Chocolate cake in 5 minutes

The Underground History of American Education - looks like it could be interesting reading, although I don't have time to actually read it at the moment.

Stoooopid .... why the Google generation isn't as smart as it thinks

Disconnecting Distraction

I've been using my mac mini as a backup server for ages. Over the weekend it died. I'm almost certain it's the hard drive.

I'm going to attempt to replace the hard drive, and I should even get some extra space if it works, but I'm thinking it may be time to upgrade my storageness.

At the moment I'm tempted by the ReadyNAS Duo. Lots more storage, RAID, hopefully less to manage, and I'm told it probably does the rsync things I use at the moment for backups.

In the Long Run We're All Dead Mice

Been trying gnus for email a bit.

Seems better than I remember it. IMAP support works nicely, although I didn't try SSL, which I remember being the tricky bit. Spent a while with it mysteriously showing mail in folders where I know I'd deleted it. I don't know what the actual cause was, but disabling the "agent" seems to have fixed it.

Got bbdb installed and integrated nicely, need to have a look at one of the nicer quoting packages.

Low cost laptop cheat sheet. Personally I like the look of the Asus 901, although it's a bit expensive. And not actually available yet.

(Sourced from Roger)

I found stickK in the Economist this week. It seems like an excellent idea - motivate yourself by contracting to pay out if you don't meet personal goals.

Thunderbird is leaving the mozilla project

A depressing article on the state of GCSE Physics courses

javi is a vi-clone written in pure javascript

I've created a separate running blog at A Story of Doom.

"Any damn fool could produce a better data format than XML"

Lately I've been liking findbugs for finding all sorts of dodgy things in java source. I applied it to JCS and it reported a bunch of inconsistent synchronization bugs.

I've filed JCS-21 in the JCS issue tracking system to document my proposed fixes for these. The problem (as I see it) is that if you're accessing data in Java shared between multiple threads, you always need to do it inside the scope of an appropriate synchronized block. This appears to be not as widely known as it should be, although it's documented in a lot of places (Synchronization is not the enemy from the IBM site is a good starting place for reading about it).

After further tarting up, my twitter posting client is now up for download. It now has an install script, a license, and can be used without editing the source.

The currently rather dull looking darcs repository is at twitterpost darcs repository.

Scribd - it's like youtube for text

So lately I've been playing with twitter. It seems like a fun toy, but all that visiting the website was getting tedious.

I took the obvious action, and wrote a small python script to let you post from the command line, much in the way of /usr/bin/mail. To use, download to a machine with python, and edit the username and password in the script.

It may even work for people who aren't me. One day I might tart it up enough for a formal release.

• Novelist accidentally burns down office
• Multimedia Hipster PDA upgrade now available in more colours
• Boost AJAX performance using local storage
• Moving a 100 year old church

• retrofone - specialists in obsolete mobile phones. Tried to order a 7110 from them and my card was rejected, their contact email address bounced.
• thinkgeek retro phone handset
• Hulger retro handsets
• iwantoneofthose retro telephones
• Mayfair retro phone with buttons
• Dial Retro Telephones
• the home of vintage and rare mobile phones

The Atom feed but I reported in pyblosxom got fixed here

Updated the blog with my FSF membership icon. If 3 people join via the link, I get an answering machine message from Richard Stallman :)

Sign this petition to promote the use of Open Document Format within the UK government.

Thought I'd try out gnash at the weekend (it's a free-software flash implementation). It seems to be really pretty bad - it hasn't crashed Firefox or anything, but the best I got was some bits of a flash movie barely working. I have high hopes for the project though, and it is still alpha.

I fixed a reported bug in my atom feed that meant none of the links worked. This may have meant you saw all the articles again, as the content will have changed.

Update: Now reported as a bug to pyblosxom at sourceforge

Threading is hard

saigo.etla.org is now doing greylisting, based on the Greylisting with pf tutorial. Let me know if this causes you problems.

Submitted a patch to update the zile port in macports to 2.2.28.

I've submitted a patch to macports to update their zile version to 2.2.25.

How to Hire Guillaume Ports or, why the new Microsoft Open Office XML standard is impossible for anyone but Microsoft to implement.

via slashdot

zile have released version 2.2.24, so I've submitted a patch to macports to update their package.

Lately I've been fiddling with the emacs clone zile on Mac OS X

The version in macports is 2.0.7. This works fine, and in particular, C-h works for help, and Backspace works for deleting text.

The current release is 2.2.22. Unpatched on OS X C-h deletes text, as does backspace - it's not picking up the difference correctly. From a peer at the source, the difference is that the earlier release uses a termcap based terminal, where the later one uses ncurses.

I had a fiddle around looking at which keycodes are returned, and found 2.2.22 does actually see a difference between C-h and backspace, but it ignores it. So I wrote the following patch:

diff -ur zile-2.2.22/src/term_ncurses.c macports-trunk/dports/editors/zile/work/zile-2.2.22/src/term_ncurses.c
--- zile-2.2.22/src/term_ncurses.c	2006-09-13 20:54:39.000000000 +0100
+++ macports-trunk/dports/editors/zile/work/zile-2.2.22/src/term_ncurses.c	2006-09-21 22:02:01.000000000 +0100
@@ -155,6 +155,7 @@
   case KEY_DC:		/* DEL */
     return KBD_DEL;
   case KEY_BACKSPACE:	/* BS */
+	return KBD_CTRL | 'h';
   case 0177:		/* BS */
     return KBD_BS;
   case KEY_IC:		/* INSERT */

This appears to work exactly right on OS X, and also worked on a quick test of a ssh into a FreeBSD system. I've submitted the patch to the zile people via the Sourceforge patch tracker, and will see what they think. It looks a bit too magical to be portable, but it works on the only machines I've got handy.

I don't actually understand ncurses.

I just found out about the amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. If I read it right, it's essentially rentable virtual machines, similar to the Sun Grid service.

At the moment, it's a beta, which appears to be full. If and when I get an account, I'll be trying it out, and possibly moving etla.org related stuff onto it.

The Windows Shutdown Crapfest

Probably coming rather late to the party, I just found bileblog, which appears to be nothing but complaints about various bits of java this guy disapproves of.

I think it's wonderful.

For a while I've been trying to use UTF-8 in my desktop locale on debian. I've fought with various setup issues, like the stable version of zsh not supporting multibyte locales at all, and thought I had it more or less working.

Only, today, I discovered that the weird font problems I've been having for a while on my debian testing machine are traceable to the UTF-8 thing - it seems that, for some reason, on my setup, fonts would just be entirely missing in a number of apps. Going back to ISO-8859-1 fixed it. So I've given up on the UTF-8 experiment - unix just isn't ready.

The CEO of Sun asks "Why bother with datacenters at all?".

jerry's livejournal client has moved home site, so I updated my macports port and submitted the change to trac. Also mailed the FreeBSD port maintainer for jlj and let them know.

Not heard anything from the zile people about my patch for Mac OS X so I did it as a macports diff and sent the change for that to the port maintainer.

Is pair programming just a substitute for private offices?

I wish it'd stop deciding that I'm bored with podcasts and don't want to download them anymore merely because I haven't listened to them for a week or two.