yaleman.org

Well, there’s a bit of a milestone, I finally restarted my linux desktop machine. There was something going a bit odd with Nautilus and Gnome lately, so I thought I would just kill X for a little while, then go back in and all would be fine. Oh no, after so long it decided that things weren’t all hunky-dory, and that the X server would lock the console display and not let me do anything.

Ok, so maybe I’m biased, but my sister looked absolutely beautiful tonight going to her year twelve formal. It was so great to see her smiling, she seemed to be truly happy for once, and looked like SHE thought she was beautiful, instead of just the rest of the world for once.

Anyway, enough of my gushing, there’s a gallery full of pictures to see!

Gallery was removed - lost the images somehow :S

Ok, I can’t remember if I’ve said about it here, but I’ve been having problems with one of my ISP’s - they are shitheads. We sent them a cheque, they cashed it on 02/09/05 and are still trying to track the payment so they can remove the debt from their account. We contacted them on 12/09/05 to clear it up, and they sent me to a debt collector at the end of September. Finally I’ve had enough, so I told them early last week that they had until Friday to resolve it and contact me, else I would contact the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman - basically the government oversight committee on telecommunications. I called them this morning, three days AFTER when I said I would contact the TIO, they screwed me around for a while and said that they were still chasing the payment.

So I’ve been going on about it for a little while - the fact that I had to either buy or make a cable to run from the megasquirt ECU to the Relay/breakout box. I was hoping to buy a cable from the states, since it would have included all the wiring I needed, shielded runs for the required wires, and save a lot of time. Since the two different companies in the states I’ve attempted to contact won’t reply to my emails, and there’s noone else to buy one from, I decided to take on the task of making my own.

I’m completely and utterly blown away after last night! I’ve been a fan of The Cat Empire ever since they started releasing tracks - their first album has been one of my favourites of all time. An amazingly energy-filled performance that lasted for two hours, and had the whole crowd screaming for more.

Every song they played was amazing, never the same as the “album version” - which is a great thing - with lots of improvisation, solos, and playing between the band members. With nine members on the stage, and two guests last night, it’s certainly a performance well worth seeing if they are in your area. Words can’t describe how fun it was!

More than kiki’s aparrently!

“Hot town, summer in the city Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty Been down, isn’t it a pity Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city…”_

One of my favourite songs of all time, just cruisy music coming from the time of the Vietnam war, it was the first thing that came to mind when I went for a smoke break today. It’s getting to that time of year that you’re wishing that air conditioned pants were an option for popular fashion. Summer last year was a soaking wet humidity fest, and this year it’s already working on showing us how bad it can be.

There are a variety of styles of programming, just like doing anything in this life. You can plan down to the nth degree, making sure that from the start, you know all the possible outcomes of each step in the program. This is how mission-critical programmers work, such as people designing software for NASA or anything that’s life-threatening. You can start a step back, with an algorithm, adding code and testing it as you go, and generally making things work, not knowing every possible outcome, but for generalities the code will work. Recent articles and past experience using their products have shown that this is how many major software developers, including Microsoft work. Then again, you could just throw code at an idea until you get something working, which will break often, requiring constant rewrites until it’s usable.

Desk. That object in front of, many of us perform our daily worship of the gods of capitalism. We work, we study, we relax. The desks I have available to me on my overnight shifts are small, barely room for my work needs and nothing more. Somehow I squeeze my laptop on there, allowing me to keep myself occupied and awake. If it were any smaller, there would not be room for many normal people to sit, while keeping useful storage space in the drawer below. Me, I’m over two meters tall, so any semblence of comfort, let alone ergonomics is destroyed by both my size and the desk’s lack of. Attempting to sit with my legs under the desk would require either dropping my seat to the lowest height setting, or me constantly knocking my knees on the fittings underneath.

As you may have read in my previous post, I’ve installed PHP5 on my laptop. It’s running windows, but don’t hold that against it - it’s still running Apache as the httpd. I’ve heard some good things and some bad things about the latest incarnation of the PHP scripting language - most of the bad things are the fact that they’ve changed the language so much that many people are going to have to entirely re-write their applications. This is a problem, but hopefully only a relatively short-term one - except for the fact that it’s still VERY hard to find any hosting companies that supply servers with PHP5 installed and usable, since most people are still looking for good old PHP4 servers.