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The First Step is Admitting You Have a Problem

I appreciate that tensions are high in Sydney right now and it is important to maintain a cool head. However, statements like this just infuriate me.

“I do not accept there is underlying racism in this country,” Mr Howard said today following yesterday’s race riots at Cronulla Beach.

The Herald seems to be having a [...]

ip access-list 100 deny from future

I am all over this one. The Financial Times has a shortish but worthwhile article entitled The Future ends at the Firewall (via O’Reilly)

Having access to free video conferencing, or being able to examine the world in exquisite detail on a programme such as Google Earth, has awakened home computer users to the [...]

Pimp My XSLT

Deeply nerdy stuff here. I attempt to impress you all with my l337 XSLT skillz.

Slicing and dicing iTunes playlists. Lets say you want to extract a list of files for the songs in a given playlist. Maybe you want to see which files are stored where. I dunno. Anyway, how would you do it?

Silence is Offensive

SA Premier Mike Rann obviously hasn’t spent much time on FidoNet, otherwise he would have heard the unofficial network motto: “don’t offend, and don’t be too easily offended”. Falling squarely in the latter category, he declares to the ABC that he’s offended at the idea of a minute’s silence:

I find it deeply offensive [...]

Punctuation Insensitivity

So I’m trying to decide whether my recent encounter with rogue punctuation is an extension of Julian’s arguments about case insensitivity, or a counter argument.

I’m sure you all read Julian’s blog, but allow me to briefly summarise his argument. Basically he says that when capitalisation rules are ignored, the meaning of words is unchanged. So [...]

Making Trouble

Here is a puzzle for software developers who know about the GNU make tool. Answer after the fold below.

Say we have a makefile target for a file called timestamp. As you might guess, the file contains the current time as reported by the date utility. Let’s see what happens when we try to make it:

$ [...]

Now You See It, Now You Dont

Jon Udell quoted an excerpt from Microsoft CTO and blogger Ray Ozzie which I thought sounded interesting. When you click the accompanying link, you are taken to the relevant post, and then immediately whisked away to another domain which is apparently the new location for Ozzie’s blog.

He provides this rationale for the move to the [...]

MacOS X Essentials

A while back I posted a list of Windows XP essentials, and promised a MacOS X equivalent. Chris’ recent purchase has finally prompted me to make good on this promise.

Unlike the windows list, most of my OS X essentials are actually part of the operating system or at least a pre-installed application. So this isn’t [...]

Full Throttle OpenWRT

The secure shell (ssh) protocol is such a wonderous invention. I can’t say (really) how much I rely on this protocol to connect to various boxes scattered about the place, especially my home OpenWRT gateway. It is incredibly useful to be able to get into the home network from anywhere to fix things, copy forgotten [...]

Great Moments in Systems Administration, Part XXXIV

[File this one under "long and rather mundane tales of systems administration posted here for therapeautic purposes only".]

For a while now the main server at Chez Girtby has been an increasingly overworked HP Kayak. A nice machine, but very long in the tooth, with its Pentium 2 running at 333MHz. Fortunately my friend Mark had [...]