Over to the right — unless you are using one o’ them fancypants RSS aggree-gators — are the monthly archives for girtby.net, with a count of the number of articles posted for each month. Last month there was just the one and this month isn’t looking too promising either. That’s as good a measure as any that I’ve been, well, preoccupied.
[Read more →]Specialised web forums are commonplace these days. They cover the entirety of the long tail, and are therefore indispensable for discussing obscure, and not-so-obscure, topics.
These days I wouldn’t consider making any serious purchase without at least a brief consulation of the relevant web forum. Technical problems with just about anything can usually be resolved with a well-crafted search through the appropriate forum. Put simply, the web forum is the basic unit of online community these days.
But despite their ubiquity and obvious utility they remain frustratingly limited in lots of ways. In this post I vent some of these frustrations.
[Read more →]Those of you familiar with my propensity to succumb to temptation for the latest and greatest may have been looking at my setup, marvelling at the mildly dated hardware, rolling your eyes and thinking “that’s not going to last long”. And I’m happy to confirm that, in accordance with prophesy, the hardware upgrade juggernaut has finally rolled through my part of the world. Oh my word yes.
In the first week of January, Apple announced an upgrade to the Mac Pro line of workstations. They would have 8 cores as “standard”, through the use of two 4-core Harpertown Xeon CPUs. What they didn’t highlight was the fact that the “standard” configuration was actually customisable down to a mere single 2.8GHz 4-core CPU, making it available for a comparatively-quite-reasonable A$3300.
And naturally, I bought one. Read on for initial impressions.
[Read more →]A few years ago I purchased an Arc-AAA led flashlight, mainly on the advice of Dan. It was an excellent piece of kit. Small enough to carry everywhere but bright enough to be useful. For years it was the only thing that hung off my keychain (besides keys of course). A month ago it died due to a battery leak.
[Read more →]Yesterday’s apology to the Stolen Generation was a very moving and hugely significant moment in Australian history. For most of my life the many problems of Aboriginal people in this country have seemed intractable, even hopeless. This is the first time in many, many years that visible and meaningful progress has been made. I hope the importance of the occasion is adequately reflected in the global news coverage.
[Read more →]I generally agree unequivocally with Bruce Schneier, but his recent column on vendor lock-in has me wanting to take issue with some of his points.
[Read more →]To justify my occasional lapses into Apple fanboy-ism, I offer the following for your consideration.
[Read more →]Some prominent bloggers have recently asked the question “Why don’t people care about freedom 0?” To me this just raises the question “What is this freedom 0 stuff anyway?” Herewith the (lengthy) results of my own attempts to find out the answers to both of these questions, and even raise some of my own.
[Read more →]Herewith, some comments apropos of the Macworld 08 Keynote, specifically Randy Newman’s performance at the end.
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