http://blog.nickj.org Just another random blog Thu, 11 Sep 2008 04:09:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en At various times in Linux's history, various things about Linux have really sucked: Getting hardware to work used to really suck, and you used to have to patch the kernel and recompile your own kernel... and then the kernel got a lot better, and the hardware support got a lot better, ... http://blog.nickj.org/2008/09/10/migrating-email-from-outlook-to-evolution-linuxs-final-frontier/ Brion Vibber summarises from OSCON on the future of browsers on mobile phones. Some quick thoughts - capable smartphones are expensive (e.g. $350 to $1000), and the basic phones below that price point tend to be pretty limited and have small screens (but they're cheap and fairly tough, so as an ... http://blog.nickj.org/2008/07/25/decent-browsers-on-mobile-phones-are-we-there-yet/ Gosh, Dutch names are hard to pronounce correctly. I just finished a business phone call to South Africa, and the person I was after had the surname of "Van Wyk". My British/Australian upbringing tells me to pronounce that as "Van Wick". So I did, and was met with complete and ... http://blog.nickj.org/2008/07/22/pronunciation-of-dutch-names-vs-anglo-australian-naming/ So the Mozilla store has released new T-shirts for Firefox 3. I don't particular like the new T-shirt logo, and I thought the old logo was better. What's really insane though is the cost of international shipping. Cost of one Firefox T-shirt: US$17 = AUS$17.80 Cost of one Firefox T-shirt with delivery ... http://blog.nickj.org/2008/06/25/firefox-tshirt-shipping-madness/ It's that time of year to renew my car registration, and buy the accompanying compulsory third-party insurance. So I tried the NRMA, and price-wise their quote was okay, but I wanted it mailed to me in the post so that I can pay it closer to when I actually need ... http://blog.nickj.org/2008/06/12/nrma-feedback-fail/ Ok, I'll bite in response to this "Where did all the PHP programmers go?" blog post: What I cannot understand is why people with more than one Bachelor Degree in Computer Science recommend using bubble sort. Sounds wrong but harmless, as you don't write a sort implementation from scratch in PHP. You ... http://blog.nickj.org/2008/06/05/response-to-where-did-all-the-php-programmers-go/ OpenSSL Debian seeding problem - what a mess - installing the update itself is trivial, but the sysadmin time is in having to chase down and remove and regenerate weak keys generated by multiple packages, which in turn can have propagated to multiple machines, generated any time over the last ... http://blog.nickj.org/2008/05/14/openssl-debian-seeding-problem/ A few days ago, I saw this comic: .... and then today I tried to register for a forum, and got this: ... and clicking "Refresh Image" gave this: ... and of course I thought of the comic. http://blog.nickj.org/2008/05/13/proof-of-bot-status/ My quick notes from the first day of Sydney BarCamp 3 - apologies if they are quite terse: Making computing cool - Let's make everything objects, and hide file systems and devices from applications, with an on object layer. Benefits in reducing all the glue everywhere when communicating data over the ... http://blog.nickj.org/2008/04/05/sydney-barcamp-3-day-1-notes/ It's great that I can legally download ABC shows that I missed directly from their website (e.g. Sunday's first so-so episode of East of Everything). However the video resolution seems quite low, at 320 x 180. Can't we at least get a download that's bigger than a postage stamp? For ... http://blog.nickj.org/2008/04/02/abc-video-downloads-seem-quite-low-res/