How Do I Get My Content Back?

Have you ever done that? Created a content item that is of sufficient length that your session expired? You hit “Save,” Joomla tells you that you are not authorized to view the resource, and you are left there with a giant blog entry that is gone for good. You think. I had that problem several times. Joomla could react a lot better to a session timeout than by making you lose hours of work, wouldn’t you think? Continue reading

First boarding day of the season!

Go shredding! I can’t believe I waited this long, but 1/4 was my first day of boarding this season. I took bayareaskibus.com to Kirkwood, and had a blast. It was an amazing trip, with perfect road conditions, perfect weather, and really good snow. The most exciting thing was that I didn’t have to drive one mile! I just hopped on the bus, and four and a half hours later I was on the slopes. Continue reading

bayareaskibus.com

No car and snowboarder? What do you do? Take your bike up to Tahoe (hopefully it’s motorized) with your gear and your snowboard strapped on your back? Comes in handy when going downhill, you can use the board as your wings and fly above the crowd waiting in that giant parking lot that is I-80 on a Sunday evening. So far, I had three options: rent a car, go with friends that are willing to drive, or hitch a ride with unknown strangers on craigslist or one of the carshare sites. Continue reading

Low-Carb Diet

[Note: this is the first post in a new section, Diet & Health. As my pics prove, I used to be seriously overweight (108kg, about 240 lbs) and lost all the extra weight, replacing much of it with muscle. I felt I can add to the plethora of diet advice on the Internet, because I had to learn so much about weight management.] It’s time for New Year’s Resolutions, and this year I decided to try a low carb diet. Continue reading

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (J. Toobin)

I waited for the paperback edition of this book to come out, and I did well. This is a book best read with a bit of distance to the events described. A history of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in recent times. Once an institution of minor rank, over the 20th century the Supreme Court transformed itself into a powerhouse of societal transformation, pushing the nation forward towards equality and the rule of law. Continue reading

Uncertainty (D. Lindley)

There is no topic in elementary physics as odd as quantum mechanics. Once you learn the formalism, it is easy to apply (although the mathematics required can be daunting). The experimenters say, on the other hand, that the results you get from quantum mechanical computations are accurate within the limits of measurement. Problem is, there is no reason for that. We are all a little surprised by how accurately QM models the world. Continue reading

Election Night

As a good California resident, it’s no surprise I cast my lot (figuratively) with Barack Obama, the clear favorite of the Golden State. Indeed, after the shortest election night I can remember, we heard the concession speech just after 8p and the victory speech soon after. One has to admit that the real surprise of the night was John McCain’s concession speech. It was the McCain I remember pre-2004: the man of integrity that puts his country above his own interests and those of his party. Continue reading

Kubuntu 8.10

Happy as a clam I followed the instructions to get my Kubuntu 8.04 machines upgraded to 8.10 – and with them KDE from 3.5 to 4.1. It was a swift download, about 30 minutes, and I encountered no problems at all with the installation process. Kudos! After the reboot, though, the problems started surfacing. Most of them were minor, and the only serious annoyance at this point was the changes to knetworkmanager. Continue reading

Om Shanti Om (2007)

It’s been a long while that I’ve been curious about Bollywood movies. I have enough friends from India that their constant chatter about them has started to make a dent, and I’ve been quite bored with standard Hollywood fare. I think part of it is that Netflix continues suggesting crappy movies from the 80s (Ladyhawke, Labyrinth and Working Girl amongst the latest). Regardless: when the Internation section of my recommendations contained a Bollywood title with great rating, I added it to my queue, not hoping much, but assuming it would be better than the other stuff I’d seen these days. Continue reading

OO vs. PP (KDE vs. Gnome)

In the flame war between Gnome and KDE, the leading desktop environments for Linux, I’ve always been on the side of KDE. As you may recall, KDE was first: based on the QT libraries from Norway’s Trolltech (now part of Nokia), KDE was the first real desktop environment for Linux. Then a Stallman-esque backlash at the licensing of QT generated a group that wanted a fully open-source product, and out of GIMP (the Gnu Image Manipulation Program) came Gnome. Continue reading