This is probably the grossest thing I’ve ever seen. Centipedes are beneficial — they eat other insects? How about mice!? Pretty soon they’ll be eating household pets and then small children.

If any giant arthropods come within a 100 yards of me surely they will meet their end by the edge of my sword.

Edit: this video was tracked on Digg, here’s one of the comments:

I’d love to see the video of you hitting it with a stick and it climb up the stick, wrap around your arm, and bite the hell out of it. People have fear for a reason.

“Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? ”And here is my good big centipede!” If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.” — William Burroughs

Discovered a crucial feature, usability wise, while messing with epiphany toolbars. The entries you get in the menu are “examples” rather than descriptive names. Have a close look. So instead of viewing the “Navigation toolbar” (what the heck IS that, anyway?) you’re viewing the thing with “back, stop, reload” buttons. Go Epiphany!

Toolbar editing in Epiphany vs. Firefox:

Awesome.

While working on a new .net project, I went hankering off for the best way, currently, to serialize objects to a database and query for them back. I’m not writing SQL code by hand, I’m not annotating all of my classes, and I’d like to avoid writing huge XML map files for all my dang objects. So I was looking at NHibernate, looks good, very popular. Then someone in #mono writes 4 letters, just 4 letters, to my question “Is NHibernate what I should be using?” and my world of data access objects was rocked. Completely.

Check out this gem: db4objects. Written natively for both .net and java, and they even have explicit mono support. The usage model and API are simply amazing. Here’s a piece from the tutorial on the mono wiki:

        ObjectContainer objectContainer = Db4o.OpenFile("myDatabaseFile.db");
        objectContainer.Set(new Pilot("Rubens Barrichello", 101));
        objectContainer.Commit();

        // Note the awesome query by example --
        ObjectSet objectSet = objectContainer.Get(new Pilot(null, 101));
        foreach (object element in objectSet) {
            Console.WriteLine(element);
        }
        objectContainer.Close();

Geeze. Completely out of hand. And it’s apparently much faster than Hibernate with MySql. The whole package is a 400KB dll/jar you deploy with your app.

What is it with Microsoft’s help system? I’m in the middle of debugging some important code in Visual Studio, completely focused on the task at hand. I reach for F5, mistakenly hit F1 or F2, and my hard drive starts churning… for like 3 minutes! “This is a huge crash” I thought. Lo and behold, after a few minutes of 100% processor usage and gigs of disk access, MS help comes up.

What on earth? Why would anyone use this system if it takes so long to come up? Give me a way to query help quickly from a search box — don’t bother about indexing it for me on the spot. If you’ve got to index it for searching, do it in the background… don’t make hitting the F1 key an odious experience that completely disrupts your entire work flow. I think MS Office has pretty good (and performant) help integration… it pops up on the side, doesn’t occlude what I’m doing with a separate window, and does a pretty good job of giving me some contextual help as I work. It’s time for the rest of the MS products to step up.

With the existing situation, I avoid F1 like the plague. I wish I could rip it off my keyboard… wretched, vile key.

Made the first release of a GNOME mono app I’ve written. Check it out here.