Machina improba

Life

Blaming Twitter, for no reason

Posted Mon, 02/16/2009 - 1:08am by rernst

If you've been online any length of time you may have come across a news article heralding the death of the wedding: fewer people are getting married and on slow news days it seems like these articles are trotted out to fill the gap. I've come across one which inexplicably starts blaming twitter in the last quarter of the article. Twitter? I don't get it... did I miss a paragraph, or was one accidentally ommitted?

MySQL/Sun and 'Eastern Canada'

Posted Tue, 01/27/2009 - 3:25pm by rernst

Today I received an email with the subject 'Sun Microsystems brings MySQL Training to Eastern Canada'. So where is this mythical 'Eastern' part of Canada? Well, the locations are as follows:

Ottawa
Montreal
Montreal
Toronto
Ottawa
Montreal

So much for the 'east' part of Canada:

Kubuntu 8.04 ('Hardy Heron')

Posted Tue, 07/29/2008 - 5:45pm by rernst

Followers of my blog may have wondered -- around the end of April -- why I never made any comments about 8.04 / 'Hardy Heron'. There are two reasons for that. The first was: It was really really bad. I'm not enough of a zealot to gloss over that and ignore it: I'll speak my mind even on things I've traditionally endorsed, and it was a load of crap. Why? KDE4. That brings me to the second reason I did not post about it: upgrading my main workstation was such a disaster, I didn't have the time to blog about it.

The ever-so-mistitled 'Domain Registry of Canada'

Posted Sun, 07/13/2008 - 12:24am by rernst

A few days ago, I got a letter from the 'Domain Registry of Canada' about a particular domain I'd registered (a .com) some time ago with a different registrar than I normally did. It was one of these:

http://support.easydns.com/domain.slammers/droc.php

Thinking 'oh, I meant to transfer this domain away from that registrar anyway' (because the registrar was expensive), I went to their website.

Keeping a Paper Notebook

Posted Mon, 06/02/2008 - 2:24pm by rernst

Keeping a paper notebook -- as low-tech as it may be -- is still important. Unless your desk is one of those tiny unergonomic laptop desks it's far easier to keep a notebook open than to fiddle with 'one more program'. It feels more intuitive. But what's the best way to keep notes? I've spent a lot of time working on this.

Legacy Web Application features

Posted Wed, 04/16/2008 - 3:44pm by rernst

In my continuing trend of posting screenshots of Facebook screens, here's another one.

What's up with this? It's an interesting artifact of Facebook's "student-only" audience. It has no practical use for a large percentage of their audience. Since Facebook has the information available to determine whether someone is currently in an institution where you might have need of these fields, they should ideally only appear for those users.

New Site Launched

Posted Wed, 04/09/2008 - 10:13pm by rernst

After over a month of working on it in the little time I could spare, I've finally readied the new Shadowlife.

I thought about it for months, and I kept coming to the same conclusion: Wordpress was too limiting, and it was too difficult to add the features that I wanted to add. Now I have the opportunity.

So what's new? Let's see...

  • A better image gallery
  • Real 'pages' with better information
  • A new theme (though, I really did like the old one)
  • Reorganized Taxonomy and image categories
  • Better tagging

To Drupal or not to Drupal, that is the question?

Posted Thu, 01/17/2008 - 2:17pm by rernst

I've been working with wordpress a long time. Since early 2005 IIRC. So I'm rather reluctant to give it up.

The main problem is that it's a hard system to make into a fully-fledged website. It was designed to be a blog -- an extensible blog, mind you -- and anything else is just an add-on hack. The 'pages' metaphor is teh suck.

While You Were Out

Posted Thu, 09/13/2007 - 2:02pm by rernst

It's surprising what can happen while a person is on vacation. Here are the numbers:

  • 400+ spam (entirely expected)
  • 200 email in my personal account
  • 550 email in my work account
  • 11, 500 RSS feed reader items (Do I really read that much?)
  • 67 'server is down' email. notices from a machine at work
  • 3,600 km travelled (It didn't seem that far, really)

The Saga of the Wisdom Teeth: Delays, Delays

Posted Sat, 06/30/2007 - 8:02am by rernst

In the past six months my wisdom teeth have been giving me headaches like mad. So, I decided that I should probably have them removed. Doubly so when I found out that several had decay, and since they're so far back in my mouth that they'd be extremely hard to repair.

So, my attempts to have them removed went something like this: