The Dark Balloon

A weblog by Hao Lian.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.
A note that thanks you for being born, all those years ago.

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The definitive list of what will happen in 2008

dfdb is proud to expand to politics and music and culture and current events this year.

  • Despite the best efforts of America’s women, Obama will become president of the United States and, by proxy, the world. His vice president? Some white person nobody cares about.
  • The Funnelwhich will get a quantity of updates that is a multiple of three. Maybe.
  • New Amsterdam will get canceled even though it’s a damn good show.
  • Google’s suite of office software will continue to suck. TRUE
  • Apple will learn how to make iPod nanos not look like the fat chick nobody likes. Also, gray? Seriously? Gray’s going away.
  • People will continue to enjoy pornography in novel and exciting new ways despite the best efforts a new production company, n-girls + n-1 cups.
  • foobar 0.9.5.2 will be released to much “fanfare.”
  • Franz Ferdinand and The Fratellis will release their new albums. Somebody will make yet another postmortem album for Elliot Smith.
  • There will be no new Windows OS release because most scientists agree such an event would cause a permanent rip in the very fabric of Bill Gates’ pants. And nobody wants to see his butt.
  • That’s right, I’m making this public: Bill Gates goes commando on a daily basis. ♫ Thonnnng. ♫
  • House will get renewed despite crappier writing and even crappier medicine.
  • The next version of Mac OS X will contain, let’s say, Firewire support. And better icons than those in Leopard. And a TCP/IP Stack®.
  • People will continue to not care about any of the Linux operating systems.
[(2008 April 1) • • • • • • .]

Recent comments (Ethane, General announcement.) • (HAO, Jammies.) • (Tim, Jammies.) • (Prashanth, Wedding.) • (Hao, Hands.).

Recent posts (10/06, The myth and the man.) • (09/13, 2011 Sep 13.) • (08/21, Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.) • (08/21, Failing beautifully.) • (08/18, Shameless.).

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Order.

Make your title bar in GNU Emacs useful.

;; File names in title bars with a twist: Replace HOME with ~ while
;; still working with Emacs' / and HOME's \. And it works for
;; Windows-style HOMEs.
(setq frame-title-format 
      '(:eval 
        (if buffer-file-name
	    (replace-regexp-in-string
	     "\\\\" "/"
	     (replace-regexp-in-string 
	      (regexp-quote (getenv "HOME")) "~"
	      (convert-standard-filename buffer-file-name)))
          (buffer-name))))

Delete, not kill.

;; Damn it, stop messing with my clipboard.
(global-set-key "\C-c\C-d" 'delete-region)
(add-hook 'minibuffer-setup-hook
          '(lambda ()
             (define-key minibuffer-local-map "\C-c\C-d"
               '(lambda ()
                  "Delete everything in minibuffer"
                  (interactive)
                  (delete-minibuffer-contents)))))
[(2007 September 11) • • .]

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Reinstall.

I did something along the lines of del *.* in the Windows folder yesterday and had to reinstall Windows. (Impressive, I know.) Then I realized that Windows keeps all your documents and so obsoleted all five of my floppy disk backups and the hour I spent making them. Anyhoo, I'm reinstalling programs one by one right now but Windows 98 SE is blazing fast. It’ll be slow again in a couple months.

[(2003 August 10) • .]