Modern procrastination

Keeping computers from ending science's reproducibility

I think this is a hugely important issue that doesn't get enough attention.

Started the setup on the new etla.org server, now to be called eris.etla.org. Hoping to get people and services moved over in the next week or two.

All must watch zefrank!

My Wikireader arrived.

Had to stop using the spam filtering service I was using for etla.org, so I now expect to get drowned in the stuff.

My Life Offline - interesting article, fits in well with my frequent anti-internet moods lately.

Rejecta Mathematica is a real open access online journal publishing only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals in the mathematical sciences.

Someone's collection of links to online CS courses.

I don't remember exactly where I found it, I think Hacker News

I went to Brussels at the weekend!

I'm too lazy to write it up properly, but you can Look at the Photos.

After thinking about doing it for ages, webmail on etla.org should be working again.

The CPAN mirror at cpan.etla.org is temporarily broken, as it's having trouble rsyncing updates. I'm investigating as much as I have time for.

In the Long Run We're All Mice

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.

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.