My mum has a high school reunion coming up, and got some copies of her old school magazines so she could write some articles. As it turns out she wrote a fair chunk of articles for them, one of which was a glowing review entitled “Australia!” Interestingly, it came from the assumption that the reader […]
Well, a draft anyway. Available now from the linux-aus archives. Highlight? Announcement of the location and dates for linux.conf.au 2006!
David pointed out the absolutely sacralicious “Baby Got Book” that seems to be doing the rounds (and if it’s not, it should be!). Normally I wouldn’t relink to things even that awesome (in the same way I didn’t pass on the cartoon skeletons page Hanna of Debian linked to), however in light of Ricky’s spiel […]
Wow; I thought David getting a hit from the Troppo Armadillo was cool (not to mention the rest of his growing fan club), but now the other David gets slapped in the face with the velvet glove of the Mistress of Hollywood Babylon herself?
Continuing my “Today’s del.icio.us links” variant in my usual indolent fashion, an interesting post from the other week was this one on making apt-get update a bit quicker and more pleasant. It’s based on these ideas from a while ago, but now it actually works. (Well, actually it worked years ago when Ben Bell first […]
That’s the ABC’s claim anyway: The increasing popularity of online music stores is welcome news to a music industry that blames digital piracy for more than two years of precipitous sales declines. “The biggest challenge for the digital music business has always been to make music easier to buy than to steal,” IFPI chairman and […]
With the trend of posting daily del.icio.us links, I’ve been thinking of trying out a “daily mailing list posts”. Maybe I’ll get around to it sometime. Anyway, today’s mailing list post is this one about dodgy uploads of lib packages. It seems to be the season for it, since Matt Zimmerman did the same thing […]
One of the curious things about testing software is that as far as increasing your confidence in the code is concerned, it’s better to have a test suite that finds bugs, rather than one that doesn’t. The problem is that for any piece of software that ever works, you can find an infinite number of […]
In his epic battle with Adrian over exceptions, Ben mentioned: Save your work? That’s for sissys. Use a journalling file-saving model. Save everything the user does immediately. You can support the traditional file save/load facility using checkpoints or other niceties but I fail to see why any application in this modern age of fast hard […]
…and you can’t beat that. Or, at least, I think that was some primary school slogan we had at some point. But Google knows nothing about it, so maybe I imagined it all. Surely, there isn’t still more in the universe than’s dreamt of in Google’s eight billion web pages… I think it might’ve had […]
Decided to wander into NextByte to see about getting some more ram for my nice new iBook today. I’ve been tossing up whether to go for an extra 512MB (for 768MB total) or an extra GB (for 1280MB total) — I really wanted as much as possible, since OS X is a memory hog and […]
Evidently Energex noticed the twenty minute thunderstorm we had after lunch today, and decided to switch to their summer policy. Hence we’ve had two prolonged blackouts this evening, so far; the current one’s stopping me from watching both the Rebel Billionaire and the West Wing. Not impressed. And why they’re happening well after the storm, […]
One of the harder aspects of version control is dealing with merging issues. Normal development is straightforward — all you’re essentially doing is providing an annotated “undo” feature. darcs manages that, IMO, perfectly. And to be honest, that’s probably 80% of what I want form a version control system. But dealing with merging different lines […]
One of the central ideas in Jef Raskin‘s book The Humane Interface is that the “zooming” interface — rather than 2d windows that you shift around and overlay on each other, you have a huge canvas that you can zoom into and out of, as well as move around on. Obviously your screen only displays […]
Cripes. This was meant to be a quick followup note about some more quick darcs hacks. So much for that — I’ve had to write an outline for this post for heaven’s sake. (Side note: if someone wants a new title for their blog, the above’s free of charge!) So, when last we met, darcs-repo […]