Dark Pegasus

I just got a netbook and I have to say it’s pretty sweet. However, firefox takes up a lot of screen estate with the tool bars, and how often do you really need them? Sure you can get rid of the bookmarks toolbar but the nav bar and the menu bar are annoying.

Enter the hide extensions — specifically Hide Menubar and Hide Navigation Bar. These two extensions reclaim a lot of real estate. Once they’re installed, hit F2 to toggle the nav bar and alt to toggle the menu bar. Awesome.

Look Ma, no menus!

I’ve been using appengine for a side project lately and it’s pretty sweet! However performance isn’t guaranteed, especially with a naive model. Some learned points:

• Avoid accessing the datastore. Especially writes. GAE is highly optimized for frequent reads and infrequent writes.
• Related to that, favor fewer large objects over many small objects in the datastore. It’s much better to load and deserialize an object tree than to make a query for each object type. This will reduce your round trips to the datastore. Also there is no way to bulk delete rows but if you have your objects as a pickled collection in a db.Blob, you can delete many elements from the collection in a single access. Pretty nice actually.
• Avoid writing to the same objects concurrently. This needs to be balanced with the previous point. The contention will kill your performance as you get more users. However if writes really are rare in your model this is fine.

So it seems that McCain doesn’t know who the Spanish Prime Minister is. But that’s okay because he’s so knowledgable and experienced with foreign policy.

From TPM:

We wanted to give you an update on the post below where we described Sen. McCain’s latest gaffe in which he seemed to suggest that he might not be willing to meet with Spanish Prime Minster Zapatero because he is among those world leaders who want to harm America.

The story is already getting picked up pretty quickly in the Spanish press. And the way it’s being interpreted in the Spanish press is that McCain got confused about the fact that Spain is a country in Europe, rather than a rogue state in Latin America.

Sigh.

Even if he didn’t know you’d think he might look this up before meeting with someone from the Spanish press. This from a man who may become president.

Audio and translated text of the interview here

Translated version of another Spanish Article

Translated version of a Spanish Article describing the gaffe

Awesome. Google is now doing audio indexing on videos. So far it seems they’ve just started with political videos and not general youtube videos but still. Damn! Very cool stuff. I wish I was that cool…

http://labs.google.com/gaudi

At this point, much of their material writes itself. A few jokes inserted to keep it flowing between clips and the people they mock do the rest.

Covering McCain’s Acceptance Speech

McCain’s transformation from the McCain of 2000 to the McCain of today.

Republican comments on Palin vs Democratic candidates

PUMAs

There are a lot of benchmarks about how fast Chrome is at running Javascript. While true there is still a good amount of bias in them. Obviously Google optimizes for their benchark suite, mozilla for their’s, IE for who knows what. But numbers don’t do it justice. Download Chrome and try out these sites to see what a difference it makes. Okay, so some of these sites are optimized heavily to run on today’s browsers so try running them on a slower machine if you can. Trust me, you’ll notice the difference.

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/mariokart/  Rendering bug on my machine, I filed a bug report through the browser.

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/chess/ Rotate the board

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/wolf/ 

http://www.jsdesk.com/

http://www.meebo.com/

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/examples/dd/portal-drag_source.html#

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pHAgbiDvfxHEUsrD0NhujRA (Copy this to a new spreadsheet, change the data)

http://maze.sitepoint.com

The Daily Show at it’s best.

You have to be kidding me. They’re seriously trying to claim that being geographically close to Russia means you have foreign policy experience. Wow. That’s like saying you can learn math by putting the textbook under your pillow at night. She didn’t even have a passport until last year.

Ms. Palin appears to have traveled very little outside the United States. In July 2007, she had to get a passport before she visited members of the Alaska National Guard stationed in Kuwait, according to her deputy communications director, Sharon Leighow. She also visited wounded troops in Germany during that trip. (NY Times)

And she’s supposed to take over for McCain if he becomes incapacitated? I can only hope that people are paying attention to see this crap as it really is.

It seems some protestors at the RNC are being charged with terrorism charges… This is frightening stuff.

http://cliffschecter.firedoglake.com/2008/09/03/eight-rnc-protesters-face-state-terrorism-charges/

This is even more frightening considering the FBI wants to investigate people without basis for suspicion, the St. Paul police beat a protestor (photos), arresting journalists and photographers under charges of conspiracy to riot, using pepper spray, tear gas and flash bangs to break up protests… And most of that is just this week. Combine that with the FBI planning to spy on peaceful protest groups and it all paints a very scary picture.

Crap like this isn’t supposed to happen in our country…

You have that just formatted feel. You just installed all the required drivers, Windows is running fast and smooth because there is nothing on it.

Now what?

Well, you install apps to make it useful of course! The real question is what to install? That’s where this post comes in. It’s as much of a checklist for myself as a guide for everyone else, what to install right away without spending any money.

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