a timocracy of one

Pretty self-explanatory. After seeing yet another blog post in the community on this, I decided to throw in my meager PageRank 5 help on the LogoMaid are rip-off artists campaign.

Update: Why trademark “theft” versus copyright “violation”? When you violate copyright you are committing a crime, but not directly taking anything away from the owner, unless you would have bought the product yourself, or you are distributing it to other who would have (then the lost sales argument comes in). Not that I support any form of Intellectual Property violation, as I depend on IP for my living (I don’t even generally download music – since I don’t pirate, and am boycotting the RIAA), but the case for it being directly equivalent to theft in most cases seems harder to make. Dilution of a trademark, though, to me, seems to be a more cut-and-dried harm, and you are directly taking something from them: public recognition of their branding.

I updated my versioncopy of typo and cribbed some of the fixes from scribbish (which my theme is based on, since it’s touted as a good tabula rasa for building themes) for returning feedback to the user even with moderation enabled.

I use a lot of the Google Apps, and generally don’t mind that they are opinionated, as they are usually close enough to right, in my view, and I don’t have to use them, after all. Well, this breaks down for me with Google groups, because there is at least one fundamentally aggravating problem with their interface and you are closer ( I could go back to the stone ages and actually store all the messages offline in a newsreader) to locked in if the owner hosts the group on google; and with their grabbing up everything they can, there is a lot that is hosted on GG. And they don’t even seem to hear complaints about it

So what is are my specific problems? The biggest is that messages don’t seem to get marked as read in any sort of logical way. Big deal you say? It is, in my view. In fact, I say it is one of the most fundamental aspects of the software, and it’s broken. I don’t care about the rest of the fancy features they add if this one isn’t working. It makes the unread messages functionality actually more harmful than leaving it out to have halfway implemented. I’d rather be able to turn it off and thus stop checking on groups that incorrectly show new messages, up until I click down into them (proof that the code works somewhere, since they show correctly then)

In short, Google does a good job of making opinionated software when they say “that functionality will never be implemented, because you aren’t supposed to use it like that,” but that approach doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to your users concerns when they are complaining about things that don’t work, as intended (there is only one way I can figure that “unread messages” is intended, and they already implemented it quite well in their RSS reader).

For a long time I’ve wanted to be able to click onto my desktop and jot down a quick note, keeping that as my background. I looked for ways to do that via ActiveDesktop and never found exactly what I was looking for (it should be doable, but I didn’t try and implement it myself or anything). Well, now I’ve found something close enough.

I found a link to WriteRoom on one of the blogs I read, and that had a link to a Windows version, DarkRoom. While the original intent seems to be to give you a very simple fullscreen editor (to help minimize distractions), if you instead set width and height to auto in the prefs, and don’t fullscreen it, you get what I was looking for, or close enough. Of course, it covers up any icons on your desktop, but I thought those were clutter anyways.

So Alek has started blogging again. He’s the creator of the handy AdxMenu, a dropdown menu that uses simple semantic mark-up and css, and then whatever minimum amount of js is needed to make IE work, like Suckerfish, but can also add in his Windows Control Hider that makes it cover up select boxes in IE 6 and lower.

Oh, and if you are in a professional setting where blogs designed around supermodels might be inappropriate, he’s redesigned for a much cleaner simpler look… minus the Yasmeen. ;)

Ever get tired of the first result in your address bar dropdown for a given URL being a typo that goes to a 404? Well, you can delete just that entry, after all.

In Firefox, if you want to delete an individual entry from the History, just highlight it (either in the History sidebar or in the address bar drop-down) and press Shift+Delete.

from: downloadsquad

In what seems to be my new drive for finding distractions, I decided I got tired of not knowing when I was at my own blog, due to having the same new theme as everyone else using Typos (Scribbler). So, I ported over the old theme from my company, InfoSauce. I slightly repurposed it and upgraded the css to work with the new code. Of course, in doing so I broke it in at least IE, somewhat, so I’ll be touching it up as I go.

I noticed that Scribbler actually has one minor bug in IE, as well. The code blocks don’t autoscroll like they do in Firefox, so if they are too wide they kick the sidebar down to the bottom. I just gave them a width, so IE would know to engage the overflow:auto. That is still not perfect, because then you get vertical scrollbars in IE, due to the loss of 16px, when the scrolling is activated, but it’s better than it was.