John Mort's Weblog

It's annoying as hell that Ubuntu doesn't come with emacs by default. I get that the devs have their preferences and maybe more people out there really do prefer to have to hit all sorts of random characters at random times over key-chords, but I think enough people like emacs that it at least ought to be included by default.

trian and I have made a few attempts to introduce plantlife into our home, mostly resulting in plant murder. But the following TED talk has reignited the bug in me.



I spend a lot of my day alone in an office now, so maybe I should introduce some durable plants, preferably lower maintenance than what Kamal Meattle suggests. Looking around, I've come across a few reports and have largely settled on starting with the Spider Plant. It's inexpensive, easy to reproduce, has minimal maintenance, and handles neglect. So it's the perfect plant for me. I figure I could hang one from the ceiling, and then as it makes more, get more pots to hang around the walls.

This might be a naive statement, but I've never understood why there is a separate link for account creation on login pages. Wouldn't it make more sense, when someone puts in a username that isn't registered with a website, to then bring up the account creation page for that username, or at least to ask the user if they would like to create that username?

Ultimately it's trivial to make people click an extra link to create a page, but it would simplify a lot of front pages if things were done this way. Many sites, like Flickr and Kaboodle, give more real estate to account creation graphics than they do to sign in page links. Wouldn't it be simpler to just merge these two things into one page/dialog/graphic?

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, that's just a personal gripe, but it annoys me.

(Testing out the BlogIT Facebook application, if it updates my blog and Facebook in a way I like this will likely be how I do updates for now on)

Last night my Uncle called me to let me know that he finally updated our MX records so Google Apps will take over handling the mort.net e-mail. This is exciting because it means I'll be able to use john@mort.net without concerning myself with attracting spam or filling his mail server with attachments. I'll also get to use the gmail Blackberry and Web interfaces I've grown accustomed to with it, and the uptime Google provides will be much better than what we were able to accomplish ourselves. It's very exciting!

Really, the only downside will be having to go to google.com/a/mort.net to sign in, rather than gmail.com. But I think we could probably alias something like mail.mort.net to that to make that a bit simpler.

Had a good scare today. I have a keyring with my 8GB flash drive and my Yubikey on it. During my lunch today I decided to figure out how to set up my own Yubikey authentication server on my home server, and discovered that I didn't have it in my pocket! Much worrying and paying special attention to the ground commenced, culminating in finding them in the jeans I was wearing Sunday.

I was only worried because I hadn't encrypted my flash drive yet. I keep pussyfooting around it, mainly because of the whole conflict between a strong password and the inability to recover data when said strong password is forgotten. That and making sure I can use it in both Windows and Linux. But I will obviously be backing up and encrypting the thing asap after being scared that someone would pick it up and have access to Ican'trememberexactlywhat.

So initially I was saving up for the EEE 1000. The 10" screen will be a bit nicer, and the keyboard more accommodating to my large hands, and it'll still be portable. I was also thinking the 40GB SSD was a nice thing, because, being a portable laptop, the SSD would be resistant to shaking, which is kind of nice to have in an ultraportable.

However, I've been viewing some reviews lately, and I'm now a bit torn. The EEE 1000HA comes with a 160GB HDD, and it performs as well as a laptop with it's specs generally does. The only reason this makes the EEE 1000 look like a problem is that the write speeds to it's SSD are rather slow. I don't know if this would get frustrating over time. Couple that with the fact that the EEE 1000HD is about $50 cheaper, and now you have a real competition between the two.

I'm still a couple months away from getting either one, maybe something new will reveal itself by then to make the choice easier.

Looks like my Congresswoman got the nomination to the Senate. We'll find out noon tomorrow.

Paterson has balls, he could have removed a rival to his re-election but decided not to do things that way.

Even if I wasn't a fan of Gillibrand, this definitely up's my respect for my Governor.