this blog is girtby.net

Catch The Bushfire

Earlier today, in an email to Brendan, I attempted some gallows humour in relation to the Victorian bushfires:

A Kamikaze That Doesn't Crash And Burn

Long-time readers will know that I’m a big fan of the OpenWrt linux distribution for home routers.

PayPal Is Not My Pal

Paypal sent me an email in Feb 2006. Here’s what they said (emphasis theirs):

Prez Obama FTW!

The window of opportunity for commenting on the Obama inauguration is closing, so I’d better have my say, I suppose.

They Don't Call it Hardware for Nothing

Sometimes you blog because you’ve accomplished something. Sometimes you blog because you just want to salvage something from failure. Today I’m going to do both! Yes, hardware is involved.

Monkeying With JavaScript

It’s funny really, one of my main reasons for switching to a Rails-based blogging platform way back when was to become more familiar with web technologies. As it turned out I never really did much of that, but since switching back to Wordpress I’ve been tinkering away madly, and astute observers may have noticed the results on this site.

Of course I have no real idea what I am doing. Despite having zero knowledge of PHP or JavaScript, for some reason I feel no reluctance towards sitting down at a keyboard and bashing away until I produce either Macbeth or a better website. The entire site is stored in a Bazaar repository, and that makes reverting bad changes especially easy, and I’ll attempt to blog further about that sometime.

For now let me just point out a seemingly small change to the site. The dates of the posts and comments are now displayed in a more human-friendly manner such as “3 days ago” or “20 minutes later”. This was a feature of Typo that I liked enough to port to my Mephisto theme, and which (I thought) would be fairly simple to get into Wordpress.

It wasn’t. Read on for the war story.

Software That Goes Clunk

In the world of the manufactured consumer item, there has long been a tradition of techniques which convey an impression of underlying quality to the prospective purchaser. For example, it is never going to hurt sales if you display the words “Made in Germany” prominently on your item’s packaging. And I’ve heard that disproportionate engineering resources are typically expended on a car’s doors, in order to get just the right “clunk” to impress potential customers on the showroom floor.

Great Designers Steal, And So Do I

Welcome to the new girtby.net site design. If you’re in an aggregator, please feel free to head on over to a browser and admire the countless hours of work that I’ve put into … stealing someone else’s site design.

Becoming a Bronzed Aussie

This weekend I passed my proficiency test and will soon be awarded a surf lifesaving Bronze Medallion.

Blog Migration Secrets

So given that the world (still) lacks a decent common export format for blog software, you might wonder how I managed to move the collection of assorted nonsense that is girtby.net from Mephisto to Wordpress.