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A Field Day

Last weekend, Peter convinced me to go to the Central Coast Amateur Radio Club Field Day.

This was a great event, providing me with a glimpse of what cyberspace looked like before the Internet. Before the personal computer even. Events like this are great, you really get a sense of the community, and of the obsession that drives the members to spend all their free time on what is, to outsiders, an incomprehensible hobby. Lots of fun.

Some photos over the fold.

Chomsky and Free Speech

I commend to you last Thursday’s episode of Late Night Live (mp3 here), wherein two Massachusetts intellectuals are interviewed (separately) about world affairs. The first guest was Eric Reeves, discussing the continuing violence in Darfur. The second guest was Noam Chomsky, who ranged across many topics. Both very thought provoking.

Rethinking Virus Protection

For some time now I had been meaning to do something about the annoying message that my AV program had been flashing at me sporadically. It was telling me that that my Symantec Anti-Virus subscription had expired. The options were a) paying the fee to reinstate the subscription, b) doing a fresh OS install to reset the subscription life clock, or c) doing without AV software.

c) was looking awfully tempting for a while there.

xcopy brain damage

And now, a software development war story, if you’ll indulge me.

A Futile Gesture

The great thing about blogging is that even when you perform some totally pointless task or make a futile gesture, at least you get to redeem some benefit from it by sharing with others.

So, in that vein let me tell you all now that I have attempted to report an email spammer to the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

The Mindreader

For a few minutes diversion, try this online card trick.

Amazing, eh? Just how can the computer read your mind?

Below the fold is my explanation. Don’t click unless you are really stuck.

Them's Fightin' Draw'ns!

I was going to express this blog post in cartoon form, seeing that it’s apparently the most effective instrument of widespread offence at the moment, but thought better of it.

And at the risk of duplicating some entirely reasonable and obvious commentary — eloquently summarised as “get over it” by Henry Thornton — a comparison to the publication of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses seems appropriate.

Aesthetics

Now I’m no great aesthete, but why does this

Bloggable Mass

For some weeks now I haven’t blogged much, but I have had little projects and events going on in the background. Individually these aren’t blogworthy, but together I’m hoping that they reach a bloggable mass.

WYSIWYG Editors: Forecast Calls For Continued Suckage

Many folks are trying out the new iWeb application, a WYSIWYG editor for web pages that is new to the Apple iLife ‘06 suite. And it seems many are walking away not impressed with the quality of HTML markup generated.

Many, like John Gruber for instance, point out that, hey, at least it validates as HTML. This is in fact a significant improvement over the famously terrible markup generated by Microsoft Word, and over the standard of WYSIWYG editors in general. Generating halfway decent HTML markup from an WYSIWYG editor is apparently a very difficult task, as evidenced by the number of implementations that generate tag soup. However the pundits say that the redundancy and ugliness of the code can be expected to improve in subsequent releases and I agree.

However when it comes to generating the tags that correctly reflect the intended semantics, I say that this is a task which is beyond the capabilities of a WYSIWYG editor. Without wishing to repeat an already belaboured argument, let me just propose a thought experiment.