On the whole, I quite like the improvements in Ubuntu 10.04. Things seem to be running better than ever and the purpleness is quite nice.

I don't, however, like the new top-left location of the close button and friends:

This article shows you how to fix that (at least until the Ubuntu folks put a nice UI for this somewhere).

Making decisions is hard. Sometimes.

While George W. Bush was the Decider, making a call and sticking to it with insane fervor, the rest of us sane folk need to be somewhat more circumspect in our decision-making process. I suggest a three-pronged attack:

• If possible, have a quantifiable measure of goodness by which you can evaluate the alternatives.
• Have a fixed algorithm for distinguishing alternatives that seem to be tied according to your measure of goodness.
• Learn to live with the fact that most decisions don't need to be optimal, just good enough--it's likely that the majority of your decisions aren't going to make that much difference and a bad decision just isn't that important in the grand scheme of things.

Once you have these down, convincing yourself that you did the right thing should be easier. Once you have that, confidence in your decisions should follow and you'll have the appearance of decisiveness.

So my wife and I had a belated Valentine's Day weekend and decided to spend it overnight at Cameron's in Half Moon Bay.

Positives:

• Right...over...a...bar (an English-style pub, in fact, with great food).
• Saturday night karaoke.
• Not too expensive ($109 for the night).
• A free beer with night's stay.

Negatives:

• The room was quirky. Very quirky. Almost too quirky for us (and our tolerance of quirk is legendary).

In summary, we were glad to have the one-night adventure and it was fun but not worth doing again. It was the sort of experience everyone should have exactly once. Enumerated list of quirks after the break.

Update: Safeway's not changing their minds and the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control's directives are out-of-date. See below!

I've recently run into some ambiguity with regard to whether passport cards can be used for the same identification purposes that a conventional passport card can.

While I've verified that the passport card is valid for Form I-9 (the form you have to fill out when you start working at a new place. See the top of list A on the last page), I asked the California Secretary of State for clarification. See the email I received in response below:

I've been working with virtual appliance payloads a fair amount lately and have taken to disambiguating between virtual and non-virtual machines this way:

VM = VM, since everyone uses that

Non-VM = "hardbox," since it implies both a piece of hardware and a complete system.

Just wanted to make a note here so I can be the one that coined the word for this context. (C)2009-10 by B.J. Black :-)

From Goats:

"I wish World War Four would hurry up and get here so we can all be conquered by the flavor of fresh Pocky."

Sometimes spam message titles just make me smile... :-)

So if you call exec() from a sub called by SIGALRM, you need to unmask SIGALRM before calling the exec() or risk losing further alarms:

use POSIX qw(SIGALRM SIG_UNBLOCK sigprocmask);
...
sub handler {
    my $sigset = POSIX::SigSet->new( &POSIX::SIGALRM );
    sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK, $sigset, undef);
    ...
    exec([stuff]);
}
$SIG{ALRM} = \&handler;

Without the sigprocmask, your alarm will fire exactly once, be masked from running again, and your subsequent processes won't have an alarm to use anymore.

Just so the almighty Google picks this up...

If you:

• Use Debian with Exim and exim4-config on e.g. a web server, and
• Attempt to send email from the box to:
• A mail address that your smarthost knows about

...you will need to create an account on your box for that email address or get "unroutable address" errors.

Actually, this starts out more like a soup and becomes rather porridge-like the next day (thanks to the barley and potato). But it's got both bacon and scallops (which are unclean according to Kosher law), so it's an Abomination (tm).

You can probably do this without the pressure cooker, but it will take a lot longer... Full recipe after the break.