Journey's End

May 03
2008

Earth Hour haters strikes back

Earth Hour was today at 8pm. I turned the lights off, and happily gamed away in the dark. Not many people appreciate the point of Earth Hour, one of them is Tim Blair. I came across his "opinion" page in the paper today. I have to say it is one …

May 03
2008

Tim Blair is a moron

Why would Keating (who has accomplished one or two things despite his educational handicap, such as becoming the prime minister of Australia) envy academics, massive faculties of whom by and large accomplish nothing and who these days aren't even allowed to feel up first year students?

Says a man in …

Apr 28
2008

{} I <3 thee

Firstly, I am the kind of guy who likes tabs over spaces, because I don't like forcing my particular preferences on to other people. To wax poetic, I like to give other people the freedom of choosing how they want their code indented. This of course brings me into the …

Mar 28
2008

eeepc, likes and dislikes

Likes:

  • nice and small

  • all the hardware works, including sleep/suspend

  • runs debian based OS by default

  • can run an external monitor at decent resolution

Dislikes:

  • uses fastinit which only boots into single user mode, so user "user" is always logged in. Endless frustration playing with X11 startup in vain …

Mar 15
2008

esd and esdrec under OS X Leopard

If you try to use esdrec under OS X, you will find it will simply exit with the following printed to stdout:

usage: program_name [address][:port]

The reason for this is because libesd checks for ipv6 capabilities and if it is present will use it. It prints the above message …

ts=07:28

Mar 09
2008

Cyberpunk - get it right damn it

I have been reading the Whole Wide World, and I am finding it difficult. It is not that the plot is boring or the characters uninteresting, it is the mere fact the author gets the technology wrong. It means I can cruise along with the main character, immersed in the …

ts=14:23

Mar 02
2008

Mar 02
2008

Feb 15
2008

Jan 06
2008

Finally, PIC under Linux made Easy

I have been looking for software to work with my PIC-PG2 programmer under Linux for a while now. Previously I have been using windows and PICPROG which while nice, still involved messing with windows and stuff. The situation back then (around 2006) was bleak - there were no up to-date and …

ts=14:16 tags=[pic,oss,linux]

Jan 01
2008

Dec 31
2007

html2pml

I was tired of converting all my HTML ebooks to rtf, then to pdb using Palm Doc Converter only to lose all the nice touches like bold, italics and headings. Since there didn't seem to be a HTML to PML converter for OS X, I wrote one to get more …

ts=10:15 tags=[python,code,palm]

Dec 30
2007

Hugin Preview Tip

When setting the field of view in Hugin via the preview window, the restitch and remap of the images takes a fair bit of time when the panorama consists of many high resolution images. This can make the process of finding an acceptable FOV frustrating. One way to speed up …

ts=12:41

Dec 27
2007

Dec 24
2007

Dec 24
2007

Fitting A Round Peg Into A Square Hole

The Australian Government is busy fitting an outdated concept into the modern world - they want to censor the Internet the same way TV and movies are censored. The Communications Legislation Amendment (Content Service) Act 2007 (Content Service Act) was passed on 20th of July 2007. This Act inserts a new …

Dec 13
2007

MacPorts-teTeX and TeXLive-2007

texLive2007 and macports teTex.

If you get an error like this:

/usr/texbin/mktexfmt: line 333: /opt/local/var/macports/build/_Users_steve_usr_macports_dports_print_teTeX/work/destroot/opt/local/share/texmf/texconfig/tcfmgr: No such file or directory
fmtutil: config file `fmtutil.cnf' not found.
I can't find the format file `latex.fmt' …

ts=09:47

Dec 13
2007

Computing Oddities

Two strange and weird things happened to me recently. One is my /dev/null disappearing from leopard!

A large number of programs, both Cocoa and *nix relies on /dev/null being present. As you can see I could not gain root privileges, and thus could not recreate /dev/null (character …

ts=06:36 tags=[osx,code]

Dec 12
2007

Dec 10
2007

Note Taking with Palm TX

I have a palm TX which is my indispensable companion. It handily beats my old ipaq4150 for reliability, battery life, utility and style. One thing which I have found to be difficult in using boths palms and pocketpcs, is note taking naturally by treating the stylus and pda as pen …

ts=10:00
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