Text you place in code that you know you’ll search for later. One common example is “XXX“. If I have to write a quick-n-dirty hack to get around a problem, I’ll usually put an XXX comment near it. When I’m done writing the code, I’ll recursively grep for XXX to see if there’s anything I can clean up prior to release. Other examples include “TODO” (as mentioned at the above link) and a person’s login or nickname (”dpk”).

I’ve moved from Iceweasel to Firefox 3 beta4, and I’m in love. The bookmark handling is sweet. You can just edit a bookmark by going to the page and clicking on a little icon in the location bar. You can add and remove bookmarks right there, too. The save-password dialog box has been replaced with a box like the “pop-up blocked” thing that shows up just under the toolbars on FF2/Iceweasel, so you can decide whether or not to save it after you’re sure it was successful.

Best of all, the beta is way faster than Iceweasel ever was.

My only legit issue* with it is the ginormous drop-down that appears when you are entering URLs. If your mouse is hovering over a link in the drop-down, you can’t take proper advantage of the tab-completion — it’ll end up using your URL you’re hovering over. I think that might have been the case before, but it didn’t come up as often because the menu was so much smaller. I’m counting it as a focus issue, something that plagues Linux window managers and applications.

That rant said, I’m giving this browser the dpk stamp of approval.

* That is, other than that some plugins aren’t available for it yet.

So I’m taking a math class (pre-calc), mostly as a way to try to feel less dumb in my day-to-day life. I’m doing OK at it, getting most of the “higher” principles such as using conjugates to decomplexificate* a complex ratio. But I’m having trouble remembering some of the basics, especially during quizzes.

Historically, I’ve done better on quizzes than on homework, but now that I’m old, things have changed. Now I watch as other students finish their quizzes before I’m half way done with mine, and I still get things wrong.

I titled this post “math shame” because I hope that by sharing my shame, I will remember what I typed here, and will get it right the next time. Today’s inspiration is due to the fact that on a quiz, I forgot how to change √-2 into something that follows the “a + bi” form. I wrote 2i. The real answer, as pointed out by another student on our way out of class, is actually i√2. D’oh. If I had thought about √-4, I might have realized that’s really what 2i is.

I think this plan may work. There’s only two remaining class periods before the final, so I’ve got to get this shit down quick.

* Firefox says that’s not a word. Too bad.

I think I should hand out dpk.net Alexa ranking t-shirts at the next convention.

Here is a link that was shared to me. I now share it to you.

Garfield minus Garfield. I see now it was already on digg. I’ve failed you all.

The dpk-owning-a-house experiment has come to an end. Bought in a seller’s market, and sold in a buyer’s market, and I still came out ahead. Plus, I left the house in better shape than it was when I bought it. Everybody wins! Especially the excise tax board, sheesh.

To help pass the time waiting for the #28 bus, running on a Sunday schedule this being the great American holiday President’s Day, I went to the corner market and bought a red pen and a pad of paper. Both were proudly made in the USA. The pen, red to be patriotic, or because it was the only choice available? You decide. The paper is white, and if you squint and are colorblind the cover might look like what you would have to assume is blue.

However, the pen does not write, even though I intended to extol the virtues of compromise, and the “power of pride.” What a shame. Instead, I had to write this on my made-in-Mexico cell phone.

Every once in a while I’ll go out and pick up some CDs. I have an eMusic subscription, which is pretty awesome, but they don’t carry everything, and sometimes I just like to have the album art in my hands.

Like hundreds of others, I own an iPod, and use it for almost all of my music listening. I load it using iTunes. I use Windows, and presumably Apple is writing this software to try to lure me over to the Mac side. I mean, if I love it, I’m really going to love the Finder and all that, right? I sincerely hope I am wrong with this presumption.

So iTunes maintains a “Recently Added” playlist. It contains all of the tracks you’ve most recently ripped or added to your playlist. You can sync this playlist to your iPod, which is pretty sweet, because then you “always” have your new music in an easy to find place.

The problem? iTunes adds the tracks to the playlist, as they’re ripped, even if you’re ripping the entire CD in one operation. As implied by its name, the playlist is loaded by adding tracks to the beginning rather than the end. The result? When you go to play the tracks back on your iPod, they play back in reverse order. Brilliant!