3 posts from October 2007

"Fanboys" and the IT media

Here is what I've come to learn from the mainstream IT media:

  • If you prefer Linux to Windows, and encourage its use to others, you are a fanboy and/or fantaic
  • If you prefer OS X to Windows, and encourage its use to others, you are a fanboy and/or fanatic
  • Corollary: If someone makes a ridiculous claim about Linux or OS X (e.g. "Yeah but you can't read PDFs in Linux!") and you attempt to show this to be wrong, then you are a fanboy.
  • Linux/OS X fanboys are ridiculous. No one wants to be ridiculous. Therefore, don't use anything other than Windows.
  • There are far more fanboys in the minds of reporters than exist in reality, by a factor of approximately 1000:1.

Every "reporter" who uses the word "fanboy" -- except to decry the stupidity of the word -- should be forced to wear a scarlet letter "F" around their neck.

The "F" is for "FAIL".

1 comment Tags: media, fanboy, zealot

GNU Screen

I tend to avoid evangelism of any sort these days, but if you are a unix weenie of any flavor and do not use screen then you are, quite frankly, not cool.


Screen needs some help to make it more visually appealing, so here's a snippet from my .screenrc. (Note: I lifted this off another website many moons ago. Props to whoever did it.) This makes a pretty blue bar at the bottom of your screen that shows you your different screens (analogous to tabs). 

hardstatus on
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string "%{.bW}%-w%{.rW}%n %t%{-}%+w %=%{..G} %H %{..Y} %m/%d %C%a "

Screen shot of above:


Screen is very, very handy. It always surprises me that more people don't seem to know about it. It's far more elegant than any GUI solution; the real estate is minimal (and optional, actually), and being able to attach to an existing session is just the epitome of cool. 

Post a comment Tags: unix, gnu screen

JCaptcha and ImageFilters

FYI: JCAPTCHA uses the robust set of ImageFilters from JH Labs. These include a WarpFilter, which is what I was looking for but was unable to find. For a while. A long while. Far longer than it should have.


The documentation for it could be improved, but so could the underlying API. (Builder, anyone? Please?) It does its job, and it is a small open source project, so they are certainly deserving of props for doing what they've done. I'm just bitter because I'm almost done with this thing and want to move on to playing with Glassfish.

Post a comment Tags: java captcha filters