Must-read for all developers

The 7xx range of HTTP status codes.  I've had a use for many of these.

Good thing we're not in the Middle Ages anymore

Otherwise we might have to put up with this kind of shit.

What's offensive now?

So some marines are in trouble for peeing on the bodies of some folks that they killed.  Watch the video where the newz d00d says that the "offensive bits" are blurred out.

Let's pretend this is a children's magazine (and some magazine it would be!) and we're supposed to be listing the things we see in the photo:

1. Marines occupying a foreign land
2. Dead, bloody bodies
3. Urination taking place, onto said bodies
4. Penises.

Clearly, 1-3 are cool, but 4 is just... OFFENSIVE.

Two layers of fail here.  Fail the first: If you kill me and then pee on me, it's the killing that'd bug me far more than the peeing.  Fail the second: the offensive part of an image of marines desecrating their kill is... the desecrating and the kill.  Not the penis.

Now if you'll permit a sweeping generalization: nothing says "AMERICA" like the intersection of ultra-violence and prudishness.

A nice introduction to yak shaving

Can be found here.

How to set an alarm clock

Giles instructs.

Nuclear: Safe energy, or Safest Energy?

Consider this.  Of course Chernobyl makes for better TV than a bunch of individuals dying from lung cancer.  Humans are VERY vulnerable to availability bias.  So... we get what we get.

Pulse reader - from awesome to fail

Pulse reader was a pretty cool app for ios and android. RSS has been done a bunch, but they had a cool ui for mobile devices so I bought the app.

A couple weeks ago, the app started hounding me hard to upgrade. They had a new catalog feature or something for finding new content.

I didn't care about the catalog feature at all. The app was great as it was, though i guess I wouldn't have complained if they fixed the bug where every once in a while the "sent to instapaper" feature would suddenly start to fail silently. You only knew its happened when you logged onto instapaper later and noticed the missing stuff. That's another story though.

So the hounding was pretty persistbent. Every time you opened he app,it blocked you with a modal dialog making sure that you still knew about their catalog thingy. No option acknowledge and not be shown again - you got it every time.

So I finally get pissed enough that I give in and upgrade, promising myself to never use the stupid catalog thing out of protest. This is a pay app, I'd refer less hounding.

I have no idea what the catalog is, I haven't used it. I do know however that the app crashes whenever I try to view an article. Which is really what a reader is all about. Reading articles.

So now I have a catalog thing that I guess I could use to discover new content that I could add to be reader and then... Not be able to read.

Some product manager somewhere thought this was a good way to build a band or something, but in my case it's doing the opposite.

Can haz downgrade? Or maybe I should switch to a less hostile app..

First world problems... I shall take my traveler's checks to a competing resort...