Google’s productivity apps get a lot of things right, and for many uses, are good enough to be replacements for Microsoft Office, Libre Office, or whatever desktop apps you might be using.

But the missing bits are usually enough to be really frustrating or simply send me back to my traditional desktop apps.

Case in point? A serious lack of keyboard shortcuts in the spreadsheet app.

You can highlight a row or column with a keyboard shortcut, but (if my Google Fu isn’t failing me) you can’t delete one. Which is a massive fail if you’re trying to do some quick editing of a spreadsheet that involves deleting a lot of rows. You also can’t select multiple, non-consecutive rows or columns by pressing a key. Massive fail.

This means an operation like deleting every other (empty) row is a monumental pain in the posterior instead of being a minute of rapid keystrokes.

Any operation that’s available via a menu on a desktop productivity program should also be available via a shortcut (or at least allow a user to assign one). Having to do repetitive operations using the mouse is a productivity killer, and a sign that an app is not mature enough to be used in a business setting.

For some reason, I can’t recall my first video game. It might have been Asteroids, or maybe it was Space Invaders. Could have been something else, it’s been a very long time.

Even though I can’t remember the name of the first game, I do remember three things very distinctly. First, I know it was ¢25. Second, I remember that the game was over in a flash. Third, I remember dreaming about a day when I’d be able to have unlimited replay on video games and play them at home.

Interesting read from my friend Benjamin Mako Hill. I love checking in with his blog, because he usually has something interesting to say.

But I was surprised to see Mako addressing sports in this post, since I know Mako from the free software community and his writing usually tends to topics of a more academic and geekish nature.

Like many of my friends, I have treated professional sports with cultivated indifference. But a year and a half ago, I decided to become a football fan.

Several years ago, I was at a talk by Michael Albert at MIT where he chastised American intellectuals for what he claimed was cultivated disdain of professional sports. Albert suggested that sports reflect the go-to topic for small talk and building rapport across class and context. But he suggested that almost everybody who used the term “working class struggle” was incapable of making small talk with members of the working class because — unlike most working class people (and most people in general) — educated people systematically cultivate ignorance in sports.

Read the whole thing, it’s worth thinking about if you find yourself in the disinterested camp. Note that I’m not saying I agree with this – but it’s worth thinking about. I have some thoughts on the topic, but I’m going to take a day to digest the post.

People often try to fluff up the importance of an event or person by saying it “changed history,” “changed the course of history,” or “changed history forever.” (Or something along those lines, you get the idea.) There’s just one problem with that type of phrase: it’s completely, 100% wrong.

History is stuff that has already happened, or the study of stuff that’s already happened. No matter what you do today – no matter how important or how much it upsets the expectations one might have for events to come – unless you’ve invented time travel and actually gone back in time and changed the past you have not changed history at all.

What one usually means to say here is that something happened that had a major impact and events would unfold differently than one would have expected.

For instance, Abraham Lincoln “changed history” by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. But, of course, he didn’t change history at all. He did something that had an immense impact at the time, and that would have a ripple effect that lasts to this day. It was enormously important. But, and this is crucial, he did not change history one tiny little bit. He made history, but he didn’t change it. History, as Lincoln knew it, remained the same. But the future was as of yet unwritten, and so our history is what happened as a result of his actions.

In short, “changed history” is a lazy, awful phrase. Don’t use it.

Instead of spending “Black Friday” out spending money, I’m taking the opportunity to get some tasks done that I usually don’t have time to do.

For example, I’ve got some really old CD-Rs (1999 - 2002) with old mail backups and such that I want to copy to cloud storage (after encrypting…) just in case there’s anything worth saving. I’ll go through them later, but the key thing is to get the data off before the CD-Rs give up the ghost entirely.

That is if they haven’t already. The first disc I’ve popped in the drive had read errors when I tried to copy the data off to my backup directory.

Spending a lot more time with git these days, and one of the things I’ve noticed is that virtually every book or tutorial you find online about working with git totally glides over the mechanics of actually dealing with a merge conflict.

That is, it’ll tell you (maybe) the git commands – but the actual “wading through the code and dealing with a merge” is totally glossed over.

Once I have a full release under my belt (4.0.1-incubating), that’s at the top of my to-do list. Document all the things!

The first point release for Apache CloudStack 4.0.0-incubating is in progress. The project is planning on monthly point releases, so the first point release is being targeted for early December.

Right now, the schedule is:

• Freeze on November 30th.
• Testing until December 8th.
• 1st vote (PPMC) on December 8th.
• 2nd vote (IPMC) on December 11th – assuming 1st vote passes w/in 72 hours.
• Release on December 15th (assuming 2nd vote passes w/in 72 hours and giving 24 hours to sync mirrors).

Have any suggestions for the release, bugs that have been fixed and should go into the release? Speak up on the mailing list or edit the wiki page. We have 15 bugs so far that have been proposed, one already merged in.

A few days ago I replaced the hard drive in my 2009 iMac with a 512GB SSD, and decided to go with a fresh install of Mountain Lion rather than a restore from Time Machine. Naturally, this means re-installing a bunch of software – but it’s nice to start with a clean slate sometimes.

As I went to install Homebrew I got a complaint from brew doctor:

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Warning: Unbrewed dylibs were found in /usr/local/lib.
If you didn't put them there on purpose they could cause problems when
building Homebrew formulae, and may need to be deleted.

Unexpected dylibs:
    /usr/local/lib/libMonoPosixHelper.dylib    /usr/local/lib/libSFFileMonitor.32.dylib    /usr/local/lib/libSFIPC.32.dylib    /usr/local/lib/libSFIPC.I.dylib    /usr/local/lib/libSFsqlite3.7.4.dylib    /usr/local/lib/libSFSyncEngine.I.dylib

Now, what might have put those there? On Linux, it’s easy to query the RPM or Debian package databases to find out which package installed a file. On Mac OS X, this is non-obvious.

A bit of googling led me to a hint on MacWorld about uninstalling applications that were installed with a pkg on Mac OS X.

The lsbom command can show what files were installed by a package. You have to find the .bom file first, though.

On Mountain Lion, the “receipts” are found (mostly) in /private/var/db/receipts. To find out what files are owned by a particular .bom, just run:

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lsbom -fls filename.bom

As it turns out, the files that Homebrew complained about were installed with Citrix Receiver. Note that these don’t seem to be essential to Citrix Receiver, but are related to Sharefile, which apparently tailgates on the Receiver install. AFAICT, Receiver runs just fine without them. (At least for the time being, I’ve moved them into a backup directory in case it turns out otherwise…)

It might take a little hunting, but this might help finding the parent program of some unknown files on your Mac if you’re unsure where they came from.

If you are trying to customize your Octopress themes, the stock documentation is a bit terse. You might try Alessandro Melandri’s post as a supplement. Much more in-depth with some good examples.

Here’s a great piece that anyone interested in politics or professional life should read, “Petraeus, On Further Reflection (R.I.P. John O’Neill):”

I don’t need rectitude from my leaders. I need competence. I need results. If you have someone better than Petraeus, then that’s one thing. If he’s the best at counterinsurgency, then he is not expendable at this time, when insurgency and our response to it mean actual American lives in the balance.

Read the whole thing.