Google Mail
Google have openned up gmail to anybody with a mobile phone. I guess they still don't want just anyone (like a robot) signing on...
Preserving the programming craft
This post was originally published at sinewalker.wordpress.com on 1 May 2006.
I posted this reply to an Ask Slashdot: Do Kids still program? I found myself commenting all over that thread… it must be close to my heart :-) Reproducing here, and exploring a little further.
Many of the observations made on Slashdot are right. I wonder what it is that drives me to hack, that is missing from what is covered? Why do I like to hack, and why would it be passed over by kids these days? Or would it?
Cygwin systray menu
This post was originally published at sinewalker.wordpress.com on 18 April 2006.
While I'm on the subject of Cygwin hacking, I discovered this man-page about the Cygwin X server: type man XWinrc and read about how you can hack your systray icon to include a little launcher menu for you favorite X clients 8)
Hacking emacsclient in cygwin
This post was originally published at sinewalker.wordpress.com on 18 April 2006.
I don't know why I haven't ever got around to this, but here—finally—is a hack to have Cygwin only ever start one instance of emacs (especially important in cygwin, because Win32 does not appear to share program texts between processes… )
Mystical jargon
This post was originally published at sinewalker.wordpress.com on 4 April 2006.
I'm sure this observation has been made elsewhere, but I can't find reference to it online.
Have you ever noticed the prolific use of mystical/fantastical words in computer jargon? I'm sure there is a significance, or at least a tongue-in-cheek pointing to the wizardly ways of early and contemporary computer experts. It is funny I suppose, and when you look at how wide-spread it is, it may be revealing of the hacker psych.
Migrated to Wordpress
This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au and sinewalker.wordpress.com on 30 March 2006.
Well, here is the new Wordpress version of my blog!
So far, I'm pretty impressed with Wordpress. The code is much cleaner than Blogger, its post editor is far superior too. I love the Categories, they work much easier than the Blogger + Delicious kludge I had at my old blog.
Dvorak keyboards
This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 27 March 2006.
I prefer Dvorak keyboards to QWERTY, which confounds my work colleagues no end :-)
I've been typing on Dvorak for about 3 years now [ed: That is, since 2003]. The main reason I use the Dvorak keyboard layout is because, after 15 years of six-finger typing on QWERTY, I decided to learn to touch-type, and Dvorak is very easy to learn (I learnt it in 2 weeks, back to my old typing speed after a month).
Organised books
This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 24 March 2006.
Wouldn't it be nice to organise your books like this?
Richard Of York Graded Books In Vain
Originally uploaded by rodcorp.
Only, you'd have to have some sort of catalogue with the book's colour to be able to find anything (probably use LibraryThing and add a colour tag).
Still, it looks nice :-)
Crashed Linux
This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 24 March 2006.
This is a pretty neat shot of the in-flight entertainment system on an Airbus A330 having a boot-up issue. Note, the kernel is Linux.
Originally uploaded by milliped.
This photo has a big rant in the flickr comments about whether or not it's a Linux crash. Well, what's a Linux crash? Most of the public Windows crashes do not involve the Windows kernel (except for blue-screens) but they get called Windows crashes. So, to be fair, this is a Linux crash, even if it appears that the kernel itself is fine.
Shifting Interfaces
This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 22 March 2006.
Once again, Microsoft have drastically changed their Office interface.
While the new interface is very nice eye-candy and probably has some new features that could help (arguably), it represents yet another need to re-train.
The old argument that OpenOffice is too different from MS-Office to be quickly useable has just vanished. OpenOffice is more like MS-Office 97 than MS-Office 2007 will be, and really, who has needed any of the features in Office XP or Office 2003? What were they, again…? Oh yeah, anoying interface changes, and removal of the stupid Paperclip.
I think I'll be distributing my work documents in PDF, created by OOo now, except where I must absolutely use MSO documents for work. Everthing else will be OOo. Now I just need to convince my wife that it's not worth continually purchasing MSO, or even having it on our home PC.