WTF?  Why is this snippet so awful?  Can we fix it?

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test

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Get your #musicmonday  moving with some Greek punk/grunge.

You can really hear the Nirvana-esque Steve Albini production along with shades of X, the Sex Pistols and Gossip.

I suppose Punk from disaffected youth is the only silver lining for the Greek financial mess.

h/t to Pixbear for review.

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Okay, it's totally non-obvious and buried in the settings...  There is some magic that detects that it's a following circle:

https://cs.corp.google.com/#google3/java/com/google/apps/tacotown/socialgraph/client/CircleNameSugge...

Originally shared by Trey Harris

This bears repeating. Privacy is important, and Google+ has great privacy controls. But you need to know how they work to use them to best advantage.

The first rule of privacy on Google+: people don't get any access to your info without you taking action. Relationships in G+ are "asymmetric", meaning you can "follow" someone ("adding to a circle", or "circling") without their having to reciprocate by circling you back. When you circle someone, the things they share you'd already be able to see anyway — because they're shared publicly or with a circle that includes you — will appear in your streams. But if you go to their profile before and after you circle them, you won't see much difference — circling someone doesn't give you access to their info.

At the same time, when you circle someone else, you are not only asking Google+ to put that person's shares into your stream, but you're also giving them access to things you share with your circles. For instance, if you edit your profile (the circle with a profile in the buttons up top of the G+ web interface), you can give people in your circles access to your email address or your phone number. Those are people you have added to your circles, not people who have circled you. (When you edit your profile, you can change the visibility of items by clicking the little icon next to each one.)

Similarly, if you enable G+ chat, when you click the triangle to the right of your name in the chat box (in the left sidebar of your G+ stream, not in Gmail) you can choose whether "Your Circles" can chat you, or a custom selection of circles. Note that those people must have also circled you and done the same; chat is obviously one case where reciprocity matters!

But if you've been paying attention, you'll notice that you circle someone for two different reasons: one, to see their shares in your stream, and two, to give them access to your info and/or chat. This makes sense most of the time; people you know are the people you want to hear from. But sometimes the two don't align, and when they don't, you need to know a couple of more advanced tricks, which I've taken screenshots of below.

First, not all circles are created equal. Some circles are ones you may use for celebrities or people you don't know but who publicly share interesting stuff. (A lot of people use the "Following" circle for that.) Maybe you want to get their stuff in your stream, but you don't want to give them any access to your info. No problem: go to https://www.google.com/settings/plus and click "Customize" under "Your circles" (first screenshot). Then make sure only the circles you want to share with have the checkbox clicked (second screenshot). Now, when you see "Your circles", you know that really means "all my circles but the ones I unchecked here", and you're safe to add whoever you want to "just follow" to those unchecked circles without giving them visibility to things you want to share in a limited fashion.

What about the reverse case? Maybe you have business associates or acquaintances who post stuff you don't care to read, but you do want them to have the "always up to date" contact information in your profile (especially useful if they have an Android phone or use Gmail!) and/or access to chat you. In that case, put such people together in a new circle (I call mine "Contacts", because that's how I think of them). Make sure the circle is checked in the "Your circles" setting we just saw. Then go to your stream and click that circle's name in the lefthand sidebar (third screenshot). Now, at the top, you'll see a slider. Drag it all the way to the left (fourth screenshot), so it says "Show nothing from this stream in my main stream" (fifth screenshot).

Now you won't see this circle's shares unless you specifically go to this stream again, but since this circle is part of "Your Circles", they'll have access to the things you want to share with them.

(One final note: when you enable chat in G+, you have your choice between allowing chat from "Your Circles" and a custom set you select. This gives you even a bit more control. Maybe you don't want to be chatted by that guy you're following with the interesting but weird political opinions, but you'd just love it if your favorite celebrity were to respond to your insightful comment with a chat. It's your choice.)

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So my Nexus4 order was backordered.  So here's the next best thing.  I was able to get the following since I've been with T-Mobile for over 10 years:

- $199 with $50 mail in rebate.

- Waived the overnight shipping fee of $24.99 (as a credit to my bill)

- You do need a data plan of >$35/month on the line and a 2 year contract extension, however the standard plan comes with 400 text messages so I was able to consolidate a text message bundle with the data bundle and end up at $0 change.

- Retain the rest of my FamilyTime,@Home service and the G1 data plan on the other line.

And it will arrive tomorrow...

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Have to love the low tech doodles that the Missouri Lounge does for their advertisements in the East Bay Express. 

Check them out at 

https://plus.google.com/115477316230066484040

West Berkeley’s longest running dive bar, keeping people hip since 1953.

Now does anyone have a nerd walks into a bar... jokes?

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Since you missed this before...

Originally shared by Theodore Ts'o

Phoronix, alas, has perpetrated another example of irresponsible journalism.   I won't dignify said article with a web link, since I don't want to reward them with more ad hits.  So I'll link to the original Ubuntu Launchpad report, and include the comment I just made there:

Those specific fsck corrections --- fixing the number of free blocks and the number of free inodes --- is completely normal and is purely a cosmetic issue. There is nothing to worry about here.

What is going on is that ext4 no longer updates the superblock after every block and inode allocation; that causes a wasteful write cycle to the superblock at every single journal commit, and it also is a SMP scalability bottleneck for larger servers (i.e., with 32 or 64 CPU's). To fix this, we no longer update these values in the superblock every time we allocate a block or an inode. Instead, we only update these values when we unmount the file system, mainly for cosmetic purposes so that dumpe2fs shoes the correct number of free inodes and blocks, and at mount time we calculate the total number of free blocks and inodes in the file system by summing the the free blocks/inodes statistics for each block group. So in fact, ext4 does not depend on the correctness of the values in the superblock, but it does try to update them on a clean unmount.

In e2fsprogs commit id 2788cc879bbe6, which is in e2fsprogs 1.42. 3 and newer, we changed things so that e2fsck -n would not display this as something "wrong". However, we still do show this as something that we "fix" when running e2fsck -y or -p, since in fact it is a change to the file systems. See: http://git.kernel.org/?p=fs/ext2/e2fsprogs.git;a=commit;h=2788cc879bbe667d28277e1d660b7e56514e5b30

No one else has complained or noticed up until now, because other distro's apparently are capable of doing a clean shutdown allowing the file system to be unmounted cleanly. Ubuntu, unfortunately, is incapable of reliably doing a clean shutdown even when users request it, which is why Ubuntu users are seeing this behavior much more frequently, and apparently some people have panicked as a result. Sigh....

----

I will say that it is extremely irresponsible of Phoronix to make a big deal about this this before giving anyone knowledgeable (which unfortunately  does not include any Ubuntu kernel engineers, since as far as I know they don't have any file system specialists on staff) to comment on the bug.  No one from Phoronix even bothered to contact me to tell me they were posting this story, or to ask me for a comment.  I had to find out about it when someone asked me to comment on Google+.

However, from the perspective of trying to send as many ad clicks as possible to their web site, they are doing a heckuva job....

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Following along here on my evening commute...

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A new album by Mark Mallman, very catchy.  If you don't know his work read this review:

 Frankly, Double Silhouette, his latest, is the album the Killers were trying to make with Battle Born – an epic, gorgeous pop album filled with arena-ready choruses. But he does it in a way that doesn’t make him sound pompous (sorry, Killers).

http://www.letoilemagazine.com/2012/10/02/we-will-rock-you-local-reviews-part-deux-mark-mallman-and-...

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