Ubuntucat

You’re not going to convince me not to use Firefox. I’m allowed to rant about it without people trying to push other browsers on me. I’ve already tried Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Galeon, Dillo, Lynx, and Ka… Kaha… whatever that other browser is.

Sigh.

That stupid new Control-Q keyboard shortcut, though. Control-W (close tab) is a regular part of my browsing experience. I open tabs. I close tabs. But then Firefox recently added in Control-Q (quit Firefox) as a keyboard shortcut. It sounds like a good idea. I’m actually a big fan in general of the Cmd-Q (Mac OS X) and Control-Q (KDE) approach. There should be a relatively easy way to quit an application (Alt-F4 is not a comfortable keyboard combination for me).

But, of course, Control-Q (quit Firefox) is now right next to Control-W (close tab), and I often find myself quitting when I want to just close a tab. Yes, I know I can have Firefox confirm when I want to close, but I don’t want it to confirm… I just don’t want it to close. If someone knows of an about:config trick to turn off Control-Q, let me know. In the meantime, I have Firefox set to open with the same tabs from my last session.

In high school, college, and beyond, I’ve had many conversations with female friends about street harassment, and the conversations have almost always been disheartening. It usually goes something like this:

• Woman is minding her own business on the street, on the bus, in a coffee shop, in a store.
• Random man makes a lewd sexual remark or gesture or begins talking to her when she clearly does not want to talk with him, and then he begins staring at her cleavage or otherwise making her physically uncomfortable.
• Woman’s only instinct is to be polite even though she really does not want to deal with this man. She wants to say something clever to get him to piss off but she freezes up in the moment.
• Woman is pissed the rest of the day that that guy intruded on her space and she had no foolproof way of dealing with it.

I don’t really know what exactly can be done about this. Of course, sometimes it happens that you think up a witty retort that evening or the next day, but by then it’s too late, and you can’t really know if it would have worked to drive the guy away or if it would have just provoked him more (perhaps someone like him, who is not able to pick up on basic social cues, may take your ingenious way of shooing him away as some kind of twisted flirtation?).

What’s the solution? If you try to ignore the guy, you appear rude and/or you still feel violated. If you try to tell the guy to go away, he may feel egged on anyway.

I’m not a woman, so it’s easy for me to say this, but I think in this situation it’s best to avoid wit or politeness and just say something firm and, well, “bitchy”:

“I don’t want to talk to you. Quit staring at my breasts or face the consequences.” If that doesn’t shut up him, yell loudly, “I said ‘Leave me alone,’ asshole!” so that others nearby can hear you. If he still doesn’t, kick him in the nuts—hard.

I guess you could argue the guy was just in a pathetic way looking for attention, so that would just feed into his game. Can a woman in this situation win? Any strategies to share?

Every now and then in the tech news I see a new product announced as the fill-in-the-blank-killer. The most commonly touted is the supposed iPod-killer, though I’ve also seen supposed Macbook Air-killers, supposed Eee-killers, and supposed Google-killers.

The idea that some new product on the horizon is going to metaphorically “kill” some well-established industry-dominant product may make great news, but it’s also based on a faulty assumption that people buy or use products based on the products’ relative quality or features.

iPods aren’t popular because they are the best MP3 players on the market, even if you believe they are best. Google isn’t popular because it is the best search engine available, even if you believe it is the best. Whether iPods or Google is “the best” is irrelevant. Being “the best” may help the products or services retain their popularity, but it isn’t the primary reason they remain popular. It’s not workmanship and features. It’s entrenchment. It’s brand-name recognition. It’s also ignorance.

Do you know how many times I’ve had people assume my Sandisk player is a new kind of iPod? Do you know how many times people get confused when I tell them I don’t have an iPod? They seriously wonder how I’m able to listen to music. The furrowed brow almost says, “Is it possible he still listens to a Walkman… or listens to only records?” There are great things about iPods, I won’t deny. I love the circle scroll wheel, and I have to say they just look pretty. That said, they don’t have radios (and I’m not going to pay $50—the entire cost of my Sandisk player—to get some add-on that will allow an iPod to play the radio), don’t have a microphone, and won’t support drag-and-drop of music (you need a program like iTunes to manage your music transfers).

You could make a case by feature comparisons that many other MP3 players on the market are “better” than the iPods Apple produces. Maybe they can play more music formats. Maybe the sound is “better” for audiophiles. Maybe the battery life is longer. Maybe the screen is bigger. It doesn’t really matter. Most iPod owners I know (not all, of course) own an iPod because that’s all they know, and they don’t want to spend hours researching all the relatively unknown alternatives. iPods are convenient and “everybody” has them. They’re a safe bet. And that’s all people really want, a safe bet and what they’re used to.

I’ve been using Google for years now, and the only time I even considered switching was when the news announced the supposed Google-killer called Cuil. I thought I’d give it a shot, did two searches that turned up no results, and then I switched back to Google. Is it possible that there are better search engines out there than Google? It’s possible, definitely. Do I want to try every single search engine until I find “the best” one? No. Google is what I’m used to, and it works for me.

This is human nature, I think. No one has the time to test out every single option for every single thing they do. You can do a reasonable amount of research before making a choice, especially for big-ticket items (where to attend university, what car to purchase, which house to put a down payment on), but you wouldn’t have any time to live your life if you looked at every single shirt available before buying a shirt, tried every single search engine before picking one, read reviews for every single book before choosing one to read, and studied every restaurant’s menu before eating at one.

It’s for this very reason that I don’t try to “convert” Windows users to Linux. I think Linux is a great alternative to Windows under many circumstances, but if people are happy with Windows and used to it, they should be left alone with their choice. I certainly would get annoyed if people said, “You’re using Google still? What a sheep you are. You should use fill-in-the-blank search engine instead. It’s much better.” I know it’s possible there are better search engines out there. I just don’t see the need to change right now. Google works for me.

Now, that said, if someone complains about her iPod stinking and she wishes it had X, Y, and Z features, I’d be the first to suggest a non-Apple player. And if Google started turning up crappy search results, I’d be the first to ask, “Is there a better search engine than Google?” For something to “kill” the product or service I’m used to, it has to do a lot more than just be “better” or have extra features. It’s not easy to depose a king by promising to be a better king. A revolution against the current tyrant usually has to happen first.

Right now I’m reading Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters by Jessica Valenti, and I have to say, with a few rough bumps along the way, it’s an impressive piece of literature. Most of the feminist works I’ve read—while rationally argued, fully annotated, and well-written—are dry and too academic for most pre-university readers to enjoy. Cynthia Heimel’s humorous books (columns originally published in Playboy magazine, ironically) like Get your tongue out of my mouth. I’m kissing you good-bye! and If you can’t live without me, why aren’t you dead yet? were the closest to accessible-for-teenagers feminist writings, and even those were mainly targeted at 20-something and 30-something readers.

Jessica Valenti has done a great thing in terms of boiling down the essential feminist issues into large print in a small book. The book does have its flaws, of course. For one, it tries too hard. It also does a little bit of a mental bait-and-switch. You have to be a little forgiving on the former problem, though, since it is taking on the nigh-impossible task of making feminism “cool” for girls and women born after 1990. The latter problem seems to stem from a lack of restraint on the part of the author. Valenti begins by essentially saying, “Hey, everyone should be a feminist. It makes sense. It’s not a scary thing. It isn’t some crazy fringe of whining unattractive people (not that there’s anything wrong with being unattractive). Are you on board?” but then quickly starts hammering you with statistics about rape and domestic violence—issues she quite rightly gets passionately outraged over.

I do admire, though, how she treads a very fine line on the whole “freedom” debate. She manages to get across that she values freedom from patriarchy most highly while not disparaging those in the “doesn’t freedom mean I have the freedom to be traditionally feminine?” camp. In other words, she appreciates balance and does not want to alienate anyone.

The whole time reading the book, though, I kept thinking, “Someone should write a Full Frontal Linux book like this.” I’ve seen books like [Fill in the blank] for Non-Geeks, but they’ve basically still been pretty geeky. How do you make Linux “cool” for the general public? How do you explain that software license freedom is the ultimate goal while not alienating those who still want their free-to-run-what-proprietary-software-I-want freedom? Who knows? Maybe after I finish reading Full Frontal Feminism, I’ll take a crack at Full Frontal Ubuntu (I probably don’t know enough to speak for all of Linux).

Hats off to Jessica Valenti. It’s not a perfect work by any means, but it fills a niche that needed filling.

Every now and then my friends seem to accidentally have their files deleted. You can read here about last year’s incident. This year, another friend, who keeps her photos on one laptop with no backups had some folders mysteriously go empty. I had no idea how they got deleted, but I assured her we could probably get most of them back. I didn’t realize what it would take, though!

First of all, I had to borrow an external hard drive, since mine didn’t have enough free space to copy over her entire drive. I booted up a Ubuntu live CD and installed testdisk and tried to run

on the drive. It appeared to work until it got to 1464 files. Then it just froze up. So I stopped it and restarted it. Froze on 1464 again. Clearly something was wrong. So I tried scanning only the unallocated space on the drive and Photorec gave me a segmentation fault error. I knew the drive was probably damaged in some way.

I figured imaging the drive with ddrescue would solve the problem. I ran it overnight and the next day I realized the external hard drive I’d borrowed was formatted as FAT32 and so would not hold a disk image larger than 4 GB. I resized the partition and created a new NTFS partition and ran ddrescue again. There were a lot of bad blocks on that drive in various places. Running front to back and then running back to front, ddrescue took almost 40 hours to image that 80 GB hard drive with bad blocks.

Then it took another four hours for Photorec to scan the imaged drive and recover the photos. I don’t think it ended up getting everything, but it got a lot, and my friend was grateful and felt a little guilty that I’d spent so much time recovering her data. Instead of accepting a thank-you from her, I told her, “Just buy an external hard drive and back up your photos.”

I think it’s human nature to have to learn the hard way. Most people don’t start backing up until they’ve lost important files.