Okay, so you probably have already heard that Obama won North Carolina heartily and Clinton squeaked out a win in Indiana. The results (with 99% reporting) were [IN] [NC]:

Indiana Clinton 638,274 Obama 615,862 Difference 22,412

North Carolina Obama 890,695 Clinton 657,920 Difference 232,775

If you recall my post from yesterday, I said that Obama had an uphill battle here in Indiana largely due to the population here. I really hadn't expected him to win here, but I had hoped that he would.

Well, looking at the extremely small win here for Clinton (~2%), I am thoroughly pleased. Indiana performed beyond my expectations... color me impressed. In fact, Clinton's win is so small, I think it warrants a special sound:

<br /> <bgsound src="http://files.samhart.net/humor/audio/Price_Is_Right_loser_clip.wav"><br />

Now, there's more detail about her... ahem... "win" than you might first realize. Let me elaborate...

A little word from the late Hunter S. Thompson on the "End of America", which is very timely on this day of the Indiana Democratic Primary. Hunter S. was talking about the news media immediately after 9/11, but his words ring very true today.

I sincerely hope that everyone here in the state that I live (Indiana) goes out today and makes the right vote for our country. Personally, I think the right vote is Obama. He is one of only two very intelligent and thoughtful presidential candidates we've had in my life (the other was Carter), and I, for one, think we are in dire need of intelligence in the White House.

I've been an xkbset user for a long while now (I'd estimate at least since 2001). I'm someone who can't stand two things when working with laptops:

• 1) I hate it when they don't have a 3rd mouse button (for all my handy-dandy copy/paste goodness under X)
• 2) I hate it when they have all these damned unused keys all over the keyboard (Windows key, Internet Explorer key, email key, "arrow clicky on an abstract pull-down menu key")

Well, the wunnerful thing about Linux and X is that I could remap those useless keys to more useful functions. Couple this fact with the powerful fbkeys in Fluxbox, and I can set up some pretty useful combinations.

For example, in every laptop I've had thus far there's been a useless Windows key down on the left of the keyboard between the CTRL and the ALT. This is as good a place as any for a middle mouse button, so I've always remapped it with some variation of the following:

xkbset m
xkbset exp =m
xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = Pointer_Button2 Pointer_Drag2"

(Obviously, keycode 115 has to be changed when that number isn't valid)

Anyway, everything's been hunky-dory for a while now and I've been a content and happy beaver... At least, until sometime this last week....

I vow today that I will never allow some blinkard, narrow-visioned, elitist Test-Driven-Development (TDD), Agile or XP (EXTREEEM PROGRAMMING!!!11one1eleventeen) cock-sucker push me around again. I also vow that I will fight these religious zealots with their pigheaded belief that TDD is the end-all, be-all solution to everything, until my last dying breath.

Seriously, not since... well... never.. have I felt so strongly about a particular technical methodology. I may rant about the cults of elitism surrounding git or vi, but they can't even remotely approach the level of elitism and self-assuredness of correctness in spite of ample contradictory evidence as the TDD crowd. For those practitioners and proselytizers of TDD, you're either with them or you're some sort of mentally retarded misanthrope who writes shitty code and probably eats babies.

What is TDD, and why do I hate it so? Well, let's explore the subject a bit deeper, shall we?

• Just because you fantasize about being raped doesn't mean everyone does...
• Would the LHC destroy Earth once activated? Hmmmm, the people behind the lawsuit may have a point, after all, look at this:
  
• For probably the first time, Yahtzee actually nails a review:
  

Link to the release notes. Reprinted here...

Go get it!

Very sad news of Arthur C. Clarke's death from Sri Lanka today.

What follows is the last message he left the world shortly before his 90th birthday a few months back.

80s dating videos edited together into a montage of suck:

In my general browsing today I encountered the following very useful post from Carlo Wood concerning recovering deleted files from an EXT3 filesystem. I've never done an "rm -fr ~" on any of my machines, but I've certainly had enough filesystems die on me, and done enough stupid things to appreciate and fear the ramifications of lost data. Hell, not two weeks ago I had my desktop die on me in a spectacular way.

Anyway, I began to wonder what I'd do if I encountered a similar problem as I use XFS instead of EXT3. (Several years ago, I used Reiserfs, but after a catastrophic Reiserfs-related meltdown I switched.)

Then I realized I use rdiff-backup and have incremental backups of all of my data since Summer 2007 (when I started using rdiff-backup :-) So I probably wouldn't need to go through the pain of having to restore low-level XFS transactions.

I am very enamored with rdiff-backup. In fact, if rdiff-backup were a woman, it would be a no brainer to cheat on my wife with her (unless she already was my wife, of course). I also think I have a pretty clever system set up for my backups, so I'm going to share it with you all...