Category: Uncategorised

In a chart of changes over the last decade, this must be the most impressive:



Books published in 2000 in the US:

282,000


Books published in 2010 in the US:

1,053,000

[[Britain](http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/27/dale-farm-essex-travellers-eviction)]:

Dale Farm is the largest Romany Gypsy and Irish Traveller site in the UK, and part of it is due for demolition.

A number of Gypsies and Travellers have lived at Dale Farm entirely legally since the 1960s. Over the years, more families came to join them after councils began shutting down public sites and Travellers were forced to look for permanent places to settle.

France:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday (28 July) announced his government is to order police to round up allegedly illegal migrants of Roma ethnicity for expulsion from French territory and destroy their encampments.

The announcement was the result of a cabinet meeting dedicated to the subject called after officers shot and killed a gypsy youth in the Loire Valley, provoking a riot by others of his community.

Xmonad is my window manager. I’ve had it configured to use dmenu as an ersatz command-line, but have been fairly unimpressed by its slowness, and by the difficulty of getting any notification of errors.

So I’m turning to yeahconsole. This is a drop-down terminal, something similar to

yakuake

, and hearking back ultimately to the headsup terminal in quake. To use: Ctrl-Alt-y to bring it up, type/run your command, M-A-y again to hide it.

I leave outstanding two jobs, one easy and one hard. Easy one is integrating it with xmonad, to launch on M-p. Hard one is making it vanish after executing a command; from a glance at the docs it seems this will only be possible by futzing with the source directly

as simple as



:! chmod u+x %



further to earlier grumbling about firefox, it seems the main culprit is the restore-session facility. This is something I hated anyway, even without realising that it was shutting down my hdd every 10 seconds to churn through all my tabs. Solution: go to about:config. browser.sessionstore.interval controls how often firefox stores its tab data. The default is 10 seconds; setting it to a long string of nines has sped up my computer no end.

and so, firefox is saved for another day.

also of note: the vimkeys plugin, providing j/k scrolling.

JSFiddle is a useful tool for editing javascript in a browser window. Raphael puts pretty pictures there. together, they make for a pretty decent learning interface.

I doubt very much _why is a Randian, but something in his self-annihilation reminds me of The Fountainhead. There’s something scary about the vigorous assertion that your creations are yours to destroy — something that’s uncomfortably on the border of right and wrong, in an intense and personal way.

Becoming increasingly infuriated by firefox eating up a disproportionate amount of my computer’s time. Alternatives, though, seem limited:

– Chromium: best of the alternatives, but has largely-dysfunctional text searching.

– Opera: still around, still not very good on a small screen

– flock: built on firefox, but with more stuff on top of it

– galeon: not even installable in ubuntu, for some reason

– uzbl: nice idea, gaping usability/discoverability problems

..and so I return grudgingly to firefox

At Web Monday. Presentations:

• First Trimester, blogging for doctors. Apparently while there are a lot of web projects targetting patients, there aren’t many blogs aimed at providing professional information for doctors.
  
• Yourcent, a micropayments system
  
• Feed Magazine a free german-language (paper) magazine about the online world. Now at issue 0

Not a good sign:

Amid the early April tumult that brought down former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s administration, young men in Bishkek and other cities began forming druzhiniki groups to patrol the streets and restore order. These groups were originally envisioned as a temporary solution to security challenges. But in the ongoing unrest that has plagued Kyrgyzstan since April, militia groups have kept on amassing influence. [Eurasianet