james.lab6.com

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5th
- One laptop per comrade → The XO laptops are apparently just a little bit excellent. Who wouldn’t want a “spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof” tablet PC/laptop with a 6 hour battery life, 200dpi screen and truly zero configuration wireless mesh networking? Especially for $400, but that price is only available for a few weeks in November. After that, you’ll have [...]
- A mlog before an evening → I’ve just been alternately boiled alive (or is that roasted?) and frozen to death in the sauna cycle. They say it’s good for people in general, so I’m hoping it’s good for people with a cold in particular. Sniffle. I hope to see Atonement tonight. It’s the first proper film I’ve seen in ages, having been [...]
9th
- Superbad and Atonement → I’ve seen two films recently: Superbad: The dick-joke movie to end all dick-joke movies. Dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick. Extraordinarily good. Now strike me down as a hypocrite for enjoying tasteless chaos in the extreme, but I found the bad-boy police subplot of this film to be a little too much glorification [...]
- Fantasy literature roundup → I went on holiday last month, without a computer. That gave me a chance to read some of the printed todo-pile that’s been building up since the 1430s. The Cassini Division, by Ken MacLeod: The publication dates may prove otherwise, but this felt like a fictionalized rehash of a pseudo-scientific paper on Matrioshka Brains I read [...]
10th
- In Rainbows → In Rainbows is out, and downloadable for zero pounds, but necessarily zero cost. As of today, the website is slow, but just about functional. If you can get through the slashdotting, digging, or possibly a hypothetical real world source of megatraffic, it will ask you for lots of details: name, email address, postal address, postcode, [...]
11th
- The Wrong GUI → I’ve never liked Apple’s brushed-metal interfaces: And now I realise why: In Wallace & Gromit’s The Wrong Trousers, the Techno Trousers are hacked by an evil penguin, who replaces their controls with a blank, brushed-metal panel. No controls for you, user!
12th
- Wordpress 2.3 → Wordpress 2.3 has been out for a while. Here’s the good: Tag unions and intersections rule! Film reviews: http://james.lab6.com/topics/films+reviews It’s Wordpress. It’s good by default. And the bad: Tagging support is extremely limited. There is no has_tag() function for writing cool backend things - a fact I discovered after converting all my categories to tags. There is no way [...]
- Design Principles → I’ve been doing some major codesmithing on my Wordpress templates in preparation for releasing them into the wild as an official Wordpress Theme! In the process I’ve made the year pages (e.g. /2007/) generate truly beautiful HTML, not that a single damnable person in the world cares (there are new easter eggs for potential carers [...]
15th
- Your television is lying to you → You really, really can’t believe what you see on TV: Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies’ [...]
16th
- Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon → Some early observations from using the Release Candidate: I’m always impressed by the speed of the Ubuntu repositories. They never fail to max out my weedy 4Mb/s Virgin Broadband. My D-link DWL-122 USB Wi-Fi dongle now miraculously works without manual setup voodoo! Xgl was installed during my upgrade. This can be fixed with the following command: $ sudo apt-get [...]
17th
- It’s not my fault that I’m so heavy, it’s society. Society. → Insane new study on obesity: Individuals can no longer be held responsible for obesity so government must act to stop Britain “sleepwalking” into a crisis, a report has concluded. … Obesity, the authors concluded, was an inevitable consequence of a society in which energy-dense, cheap foods, labour-saving devices, motorised transport and sedentary work were rife. In this environment it [...]
22nd
- WMA vs MP3 vs Ogg → I acquired one or two files in Microsoft’s insidious Windows Media Audio format over the weekend. I pondered briefly over whether WMA is actually worse than MP3; they are both patent-encumbered formats, after all. But this O’Reilly article makes a good point: Aside: OK, this being O’Reilly, someone will surely stop me here and insist that [...]
23rd
- Restoring KRename to d3lphin’s Actions menu → D3lphin in Kubuntu 7.10 doesn’t have KRename in its Actions menu - a grave flaw. You can fix it by putting the following in a file called, say, krename.desktop in the ~/.kde/share/apps/d3lphin/servicemenus/ folder: [Desktop Action rename] Exec=krename %U Name=Rename with KRename Icon=krename [Desktop Entry] Actions=rename ServiceTypes=all/allfiles
24th
- Dreamhost nerf prompts emergency gallery → Dreamhost have decided that they don’t want people using their storage space for personal backups, as a few customers were abusing it by uploading DVD rips and gigantic hard disk images. I too have been using it as a backup dump for nearly 40GB of photos, but the new policy states that “files uploaded to [...]
25th
- BBC 2D → In the 1990s, software houses (what we used to call game studios) rushed to implement 3D graphics, awkwardly plastering rotation and texture mapping and other whizzbangs over the top of perfectly good 2D gameplay; the gameplay was often left a second or third class citizen. 3D games have since matured and dominated, but other less [...]
26th
- Chicago at the Pavillion → I saw this on Wednesday night! It was very minimalist - 80% of the stage was occupied by the orchestra. This may be normal in musicals; I don’t exactly see many. Despite (or perhaps because of) using about 7 props in total and dressing the characters in little more than a jacket and knickers, it [...]
- Desktop special effects not so special → I turned off compiz yesterday. GUIs operate at two speeds: instant, and everything else. As beautiful a desktop as compiz creates, its animations, fades, and general bulk cause 0.2 second delays here and there, which all add up to a distraction. “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing [...]
29th
- Portents of a better future →
30th
- Birthday Coordinates → What a brilliant idea. The best part is that if you are on your own, you can use your birthday for both components, and make out with yourself. Anyway, to the Googlemobile! We haven’t a moment to lose! Geographic coordinates have X and Y components. Gay couples must choose who gets the X, but for obvious [...]
- Daylight Trading Time → Daylight Saving Time has been in the news this week with claims that fiddling with the clocks could reduce CO2 emissions, just as wartime politicians discovered that fiddling with the clocks could reduce energy consumption. Laudable goals, but I fear the practice of turning the clocks forward in spring, then back in the winter, has [...]
31st
- How to get the correct month name using PHP → Can you see anything wrong in the following image? Persistent readers will notice that it’s part of the sidebar on this site’s main page, except slightly wrong. It turns out I have a bug that only occurs at the end of months! The following code is wrong: date('F', mktime(0,0,0,$month)) The following code is right: date('F', mktime(0,0,0,$month,1)) Why? It’s down to [...]
- Poverty is not a virtue → I will declare thy righteousness, and thy works; for they shall not profit thee. [Isiah 57:12] I have seen the light, and I no longer use a Creative Commons license which prohibits commercial use. I now use the simpler, newer Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK license. Yay! My primary reason for using -NC in the first place was [...]