command prompt:

gconftool-2 –set ‘/apps/metacity/general/button_layout’ –type string “menu:minimize,maximize,close”

(Note you may have to fix some of the quotes, since the typographical quotes don’t work like “real” quotes in the shell)

An viola, sane titlebar button placement for your user account. I’m planning on building a little app in Quickly to do this push-button style. If / when I finish that I’ll put it in a PPA and post about it here. It will be of limited utility, but a good way to play with Quickly and setting up  a PPA. Anyway…

The improved boot speed is FANTASTIC. I haven’t actually timed it, but on this laptop it feels as fast or faster than resuming from a suspend, which I think is pretty impressive.

The visual tweaks are good (modulo titlebar idocy…) and I love the “Ambiance” GTK theme. I tend to like darker themes, and this is probably one of the best ones I’ve used.

Of course the version bumps in major apps is nice, and being able to run the latest firefox w/o repo jiggery pokery is convenient. My webcam is also working out of the box, a first on this hardware, and is even working in Flash. Chatroulette here I come! On the downside, I am getting playback hiccup in full-screened videos from Hulu, which I never got before. Hulu has apparently made some changes recently that makes it not work at all w/ 64-bit Linux, so maybe it’s related to that.

So, long story short-ish,I think this will be a solid release. I have my doubts as to whether or not it will meet expectations as an LTS release given the fairly large amount of very visisble tinkering that has apparently gone on, but overall I’m looking forward to it.

Posted in Tech.

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By q – April 11, 2010

Ubuntu 10.04 First Impressions: From Annoyed to Incredulous

So…. Ubuntu 10.04 is right around the corner. Awesome, right? Well, they’ve made a number of changes which I’m less than excited about. One of them being moving the titlebar buttons from the top-right of the window (where they have been for ages) to the top-left. When this hit the news, it kinda bugged me on principle because it seemed like a “change for the sake of change” sort of thing. But I brushed it off and more or less forgot about it until tonight. You see, Beta 2 of 10.04 was released this week, and as is my custom I upgraded my “I like it to be stable, but it doesn’t really matter a lot if it breaks” laptop to see how things have been coming along since I last looked at the first alpha. Almost immediately I ran into this:

Can you tell me what’s wrong with this picture?

No?

Well, the problem with this picture is that fewer than a dozen pixels makes difference between clicking on “File” and clicking on “Close”. Perhaps even worse, less than 6 pixels mean the difference between hitting the main application launch button and clicking “Close”.

This is STUPID. This is going to piss off TONS of people. I’m a 15-year IT veteran and within 30 minutes of using this setup I accidentally clicked on the close button twice. What is the “normal desktop user” that Ubuntu supposedly targets going to do?

Ugh… seriously guys, it’s called Fitt’s Law. Look it up. It’s why things like this are BAD IDEA. If you are going to be making changes like this DO SOME FRIGGING USABILITY STUDIES.

I really meant to do a more thorough post on 10.04, but I have to go de-pressurize my brain after actually seeing this first-hand.

Posted in Tech.

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By q – April 9, 2010

Yea for Yeasayer

I know, the title has probably been used a zillion times. Today I discovered Yeasayer via this video on Vimeo. The video is sweet, though NSFW due to nakedness. I found it on Peanut Butter Pillow, which a consistent source of interesting bits and bobs. I think I discovered that via a tweet from the inimitable Jeph Jacques of QC fame some months ago. Listened to a bunch more of their stuff on Grooveshark while making Valentine’s cookies this evening and it was all awesome. According the their Wikipedia page they describe themselves as “Middle Eastern-psych-snap-gospel”, which is an accurate, though perhaps useless, description.

Also, this may be the linkiest post I’ve ever posted.

Wewt.

Posted in Life, Media.

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By q – February 9, 2010

Office Supply Hack!

So, I was lamenting my lack of a decent place to put my headphones at work the other day. I decided it would be nice to have a hook on the side of the cabinet above my desk, but alas, I lacked a hook. To the office supply closet! One binder clip and extra large “super paperclip” later and we have:

It even has a handy locking feature! So you can... lock your headphones...

Yay! Nothing beats the instant gratification of using office supplies in ways they were never intended…

Posted in Life.

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By q – December 9, 2009