lepht

Checkmark does exactly this, and is overall pretty great:

http://builtbysnowman.com/checkmark/

Can you link to a few that you've found useful?

Did that for a few weeks, and the Chrome performance boost was nice. I had to jail-unbreak though because stability was horrid for me, with applications constantly crashing :/

Not just the javascript either, Chrome becomes horrendously slow with week wifi signals where Safari is fine. For some reason only Apple apps can do the 3G/LTE/Wifi request pooling magic that they added in iOS 6.

Indeed. If only it weren't stuck with a slow js interpreter.

I've been using a Chrome extension I created for the same purpose. The nice part is that it does it without making an external web request, using javascript and canvas.

Also, iPhone users should check out the Scan app[1] for a QR code reader. It's by far the fastest starting, simplest QR scanner I've been able to find; Most of the other apps seem to be cramming in price-checking features and have butt-ugly icons.

[1]: http://scan.me

I think you're both overthinking it. Storage snapshots, bros.

I find that it's easy to fall into the trap of feeling like working as a software developer in the commercial world is an exercise in applying duct tape.

But I think this is a mindset problem, not one with the state of modern software writing. We're standing on the shoulders of giants; There's plenty of unsolved problems out there to be solved by the next person willing to do it. And we do it armed with the work of the previous generation that's been packaged into the convenient form of libraries, modules and established knowledge.

Would your time really be better spent finding the most efficient sorting algorithm?

Agreed. And this thought process is effectively shortsighted: "I can apply band aids now, which is superior to gaining the knowledge needed to perform surgery because that would take too long."

Disclaimer: Programmer who wishes his professional work contributed more to the greater good.

Everyone here requesting a more vim-like interface or text editor integration should check out VimOutliner:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3515

Sooo... 25 minutes of watching Netflix then?

Same experience here, and the situation on the iPhone is even worse: there's not even a native first-party app.

Slightly related note:

This seems to be a trend lately in Google's desktop software that I'm not comfortable with. On both my Linux and Mac machines 'ps aux | grep -i chrome' shows background processes running long after I've quit Chrome.

I don't see any GUI options to turn these off (there used to be an option in 'about: flags' that I think was related), and I have to end up killing them from the command line.

Not cool, Google.

I like

> $number_hash{$_} = 1 for @list;

I took the 'every' portion to mean that every screen locker is affected on the vulnerable versions of Xorg server, not that every version of Xorg is affected.

Meaning that any version of any of Gnome/KDE/XFCE/etc's screen lockers will be defeated by this exploit if they are running in this version of Xorg.

As far as I can tell this is probably true, unless someone knows a locker that uses an alternative method of locking out all keyboard/mouse input?

The offending commit[1] loads fine for me, but I'd rather not call out some poor OSS contributor by name here.

My question is: what is the actual function/line that causes the screen lock to die? My C knowledge is close to non-existent, but the ungrab all function looks a bit suspicious. Some commentary by someone who understands what's going on here would be appreciated.

[1]: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=7d2543a3...

A bit late, but I'm also a huge fan of Taskwarrior- and on a slightly related note, I wrote the oh-my-zsh plugin and was always a bit curious as to whether anyone actually used it. Glad to hear that at least one other person finds it useful.

I do find myself using Taskwarrior's shell mode[1] almost exclusively these days though, as it significantly cuts down on the number of keystrokes necessary to interact with my todo list. If you wrap task shell in rlwrap[2] you can still get autocompletion from within the shell.

[1] `task shell`

[2] I use 'ts' aliased to `rlwrap -i -r -C task task shell` for this

I'd be curious to see whether there's any substantial performance differences

In Perl, the CPAN module Smart::Comments does something similar:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Smart-Comments/lib/Smart/Comment...

Bah, they can have the verb. It's the noun, 'hacker', that doesn't have a satisfactory equivalent, IMO.

Came here to say that -- Although it has been my perception lately that we've been making progress in stealing the term 'hacker' back.

Seconded. I heartily recommend anyone with even a slight interest in Riak to check out the Riak Fast Track:

http://wiki.basho.com/The-Riak-Fast-Track.html

It's a quick, interesting, and to the point into to Riak, including theory, installation, and usage. The Basho guys have seriously great documentation, I've enjoyed browsing through the Riak wiki despite not really having any live Riak deployments.

I've been using Taskwarrior for a few weeks as my primary task manager, and I have to say it's a beautiful extension of the principles of Todo.[txt/sh]. The only thing missing for me is the ability to apply modifications to filters instead of needing to use explicit task ID lists. For example:

  task proj:Foo due:tomorrow

Instead of:

  task 1,2,3,7,10-12 due:tomorrow.

For oh-my-zsh users, I've got an open pull request for adding a Taskwarrior autocompletion plugin:

https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/pull/370

The intelligent completion lowers the barrier to task entry even further.

You may also want to try using a combination of Taskwarrior's shell mode and rlwrap, which has become my main usage method:

  `alias ts=rlwrap -i -r -C task task shell`

Combine this with a drop-down terminal like Guake or tilda, and you've got text-based-tasklist-anywhere nirvana.

I also find myself wishing that Ruby's destructive (!) and boolean (?) suffixes were either enforced somehow or not used at all.

The idea itself is cool, communicating extra context about what the method does or its intended usage, but they're used so inconsistently (even withing the Ruby stdlib) that A) They're unreliable and you need to check the source to find out the behavior anyway and B) It's less predictable whether the method exists with the suffix or without, so you need to either run it and modify your method call if there's an error or check the lib/API docs. This is the sort of thing that makes having an IDE handy for completing method names, which is unfortunate because Ruby is generally very usable without any IDE crutches.

I've been tooling around with Haskell for a few months now, and since the beginning I've been impressed with the incredible amount of polish that goes into the official distribution.

Maybe my expectations of an 'academic', FP language were low, but the clean, navigable design of the site, and easy to use package manager, and respect for the idioms of the various platforms (DMGs and not tar.gz's for Mac OS) show a regard for aesthetic that that even the 'friendlier' languages like Ruby or Python should strive for.

I can't help but feel that go is destined to become the NBL, at least in the world of enterprise development where static typing and OOP have become assumed if not necessary.

Aside from having the backing of Google, it provides C-like low-level access for systems programming, a clean syntax, static typic, a consistently evolving set of business-focused APIs, along with some of the conveniences normally associated with dynamic languages.

Obviously no language or set of libraries is designed with perfect foresight. But the painful aspects of popular languages like Java or C++ could probably be improved upon or even solved tomorrow given zero regard for backwards compatibility with legacy code. Go's relatively short legacy, combined with smart considerations for existing codebases (like gofix) mean that fundamental changes to the language or standard libs can be made in order to perfect the language. All while the language's limitations are being revealed in real world usage by the (presumably) demanding needs of users like Google and Go's early adopters.

I don't mean to sound like a fanboy, especially as someone who has mostly drank the dynamic typing Kool-Aid, but I can't wait to see what happens with go.

I've seen literally dozens of unresponsive and defective EC2 instances over the last year. This was spawning 100s of medium and large instances per day, with an average instance lifetime of around 3 hours.

From what I've read during my usage of AWS over the last couple of years, this is more the norm than the exception.

Maybe you just need to think different

Exactly my experience so far, except there's _still_ no decent Firefox replacement for Chrome's Google Quick Scroll. I forget I even use that extension in Chrome until I end up constantly Ctrl + F'ing the hell out of search results pages in Firefox.

Whoa... Internet in the NEK now? The largest introduction of new technology I ever saw growing up in Walden was getting a paved road that wasn't the highway. I figured up there you guys were still busy wrapping copper wires to make your memory cores ;)