After being described as “pathetic and unpatriotic” by the prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, actor Gérard Depardieu responded:

Despite my excesses, my appetite and my love of life, I remain a free man

Well said sir, well said indeed!

Excellent article over at Gizmodo about the whole security theatre dance that we’re forced to do any time we want to fly these days. My favourite quote:

I don’t have a problem with being searched at all – in fact, if you guys think it’s necessary, I’d be the first to admit that I look a little bit suspicious before I’ve had my first cup of coffee in the morning – but if you’re going to stroke me gently in front of hundreds of people, you’d better buy me a fucking drink first, is all I am saying.

Some insightful analysis about the recent Apple reorganisation (a.k.a. Scott Forstall getting shit-canned) from Matt Drance:

Not only is this a profound increase in responsibility for all three of these top executives, it’s a profound change in Apple’s organization going as far back as I can remember. There’s a long-standing pattern of separating watershed products important to the company’s future. The Mac and Apple teams. Mac OS X and Classic. The iPod division. iOS and Mac OS X. Suddenly, Tim Cook has pulled the reins in. Federighi owns software. Ive owns design. Cue owns services. Period.

While it looks like this is something that asn’t exactly planned in advance, it seems like some people at Apple have been hoping for it for a while now. According to Om Malik:

Forstall’s firing was met with a sense of quiet jubilation, especially among people who worked in the engineering groups.

For my part, I’m mainly interested in seeing what happens to the UI now that Jony Ive is in charge of it, hopefully the misguided move towards skeuomorphic interfaces will be taken out back and shot.

So I started up VLC just now and was greeted with this update notification:

VLC media player 2.0.4

This is a major update that fixes a lot of regressions of the 2.0.x branch of VLC.

We are introducing an important number of fixes and improvements for all playback, notably for Blu-Ray, DVD, HLS, Ogg and MKV files; but also for Youtube, Vimeo, Koreus and Soundcloud.

New support for the OPUS audio codec, including multichannel and streams. …

How the fuck is going from 2.0.3 to 2.0.4 the correct version bump for a major upgrade?

Jeez…

As an improvement on an older shell script, here’s a rake task to list all of the categories in your blog, along with post counts for each of them:

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desc "count the number of posts in each category"
task :count_categories do
  require 'yaml'

  counts = {}

  Dir.glob('source/_posts/*.markdown').each do |f|
    post = begin
      YAML.load(File.open(f))
    rescue ArgumentError => e
      puts "error: parsing #{f} - #{e.message}"
    end
    cats = post['categories']
    if cats.respond_to? "each"
      cats.each {|c| counts[c] = counts[c].to_i + 1}
    else
      counts[cats] = counts[cats].to_i + 1
    end
  end

  counts.sort_by {|k,v| v}.reverse.each {|k,v| puts "#{v} #{k}"}
end

Just add this to the end of your OctoPress Rakefile and you’re good to go.