Now I thought I'd become suitably curmudgeonly with age, what with still using a text-mode email client and grumbling about HTML posts. But it's always good to know there's someone better at something than you. Gives you something to strive for.
Enter Tom Ellard's Soggy The Sailor rant. I bow before the master.
I've had some big hardware failures of late in my computer infrastructure. My previously rather good and quiet IBM Intellistation (dual Xeon) MythTV server's power supply died. The PSU, being IBM, is completely proprietary and so the machine is now essentially defunct. Real shame as it was a nice piece of kit.
I ended up buying a Dell Precision workstation as its replacement. This is another dual Xeon machine, but this one was rather noisy, with two big, loud fans drawing air over the CPUs. I tried replacing these fans (which required me to resolder the proprietary Dell connectors) with two 92mm Zalman fans and a potentiometer. Unfortunately these Zalman fans are absolute crap! The idea with this kind of mod is you can turn the fan speed down and get dramatically less noise while only slightly less airflow. These Zalman fans basically can't have their RPM reduced by anything significant, so they only run at full pelt, producing more noise than the fans they replaced!
Holly got the shits with this situation and authorised me to spend some bucks on the problem. Fortunately Danny had recently done all the research I needed and so I, somewhat cheekily, nabbed much the same setup as him. Only difference with my kit is a different, and cheaper, motherboard and a slower CPU. I also have the hard drives I need.
I'm still waiting on the power supply and passive heatsink, but as soon as they arrive we'll have silence again in the back half of our house. If this is successful, I'm tempted to build myself a similar box as my desktop.
Well it had to happen, I suppose. Julie was talking about using Twitter to find out the buzz around what your company is doing. And so I searched a little and intrigued me enough to sign up.
So you can now read my incoherent and depraved ramblings on Twitter. Yes I know, I'm a little slow, but it just seemed overhyped to me. We'll see how long I last.
Uh-oh, someone just invoked Godwin's law in the internet censorship debate.
Or view it on YouTube directly.
Whoopsie, the inevitable has happened and the ACMA blacklist genie is out of the bottle. Gee we didn't see that coming! We can now all see what Conroy's great firewall of Australia will block, should he get his weird kinky Xtian fantasy of controlling the viewing of all Australians. As the two URLs added in March 19, the list is most certainly not restricted to child porn.
PS ACMA, this link is hosted on my own server outside Australia. If you send me something in writing, I'll remove the link after taking legal advice, though I'd like to test the theory that only a "link" (a href=?) is what's prohibited, not publishing a URL. And what about a photo of a URL?
Please remember people, when a government proposes censorship you should always be suspicious and be suspicious of any explanation they give. You'll get them rolling out all the discredited "studies" showing pornography/video games/hentai/photos of Pauline Hanson cause violence/rape/singlets/Pauline Hanson. These "studies" generally have methodologies of, say, putting someone in a room (with a one-way mirror) and exposing them to extreme pornography for hours on end, then being all surprised when they seem a little distressed by the experience. Unwanted pornography, particularly when it's things you're not into yourself, is distressing. But there's no evidence it causes any harm to people who aren't exposed to it unwillingly.
I'm writing a tutorial for a magazine about web analytics and its use by small businesses. I'd love to include a case study of how people use such tools. I use web analytics every day in my real job, but that's not a small business by any definition.
Anyone willing to have a chat (phone or email, as per your preference) and be quoted about their use of web analytics to help understand your small business's client base, improve your web site and make better marketing decisions? If you're in Sydney, there can be beer involved if you like.
If you're interested, get in touch and let me know a little about what you're doing.
I'm launching a new site for work in a bit over a week that's built in Drupal and with JQuery used extensively. So far I'm pretty impressed with JQuery, especially how you can string things together. So I need to bone up on these two things, especially Drupal which I haven't had a chance to penetrate beyond the user interface bits.
So anyone got any book suggestions? For JQuery I'd want something that's reference-style rather than anything written as a tutorial. Drupal I need something that introduces me to the basic architecture, and then is more a reference. I've found I never really go through tech books that have tutorials and exercises and the like, hence my focus on reference material.
And since I'm asking for book advice, let me give some too. If you ever need to touch JavaScript, go and buy JavaScript: The Good Parts by JavaScript guru Douglas Crockford. It's quite thin (150 pages) and succinctly says what's good, and what's bad, about JavaScript. It's essentially a "work this way and you'll avoid most of the bad stuff about JavaScript" kind of book. Essential reading!
Apparently Sydney's Shittyrail government transport monopoly is threatening an iPhone developer who had the temerity of making their timetables more usable. This from an organisation whose web site presents its timetables in the brilliantly web-friendly format of just like the printed timetable. So assuming you know which lines you need to get to your destination, you then need to page through it to find the appropriate direction and time.
"RailCorp's primary concern is that our customers receive accurate, up-to-date timetable information," a spokeswoman said in a statement.
Which might be a good argument if their own timetable pages were updated with service disruptions, trackwork and other changes. They're not. Instead they plaster a notice over the timetable telling you vaguely about the trackwork. No reason, of course, that they couldn't make this information available to developers to expose to their applications.
When the revolution comes, the developers of IE6 will be the first up against the wall. Joining them there will be the people at my work who haven't updated the desktop COE to a browser that isn't quite the spawn of satan.
Gah!
On the weekend I finally got around to trying out the new smoker box I bought for the barbecue. It's just a small stainless steel box designed to hold some wet wood chips, with a couple of holes to allow smoke to get out. You put it right on the burners on the barbie and lower the hood.
A while back I bought the smoker, and the same weekend bought a lovely piece of biodynamic lamb shoulder from the market behind our house. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to cook it, so it ended up in the freezer.
I rubbed the outside of the meat with a little salt and a bunch of chopped rosemary, that's all. Temperature at the top of the hood (where the thermometer is) was around 120°C, which means it was around 90-100°C around the meat. Cooked for four hours at this temperature the lamb was beautiful: still a little pink in the centre.
The smoker contained manuka chips, soaked for 20 minutes in water. I refilled the smoker once during cooking, as it burnt out after about half an hour, so there was probably about an hour of smoke.
The result was spectacular. Beautiful tender meat with a lovely smokey taste. The outside was a deep ruby brown from the smoke.
Next effort, I think, will be some reasonably quickly cooked sausages with the smoker on. But I need to buy some more woodchips. I'd ask Scott to bring some up from Tassie at the weekend but I'm not sure virgin forest eucalypt would go so well with meat.