skyb.us

Short technical note: I've been using Mercurial for my personal projects, but in succumbing to community momentum (and really, a much better submodule/svn:externals story) I'm switching over to Git. For some reason hg2git converters are many and generally broken. I tried a bunch, but few of them built/worked. The one that finally did is Antono's hg2git.

Distributed version control is one of these secret stories going on in the land of programmers that needs to get out into the imagination of the population.

In short, your next 'wiki' for public consumption and benefit, should maybe be hosted at GitHub.

Have you seen the US military's tangled web of a plan for Afghanistan? I really hope they paid that group to make it look complicated for PR purposes, rather than it being something they actually rely on. That is a BAD visualization, which could be much better organized.

As it happens, I have a radical culture-hack qua artistic-project that could theoretically help with problems like this some day. My website is out-of-date and it's complicated, so I'm mostly shy about it.

For those worried about all the debt the past stimulus and another much-needed stimulus would incur, let's do some 3rd grade math:

10% unemployment is about 4% more unemployment than is 'average.'
4% of the US population is 14 million people (of 350mil) that seemed capable of contributing to our economy a little more than a year ago.
Now from the other end, let's think in units of 100 BILLION dollars (scary!)

That means if we manage to get an average of $7142 (100bil/14mil) of tax revenue per 100bil of stimulus from these individuals over the whole course of the would-have-been-worse recession, then...it's worth it. Considering the tax rate... that looks pretty easy, and not even a very difficult loss if we're wrong.

This post is brought to you by People Against Scary Numbers In the News.

This post is the beginning of a series on how to destroy all your books while preserving all the information inside them (yes, even your margin notes), for a better and more portable reading experience. Before I go into the how, here is the why...

My wife and I are book fiends. By that I mean we lost the war a long time ago. Several bookshelves are double-layered and stuffed to the brim and book piles teem from behind our couch. We are good customers to the publishing industry. Despite working in a library, I still buy most of the books I read.

I happen to own a 2lb laptop which I can carry everywhere, and love it. On the other hand, I'm still working my way through Against the Day after a year or two, and I mostly blame the fact that it's too heavy to bring on the subway conveniently.

I'm learning that the more work habits I adopt from a particular coworker and friend, the more efficient I am (aside: The last one I adopted was a monthly subscription to Odwalla bars at work). I've looked lustfully over at his xmonad desktop more than once before. The basic idea is:

• I should NEVER see my desktop background--I want the window manager to configure the window sizes so everything is optimized for maximum space
• Using the mouse to move between windows and tasks sucks! I want to use my keyboard

Please pay attention to my adopted bug, with test cases. If you do, I'll eventually be able to delete my Yahoo UI text editor hacks.

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