Sat, 28 May 2005
From the Australian, via Tim Blair:
NONE of the three judges presiding over Schapelle Corby’s trial has ever found a defendant innocent, and they have now reached broad agreement on the verdict they will hand down on Friday.
Like Katie Brownell, they’ve managed not to blow their perfect game. Congratulations to Judges Suastrawan, Sirait, and Duah, may you never see an innocent man or woman for another fifteen years.
Fri, 27 May 2005
Speaking of 1c Paypal donations, joining the blogosphere today is Rhys Arkins. Welcome to the dork side, young padawan!
I tried making some minor tweaks. Tables have been replaced with CSS; ugh, what an absolutely horrible control language. Tables are more elegant. Oh well.
Also added some Google ads down the side – they’ve already made more than the single 1c donation the PayPal button managed to elicit. Interestingly, the Google Ads terms of service are very explicit about not drawing attention to your Google Ads. So whatever you do, don’t look at them! Please! Or something like that.
Wed, 25 May 2005
Well, that’s the second year of blogging down. Over a hundred thousand words, across a couple of hundred posts!
(In the Advantage: Inchoate column, though, David’s blog’s had one hundred and fifty thousand words or so, across almost a thousand posts and updates. Wow!)
David points out that it's actually over a thousand posts and updates now. Ooops. But on the other hand, I've posted lots of pictures: counting them using the standard conversion factor, I'm up to something like 280,000 words! Phwoar!
In summary, I liked the third Star Wars prequel.
Sure, I found myself laughing at the horribly stilted dialogue and plot throughout the movie, and I wasn’t particularly awed by the visuals or the CGI, and in the end, knowing how it ended by the virtue of having watched the original trilogy pretty much robbed the film of any of the drama, and the heroics of their heroism.
But it was still fun, and interesting. I think maybe the most interesting parts of ROTS were the scenes that Lucas didn’t actually film, and that only took place in my head (or that were in the script originally, and got dropped). Maybe that’s a clever way of doing a film anyway: leaving the good bits for the audience to imagine, just like they would if they were reading, rather than doing everything for them, and the experience being over as soon as you walk out of the cinema. It’s presumably a good way to encourage spin-offs and fanfiction anyway – yay franchising.
Wed, 18 May 2005
Complex and inefficient shell snippets? Sign me up!
Here’s my version:
dselect update
cat /var/lib/dpkg/available | sed -n 'p;s/^.//p' | sed 's/../&\
/g' | tr A-Z a-z | grep '[a-z][a-z]' | sort | uniq -u
It doesn’t quite match the original – having the letter pair appear twice for a single package will disqualify it, rather than disqualification only happen when it appears in two packages, and it probably looks at more text than it should (like field names as well as contents). On the other hand, it’s a damn sight quicker (O(n*lg(n) time, O(n) space, where n is the size of your available file), and it includes sed fun.
Wed, 11 May 2005
I had been going to include this in my travelblog, but then I forgot, and then I decided I could give it its own entry anyway. To set the scene, imagine trudging up a mountain, about a kilometre above sea-level, with another half-kilometre of vertical rise still to go before you’ve got any chance of civilisation. You’re exhausted, you’re thirsty, you’re hungry, you’re wishing for ice cream. The path at this point is steep enough they’ve not only carved steps into it, but they’ve had to make them barely wide enough to fit your feet.
On one step, you see this. Buried in the mud, overgrown, trampled on, alone, and lost to the world: a heart of stone.
And yet, craggy and marred, it endures, unbroken.
(Also at the very bottom of the photo you can see the tip of one my new boots! They’re awesome!)
Tue, 10 May 2005
I originally wrote this entry in the middle of last month when the news of the moment was that Linus was giving up Bitkeeper. Then I went to linux.conf.au and got distracted, and by the time I got to thinking about finishing it off and posting it, it didn’t seem relevant anymore, so I deleted it. Then came the spat about Scott and Ian and I thought I’d post anyway, and went to find a copy I could resurrect.
Fri, 06 May 2005
Hrm. Evidently I was careless in checking my mail yesterday evening.
The Government has commenced a review on options for including new exceptions in the Copyright Act 1968 and released an issues paper, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock announced today.
The review will examine whether an exception or specific exceptions to copyright based on principles of “fair use” should be adopted to make copyright law more flexible and relevant in the digital age.
“The Government is aware developments in digital technology are changing the way people use copyright material,” Mr Ruddock said. “Many Australians believe quite reasonably they should be able to record a television program or format-shift music from their own CD to an iPod or MP3 player without infringing copyright law. However, this issue needs careful consideration,” he said.
Issues paper available here.
Thu, 05 May 2005
Heh, so much for blogging regularly on LA stuff. Anyway, we’ve had more meetings since being elected, including a face to face planning session in Sydney; a couple of other meetings to keep things running, and generally been trying to run a tight ship. Jon’s President’s report goes into a bit more detail of all the stuff we’ve been trying to promote and such.
More interesting stuff on the agenda over the next couple of months too hopefully! (Including getting all those minutes and reports collated somewhere sensible, rather than just on mailing lists and blogs)