There is no doubt that Wordpress is a wonderful blogging system. But being a
dynamically generated website, all the nightmares of scripting languages kick
in. Patches come regularly to Wordpress and until you login and update, it keeps
nagging you inside and ruins your happiness.
There is an alternative - hosting on wordpress.com directly. But not only does
it cost unnecessary money (I already have a shared hosting account), it is also
severely limited by what you can run on it - no plugins or themes or custom
javascript other than what is provided.
For a while I have been puzzled why Nautilus doesn’t allow me to simply unmount
an USB pen drive from the context menu. The only options I could see for USB
pen drives was - eject and safely remove drive, which was puzzling on its
own as them meant the same to me.
Selecting “eject” or “safely remove” drive does the same thing for USB drives -
it unmounts the drive and powers it down. To mount it again, you will have to
physically detach it from the USB socket and attach it again.
One of the first things that irked me after my Precise installation was how DNS suddenly seemed slow. I normally use dnscache for local DNS caching and while setting it up this time, I noticed that oddly, 127.0.0.1 was already setup as my name server. Netstat told me that this was handled by DNSMasq for some reason. No worries, I thought, and I setup dnscache on 127.0.0.2 instead. I added the IP to the prepend nameserver option in /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf and clicked on the NetworkManager applet to reconnect to my wireless (to trigger DHCP again).
… and relevant to anybody who is a competitive arena - be it career, work, etc.
When considering the stature of an athlete or for that matter any person, I
set great store in certain qualities which I believe to be essential in
addition to skill. They are that the person conducts his or her life with
dignity, with integrity, courage, and perhaps most of all, with modesty.
These virtues are totally compatible with pride, ambition, and
competitiveness.
— Sir Donald Bradman speaking at his induction into The Sport Australia Hall of Fame, 1985
People lie to salesmen all the time. We do it because salespeople have trained us to, and because we’re afraid.
…
Of course we don’t tell the truth–if we do, we’re often bullied or berated or made to feel dumb.
Someone who chooses not to buy from you isn’t stupid. They’re not unable to process ideas logically, nor are they unethical or manipulated by others. No, it’s simpler than that:
Given what they know and what they believe, the prospect is making exactly the right decision.
You might need to dust your laptop or desktop monitor to see this one clearly. You see a tiny dot in
the photo above? In the middle of that light colored line? That is Earth, how it looks from the edge
of the solar system. This famous photograph, that I discovered only today is called the Pale Blue
Dot (actually it is the representation of earth in the
photo that they are talking about here, but you get my drift).
To summarise, in the new “advanced” Ubuntu releases, instead of clicking the
traditional menus, you have to type in a few words in a special screen every
time, and select from a drop-down which pops down.
12.04 HUD concept (From Mark’s post)
What is the problem that they are trying to solve? - Well apparently, it is an
awful nightmare to navigate deeply nested menu structures, and therefore,
somewhat like the way you access history in the latest Firefox or Chrome
browsers, you search the app menu text, and get what you want in a few
keystrokes.
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about
25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper
a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her
due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to
very specific stages of her pregnancy.
Very interesting point made out by this blog
post by
Patrick Rhone, about how Microsoft’s core business faces an existential threat:
MS office on Flickr
Microsoft for many years had convinced the world that, in order to get “real
work” done, you needed Office.
…
Then, she explained, the iPhone came. There was no Office. People got things
done. Then the iPad came. There was no Office. People got things done.
Android came. People got things done. All of those things that they, just a
couple of years ago, were convinced they needed Office to do. They got them
done without it. And thus, the truth was revealed.
