Scatterism

Defuse Bullshit

Rami Kayyali — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 22:04:08 +0000

We lie for three reasons:

To protect ourselves.
It’s a gamble, it might just work.
We want to be seen as better than ourselves.

Enjoy the primer on how to detect bullshit, by Scott Berkun.

Tabs Abstract Indentation

Rami Kayyali — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 20:19:23 +0000

Deane, from Gadgetopia has something to say about tabs:

I will use tabs with wild abandon (when you think about it, tabs are an abstraction layer for indenting — they just tell the code to what level it should be indented, not how far it should appear to be indented, like spaces do)

I personally prefer tabs a lot more than spaces, I completely agree that spaces are used in most cases just so code looks consistent in all editors, but I digress.

Two Tiny Things

Rami Kayyali — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 00:52:14 +0000

One:

Please don’t use Lightbox or any other colored box unless absolutely necessary. It looks really cool, but it steals away my right to middle-click. I’m telling you, I have tabs and I am not afraid to use them.

Two:

These guys are saying that it’ll take you around seven lifetimes to scroll to the bottom of their page. If anybody finishes this, please let me know, I’d like to know how excessive self-satisfaction feels like.

BumpTop, a Physics-based Desktop

Rami Kayyali — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 23:56:43 +0000

This baby is absolutely stunning and is probalby how Scoble should have evangelized tablets. Hey, at least it looks better than Microsoft Bob.

Onward, Rover!

Removed “www” Prefix

Rami Kayyali — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 00:16:42 +0000

It slipped my mind after I upgraded to WordPress. All my permalinks point to ramikayyali.com instead of www.ramikayyali.com, so it’s pretty pointless to split statistics to both domains.

I added a 301 redirect to remove the “www” prefix from my site’s URL. Thought you should know, in case your feed reader goes crazy for no reason.

Dive Into Mark Again

Rami Kayyali — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 19:48:53 +0000

Mark Pilgrim happens to be one of my all-time favorite bloggers. I was so sorry he was gone away for a while. He authored Dive Into Python, Dive Into Greasemonkey, and the Universal Feed Parser.

Maybe it’s two months too late to say this, but I’m very happy Mark’s back on my feed list. Thank you Mark.

Fixing Skype Sound Problems on Linux

Rami Kayyali — Tue, 09 May 2006 09:10:06 +0000

Skype’s backend is based on OSS. This causes Skype to have many problems with full-duplexing. OSS is fairly old, I think it already served it’s purpose and served it well, but that’s about enough, move on to ALSA already.

On Linux, Skype’s not a very good citizen, so if you’re getting “Problem with sound device” errors and “/dev/dsp-1: Device or resource busy” errors, here’s what to do:

Install alsa-oss package, wraps around software that uses OSS and makes it ALSA-compatible. Most distributions (at least Fedora, Ubuntu and Arch) call this package the same.
Run aoss /usr/bin/skype
(Optional) Rename /usr/bin/skype and put a bash script in its place to run aoss
Enjoy free calls!

Update: You don’t need to this anymore because Skype have already released an ALSA-compatible version for Linux. Let’s go nuts.

Pretty Good Age Guesser

Rami Kayyali — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 18:35:47 +0000

Nothing big, but I came across this age guesser, looks pretty good.

And yes, it guessed 23, a couple of months more, but what the hell.

Define Turnkey

Rami Kayyali — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 09:24:50 +0000

Turnkey \Turn”key`\, n.; pl. Turnkeys.

1. A person who has charge of the keys of a prison, for opening and fastening the doors; a warder.

2. (Dentistry) An instrument with a hinged claw, — used for extracting teeth with a twist.

Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICR

Thanks to Buzzsaw.

Random Highlights

Rami Kayyali — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 10:06:20 +0000

Seth’s video takes away 48 minutes of your time. Don’t interrupt. Make sure you watch it.
Getting Real by 37 Signals is what I’m reading right now. I love the clean layout, but I haven’t finished yet, so I can’t post a review.
Zend’s framework seems to be the hype in the PHP world these days. My god I’ve been away for long, probably too long. Have a look at Harry’s post.
This little distro is becoming a favorite of mine. It’s minimalistic, amazingly snappy, and has all the package that work. BSD-style boot scripts though, not a big deal, but watch out for it.
Gentoo 2006.0 is released. There’s a live CD with an installer. I’m having a feeling that I’m not going to use it anyway. I’m sure Gentoo can be made just as simple as Arch (Archoo?), probably needs a binary repos.
Digital, Intel and Xerox are DIX!