Saturday, August 20, 2005 12:04 PM | rahel luethy | 7 comment(s)
as you probably all know, hundreds of thousands of young people are currently celebrating a pop star who is fighting homosexuality, birth control, and sexual equality in the name of god.
in a weak attempt to counterbalance the immense and mostly uncritical media coverage, i'd like to mention two religious alternatives:
flying spaghetti monsterism was launched as a parody of intelligent design (which is allowed to be taught in science classes in kansas as an alternative to evolution). followers of the noodly master, so called pastafarians, end their prayers with "ramen". consider this relegion if you are on a high-carb diet.
alternatively, consider invisible pink unicornism: the IPU, and its younger brother IGD, the invisible green dragon, are mock god(esse)s. they don't have actual believers, but if they had, these believers could be sure that both deities are beings of high spiritual power. like for a lot of religions, the IPU-ists could build their believes on faith and logic: they could trust in the fact that the IPU is pink and would logically know that it is invisible since they can't see it.
here's a picture of the IPU:
short excursus: yesterday, my sister in law drew a picture of a colorful, neat little dwarf for aviva, my cute little niece who is 4 1/2. since aviva was in a rebellious mood, she stroke through the dwarf and instead drew an angry monster-view of herself. in big letters she wrote: "AVIVA 4/2 DONTLIKE PIKTS GOTOGEIL"
note that there are some people who would like to send the spaghetti monster page to jail. while this might be worth a discussion, i'd rather nominate glossolalia, a page on the "christian view of speaking in tongues"...
Friday, August 19, 2005 12:42 PM | rahel luethy | 0 comment(s)
i'm not an emacs or vi freak. nevertheless, i definitely prefer keyboard navigation to awkward mouse waving. i don't even want to think about how difficult life would be without all those handy eclipse key bindings.
the application i use 2nd most in my programming life is firefox. however, i have never really familiarized myself with all its keyboard shortcuts. of course i use Ctrl+T to open new tabs, Ctrl+L to access the location bar, Ctrl+F to search for text, and Alt+Home to return to my home page. but that's just about it...
time to catch up! here's a "less than one page manual" on firefox navigation:
the three most important shortcuts i've learned: Enter to follow a link, Alt+<- to go back, and Ctrl+Tab to cycle between tabs. hard to imagine that i could actually live without them?!
the Find as you type bar (launchable via Ctrl+F or good ol' /) is probably quite popular. it lets you type in a search phrase and incrementally searches for text while you type. what is less known, is the fact that the same bar can also be launched via '. it will then work in a different mode, in which it only highlights links. this is extremely handy: jump to a link, press Enter, and off you go...
alternatively, you can use Caret Browsing, a feature which has been introduced recently (press F7 to toggle it on or off). if switched on, you see a cursor which you can move around via arrow keys. again, the functionality is sensitive to links: as soon as the cursor is placed over a link (indicated by a dotted box) you can follow the link by pressing Enter.
the battle is on: who can use firefox without ever touching the mouse? i still can't :-(
Friday, August 12, 2005 2:55 PM | rahel luethy | 1 comment(s)
yet another great firefox extension: bugmenot maintains tons of credentials for sites which require registration. open sesame through a simple right-click on the username/password field. give it a try with the digital editions of guardian or the new york times.
(credits to james, even though he was being mean)
