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- We Begin!: After many weeks of thinking, scheming and proposing I have at last settled upon this blog form, and so must begin. Have I anything to say? Not much, but this morning Yanagi (yet again) gave me something to think about, and I think it worth sharing…
- The nth Day Ends: I won't fill you in on the background of anything; I have to start sometime, and it might as well be now.
The box is coming along well, better this afternoon once I gave up for the time being trying to make A Thing to cut trunnels. I turned inste…
- I Wheel My Wheelbarrow...: In which I bring my desk back to school to finish finishing it and then get it assessed.
What a marvellous morning! I brought my desk back to school this morning to get it assessed next Monday; I walked here with it on my wheelbarrow. It's n…
- The Speed Of Response: The speed at which one is required to respond in various forms of a) long-distance communication, and b) woodworking.
I have been thinking about the various forms of long-distance communication that are in common use, such as email, telephone, and…
- Morning!: …
- Fine Woodworking on Treenails:
Squaring a drilled hole. Begin by drilling through the leg and tenon with a bit just smaller than the width of the peg. Make sure you don't drill through the other side of the leg. Use a 1/8" chisel to square up the first third of the hole.
Maki…
- A Moment of Doubt: I have nailed six of the eight corners of the box: through the first tail and into the next pin, and I tried to offset the holes so the joint would be pulled tighter when the treenails were driven home. This failed to happen on most of the joints an…
- Clouds Above The Grass: An afternoon of a book, a cafe, a friend, much good talking and only a little work done.
William Morris' lectures on Art and Socialism from the last quarter of the 19th century kept me company in a juice bar in town this afternoon, but only for a …
- It's Okay (I Guess).: I have begun dressing the ash, but am quite disheartened today; I don't want to be doing it. I feel like my work is not 'good enough', too rough, or ugly... Why this society, myself included, is so hung up on the smooth, square, fair, straight, eve…
- The Afternoon: I got some lunch on the way back to the workshop, and sat in my corner feeling a bit sad about not wanting to work. It took only a bit of food in my stomach for this mood to pass and I got back to it: more dressing of the ash door jamb for this litt…
- This is fun!: In which I put little inlays over nail holes.
Thus far today I have been installing little squares of inlay to cover the nail holes in the box sides. It's fun work, quite exacting but calm and easy. I'm enjoying myself. I finished the inlaying …
- Closer, Closer, Ever Closer to Where The Wood Really Is.: To be in touch — in contact — with the wood is a wonderful thing; the dust, shavings and sweat blackening my hands; reveling in intimacy with the tree, giving part of myself in exchange for what I am making. Running my hand over the wood, sweepi…
- Assesment: This morning was my final assessment for the Diploma. I was getting pretty nervous beforehand, didn't sleep much last night (for a host of other reasons, not just the assessment) and had had little to eat. As I moved my work downstairs ready to bum…
- A slow day: This morning I began a boxboard mock-up of a set of pidgeonholes for stationery; more on that later. I'm also thinking about the possibility of a bathroom cabinet. I am working again on my bookplate, this time with a view to printing in full colour…
- Just Plane / Flat (!): This morning I came into the workshop really wanting to work on something, but I couldn't really think what. I pulled out a rough sawn piece of blackwood that was left over from my table, sharpened up my plane, and set to work making shavings. I di…
- unfinished: I haven't posted for a few days because I have not been doing much worthy of note. A bit more playing with boxboard pidgeonholes, a bit of reading (Morris mainly, this morning the first book of The Prelude, as well as sundry other texts relating to …
- Keepin' It Local: I'm so excited!! Last night I couldn't sleep for the thrill of what I'm planning on doing. I'm feeling excited about facing the utter enormity of global manufacture from a standpoint of low-tech and beautiful dumpster diving! Take that door jamb f…
- Just WALK!!:
"In industrialized countries we live as if we have no legs. Yet, we always want to go somewhere and fast. Often we don't live near where we work and we don't work where we live. ... Transport consumes large quantities of oil; it is a major source…
- A Catalogue, I Think?: I have not posted for ages, and I didn't really think I would be again until next year. But here I am, and very inspired about woodwork, uni and all that is going on: hooray (and what a relief)! I have much to report from the last couple of weeks b…
- How strange things are: How strange things are! Yesterday I was on the verge of dropping out, the meaninglessness of it all swelled up so - but fret not! an evening of friends and tea, followed by a good night's sleep, turned it all around. Now the same wrenching division…
- Over the Brink: How strange things are! Yesterday I was on the verge of dropping out, the meaninglessness of it all swelled up so - but fret not! an evening of friends and tea, followed by a good night's sleep, turned it all around. Now the same wrenching division…
- "The Poetics of Space": By Gaston Bachelard
"Imagination augments the values of reality." -- p.3
"...they describe [the humble abode] as it actually it, without really experiencing its primitiveness, a primitiveness which belongs to all, rich and poor alike, if they are…
- A Created Environment: Ben Lee delivered an intriguing, in depth (an hour and a half!) talk on his work as Artistic Director for a computer game company. What particularly fascinated me about this topic was the attention to detail that is given to the fantastic environmen…
- Nothin' like a Good Upgrade to Start The Day: I got up early this morning to grab the phone line before the others awake - there's eight here today and I guess someone will come hassling before long. I have returned to using wordpress (the software that I was using last year briefly) for this s…
- Attaching wooden boards to bindings.: The earliest period from which many bindings with wooden boards are extant is the twelfth/thirteenth century. These often have boards of around half an inch - "in some cases the book is thinner than the combined thickness of the two boards."1 Early…
- What I Did/Read/Thought Today: Hurrying off to uni after remembering the chai & cake stall, I forgot my lunch and the honey (not sweet mate), but managed to prove to myself the wisdom in having a slow bike. [Oh how I wish I could get my digital camera to work with these uni compu…
- Blackened Fingers: I began the morning in good spirits, lying watcing the grapevine outside my bedroom window, and the small bright blue patches of sky between the leaves. It didn't seem to matter if I got out of bed or not...
I have this morning begun binding a bo…
- Book 0.1b Complete: The loveliest thing happened this afternoon: I sat down to sewing the signatures soon after lunch, an lo! 2½ hours later I looked up! It is so nice when work occupies one so; I don't really care what I do so long as I can experience this feel…
- Co-operation is better than Conflict: Working at the co-op set me thinking (and chatting with a few people) about how utterly enjoyable is work that we do from a sense of love. Fabulous! After a few hours at the co-op I went to the library to continue with Bachelard. I am finding him …
- Three Things: 1. A morning of getting ready for the short, cold days ahead; as the nights grow colder and darker earlier, I find myself in need of more warmth and (some - I have none now) light: pyjamas and bike lights are in order!
2. An interesting scrabbl…
- O yearning Thought!: I wonder how much of this journalling I should create? Am I to go on and on, putting down my world as it comes by me - as if it were a film and I a critic taking notes - and heedless of the reams of text, the "ocean waste and wide", that I leave beh…
- Untitled: Yesterday I did interesting things with InDesign and two bits of wood. I read. I chatted with people. I investigated the bookbinding studio. All things that were good and I left campus feeling so very excited! Then: I stayed up too late, and am …
- Low Brain Functionality (LBF): This really is dreadful! I am going around and around in circles with this image stuff! There is a promise that the next release of WordPress will include better photo functionality, so I think my best bet is to wait until then, and go now to find …
- Silence is my vice.: A seminar by Ian Percival, a man who's life embodies so much of what is wonderful about tools, making, and what might be termed 'industrial technology'; a thoroughly inspiring talk. Then a lunch with the other post-graduate students and Ian (a usual…
- A small nook to call my own.: The house/room/attic that I dream of making, inhabiting and remaking; - where is it? What will it seem like to strangers seeing it for the first time? Many articles I have read of poet-build abodes, and rarely have they captured any true poetic ima…
- Another Side: I scribbled the following, sitting on the cold hard concrete of the city:
This is the other side. This is the side that eschews all forms of pomposity, vanity, indeed any care taken over appearance or manner. This is the sleepin' rough, carrying…
- On Writing: Around and aound I go as always, but now at least I am starting to see the pattern. For the last few days I have been in techno-mode, spending a lot of time on computers and ignoring the world. Predictably, this immersion in the web has resulted in…
- Sunday in The Lab: I have spent far too long on the computer. My mind is in quite a strange state. What am I to do?
All this coding suddenly seems pointless, and I want to stroll on the terrace, prehaps sit with a quiet cup of tea, or be warmed by the fire and Kea…
- "Howards End": By Edward Morgan Forster
"To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it." -- p.35, a thought of Margaret's. "You remember 'rent'? It was one of father's words - Rent to the ideal, to his own faith i…
- In Parting: Soon I shall return to the workshop. I have books to make!…
- Reading Wood: This morning, outside the workshop: "It is so very good to be back at school. Even though niether the library nor the workshop are open yet, I feel relieved, and insipired to study. It's a bit like a fraction of what Harry Potter felt when he got b…
- Doubt, and Reading the Cure: A moment of doubt: I have come to the workshop this morning to work again on the scroll. I am bevelling the ends of one of the rods with my blockplane, using the bench-hook as a shooting board. I have just realised that i am wearing a groove in th…
- Short Thoughts: Making, creating, working with one's hands, is a wonderous thing. An absolute requirement for being human, hugely satisfying, and I love it. Thing is, I am just as happy patching my old pair of army pants as I am working the finest wood - possibly …
- Untitled: I awoke this morning with a very sore back, but got up, breakfasted, read for an hour and was out of the house by eight. I had no wish to go back to the workshop, nor to make anything; all I wanted to do was read. There is so much that I want to re…
- The Quakers and Quietism: By Pamela M. Oliver
INTRODUCTION: That there was a change in the nature of the Society between the years 1647 and 1742 seems indisputable. It was withdrawing from outwardly-observable religious acts or witnesses to the Truth. Was it an increase…
- Untitled: I have not blogged for ages. I am sick of forcing myself to work with wood. If I were to be doing just what I want at the moment, I would not even be thinking of wood. I would be sitting in a nice place reading, or at my desk at home coding. Inst…
- I'M BACK!!: I'M BACK!! Today was wonderful! I actually wanted to be in the workshop, working; amazing! I gave up on trying to work towards any particular project, and went back to the basics. I felt like I could've been in year eight! I cut a mortice and te…
- Talk about Oscar Wilde!: An unexamined life may indeed not be worth living, but what of constant, total re-evaluation of everything?! Is that a state to be envied? It seems utterly unavoidable, quite outside of my control, this daily, hourly, questioning of is it worth it,…
- Stylin': This morning I have been playing around with CSS. I know it doesn't look too great just now, but I'll fix it soon... maybe. I want to get back to working on my main PHP project, but it's such a drag working on it without the lovely syntax high-ligh…
- The General International Standard Archival Description: The Unesco Archives Portal is a wonderful directory (among other things) to all sorts of archives and archival-related information, all over the world. I found the ISAD(G) there, and I think it will be of great value in building the structure of [a …
- Internet Collaboration: The crisp morning, cold but nothing to worry about; sitting reading at 6AM quite possible, wrapped only in everything I own. I am captivated at the moment by the 'international community' (and I use this phrase sarcastically) of the web, and especia…
- In The Sharehouse User Space: Doing lots of coding; not much woodworking. Doing what I want, getting stuff done, having a good time. Seems useful. Am I to continue with wood? Not thinking about it; just doing that which has my thoughts mostly. Feeling a bit guilty, but not '…
- A Return to the Web: Returning to this blog after so long? What do I think I'm doing?! As if this is what it's all about! I don't want to return to this God-awful dive of diurnal dialog with myself; I don't want to say, yet again, "Ooh, yes, woodwork is grand, but sur…
- Where Do I Walk, Then?: Today I reinstate this weblog. I've shuffled files around on this server, and I've shuffled boxes and books around in my bedroom; it's Spring, and time to re-organise, clear up, and start to think again. Last week I thought I was doing just so, but…
- Hyphens and dashes: Dashes and hyphens, a good article from the Characters and encodings section of the free information site IT and communication by Jukka "Yucca" Korpela.…
- On The Love of Doing Stuff Well And Caring For Things: What is it about doing things correctly that riles me up so?! Pacing backwards and forewards last night in the kitchen, finding myself thwarted at every turn by things that (I imagine) most people would have not a second glance for, let alone be so …
- What's the point?: Oh weary thing! Oh listless drudgery! Oh the stupid work we make for ourselves!! Oh!...
Here I sit, on a cool spring morning, with nothing at all to worry about; I am happy. So why-oh-why-oh-why should I sit down to work at some sloppy, good-fo…
- Begone broodiness!: We've been trying to stop our bantam from being broody for the last week or so, to no avail. Someone said that putting a clutch of ice cubes under her would do the trick, but it just seemed too painful—she sat there, looking poor and hungry a…
- All that I want to do is write.: I am unsure as to just how wise this whole online journaling idea is, and yet I feel drawn to it time and time again. Why on Earth would I want the world to read what I have to write? Why do I not just write it in my [other, paper-and-ink, bound, r…
- My xorg.conf: At last we have Ubuntu working with a SGI 1600SW Flatpanel display. Here's the xorg.conf:
# /etc/X11/xorg.conf (xorg X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# val…
- Triple Gripe: Eighteen buckets of water for A.'s garden. A cycle over to my new community garden plot in O'Connor. And now much grief caused by our bothersome host.
It's fun carrying buckets, when one doesn't have to worry about getting sunburnt. I'm oh-so-e…
- Off Again, and No More Writing.: I'm about to get on the Indian Pacific in East Perth (W.A.) to go home (home?! really? is it home?) to Canberra. I'll be studying, not writing (journal-wise) nor blogging. Seeya.…
- My very own garden plot: I've got a community garden plot at the COGS O'Connor garden. It's 9x5 metres, on an old tennis court, and has nothing but weeds growing on it at the moment (because I only picked up the key yesterday). A. and M. have also got plots there; we're al…
- My new bicycle trailer: I bought it on eBay, it arrived yesterday, and this morning we got LOTS of compost from the co-op, to take to the garden.
…
- Market Day: Market day at uni, and the most exciting thing I can think of: that my mungbeans are up! They're shooting forth in a little green row, cracking the clay apart, and are to me such wonderful little things. There's not much that draws me at Market Day…
- Gardening: It's a rainy old morning in Canberra. It's all dim and damp and cool, and all things are fairly happy. I've been to the garden this morning, as usual, and I've some photos of the garden, with Adele's plot in the foreground, and a bit of my plot.
…
- End-of-term: So, we're all sitting around, I'm sort of pissed (from a bit of a bottol of beer, and a bit of a bottil of wine) and life's okay. Thing is, I'm in here typing away here, 'cause the girls are out there talking about teaching and I've got little to s…
- Grepping: Global Search Regular Expression Print.
An’ there I was, thinking McKenzie Wark was aluding to some pre-1976 use of this term. ‘Course he wasn’t, A Hacker Manifesto is way fully for geeks who’d know how to search, and what…
- Slow Down!: The following from Japan for Sustainability:
During the planning stage for the construction of a new condominium, the prospective residents had a heated debate on whether or not an elevator should be installed. Some were opposed because once insta…
- To Coledale: Kingston railway station waiting room. Feeling slightly queezy from the bus, but excited also to be off with a bag, book and journal. Not that there's much beauty in the modern transport world; the telly is on behind me, playing the most banal, hideo…
- Work Suspended: (From 'Work Suspended' and other stories written before the second world war, Evelyn Waugh, 1948 (revised edition).)
"For the civilized man there are none of those swift transitions of joy and pain which possess the savage; words form slowly lik…
- On Photography: It seems better to not take any photos at all, or at least not to incorporate them into this text. They break up the flow (mental, not typographical, although they do that too) and distract one from reading (and me from writing, which is more to my …
- Yet again, the Great Divide: Often, when I'm sitting in a lecture about concurrency, say, or sketching a possible design for some program, I actively love the fountain pen that I'm using at these times. Engaging with I.T., I find such great comfort in using such an old and 'out…
- Procrastination: I'm lost today, lost in a dull quagmire of concurrency, Ada and the oppresive weight of too much stuff. I have an assignment to do and I understand very little of it. I suspect that I could figure it out, but I can't be bothered. If I could see cl…
- hmwilson.archives.org.au: I forgot to mention, a few weeks ago when I set it up, that the family archives now have an online home at hmwilson.archives.org.au. It's for family only, but if that's you then I will set up your account; just email me. I'm jolly excited about goi…
- Nothing to say: (So why am I saying this?) I am looking forward to the day when I will again have something worth writing about (and I'm thinking here of woodwork: one of the happiest times of wood/tech union was back in 2003 when I was working at the art school wo…
- Shimano SG-X Chainrings: What Shimano have to say about the chainrings on my bike (From bike.shimano.com; I've reproduced it here becuase I rather suspect they'll move the page and the image one of these days, and I want persistent reference.):
Reduced slippage un…
- A List:
August '06: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig 1975.
…
- Bicycle: This is a continually-modified post in which I am placing information about the tools I use for my bike. Tools first, and for which parts they're used, then parts and the tools they need in a second table.
Tools
ToolSizeUsed for
ImperialMetri…
- Trivia night at Burner Towls Club: This is the floor:
…
- End of the day, end of the week.: I am exhausted, but strangely not completely sick of this assignment. It's beer o'clock, and I'm going to the pub. Part of me wants to stay and keep going—while I'm going well an' all—but I think I've just deleted a function from the fi…
- New pedals for my bike.: I installed my new pedals yesterday. There's a picture of one of them on Wikibooks, in the Bicycling book.…
- For want of an Australian Idle: From Mr Tom Hodgkinson (of Idle fame), and HRH The Duke of Rothesay (lovely three-piece), comes a jolly sensible implore to slow down. May we heed it gratefully.…
- Freedom is here at last: I'm finished with university for the year, and that skipping calm happiness of walking into a library and being free to read whatsoever I like is mine again! O friendly days!
I leave for Perth in two days, on bike and bus and train, and am gettin…
- What I Saw From A Café In Fremantle: Spareparts Puppet Teatre; the now-ornamental crane at 'E' Shed; a line of billboards hiding much; and the corner of the railway station — these form the horizon of my view from here. There's Norfolk Pines, this café's umbrellas, and the awning ab…
- Lines through the greensward: I've been walking lately. To university, to the co-op, and home again: along Sullivan's Creek I go, sort of following the bike path and generally veering off and strolling quietly through grassy, damp, tree-lined avenues. It's nice, as nice as anyt…
- Walking the same path: Walking the same path, backwards and forwards, again and again, day after day, in doing this one gets to know the path. It doesn't matter where it is: a city street full of cars and businesses, a suburban wasteland of scraps of grass and rough dirt,…
- Sorry about this post, but...: ...I really don't like being honked at by lone occupants of four-wheel drives! Me get off the road?! Why don't they get off their stupid arses!?…
- Relying on, but not trusting, technology: I have been sorting through my (digital) photos lately, uploading the good ones to my website. It's drudge-work, peaceful in its way like all drudge-work, and now and then I stumble upon a particularly nice shot, or one that evokes some pleasant mem…
- I'm thinking of leaving university.: …
- I've left.: …
- My Sandstone University: Well, look here, I really can't think very well at this time of night, so I don't think you should expect much of this post.
I'm thinking of that cave just up from the Palm Tree Beach, the one who's main enterance caved in a few years ago, leaving…
- Kerrie Tucker's revamped site: During the last few days I've been working with Margo Kingstong and Kate Tucker on porting Kerrie Tucker's website to Wordpress. I've also set up the new ACT Greens online merchandise shop, Green Shop. So I've probably had about enough of sitting a…
- Happy Birthday Tom: This is a little thing for my brother.…
- "Dad, I dug a hole.": I have been digging this morning, working on the chicken run. It's muddy, now we've started pulling up the concrete, and the clay sucks at my boots and sticks to all the tools; how very far this is from my memories of digging soakwells in Fremantle!…
- Addressbook Plugin v0.2: Here is version 0.2 of my Addressbook plugin. Post comments, bug reports, feature requests, etc. below.…
- so cold: Why oh why does Tilley's not open until nine o'clock?! Doesn't anyone in Lyneham understand the joys of escaping first thing in the morning to a nice warm café, a good book, and the ignoring of everything one's supposed to be doing for a few hours?…
- Addressbook v.0.3: Here's version 0.3 of the Addressbook plugin. Editing and deleting now work, and I've cleaned up the UI a bit. Also, the installation procedure shouldn't now throw any errors. Let me know what you think.…
- The Chicken Run: We're getting half a dozen chicks next week, and their house isn't at all ready yet…
…
- Placeblogging: I learnt a new word today: placeblog. (By saying that, I may be showing myself up to be rather behind the times; if that's the case, then I guess I am behind the times. Oh well.)
Placeblogging is blogging about place (suprisingly), and generally…
- A Walk to the Shops: A journey to 35.25223° South, 149.124475° East.
Before I left the house it occured to me, as an act of recognition of Place (and how people conceptualise it), to find out the global latitude/longitude coordinates of my destination. I prom…
- New BB For Me: I've just installed a new bottom bracket in my bicycle. It's a Shimano UN26, 68x113mm (1mm narrower than the old one, but that's just closed up the little gap I had anyway), and cost $40. I'm posting this just so that I don't forget…
I…
- The F-91W: I bought this watch when I started working at IBM, because it is such an archetype of The Digital Watch, and I like to be reminded of the Future.
Some pointless facts about the F-91W:
Water Resistant;
Micro Light;
Daily Alarm;
1/100 se…
- From mud-and-straw to IBM: The chickenhouse must get finished! The chooks are growing up, and they're in the shed with a little light to keep them warm — but we've got such a lovely house planned for them, and we just must finish it! It's at the bottom of the garden, …
- Addressbook v.0.4: Addressbook v.0.4 is now available. A major bug with the editing function has been fixed, and a user-requested new feature introduced.
You can now embed an addressbook list into your posts or pages. Insert <addressbook /> wherever you want…
- Sitting, reading (again).: I seem to always want to return to this state: a quite chair with a pleasant outlook, and a good book. Here I am, into my second week at IBM, and I have achieved it, albeit with some detractions. The most major: I'm reading IBM Red Books. Next: th…
- To Get A Walkman: I'm going to borrow Francis' walkman, because iPods suck. Tapes are better, and there are so very many to be had. A zine with a covertape?…
- Facebook vs. Wordpress: The last few weeks have seen a great number of my friends turn to Facebook (and, of course, I know exactly how many). It's great, it's exciting, it's suddenly become so easy to organise things and we can now all talk about Facebookwhen we meet for a…
- Blog Action Day: On October the 15th, blog about the environment — along with everyone else! Register your blog for the Blog Action Day.…
- The (not so secret) lives of galaxies: Professor Mike Dopita "traces the often violent life cycle of galaxies to answer the following questions: How are galaxies formed? How is the gas transformed into stars? How do the massive Black Holes that lurk at their centres grow? What happens whe…
- Ignore the caterpillars, get back to work.: I have just returned from my customary post-lunch walk around the lake. It's lovely, strolling through the hundred meters of bush that lies between the shore and the highway — I'm not being ironic, it really is lovely. I went across the bridge (t…
- Bus Party!: Woo hoo! Email me to find out more.…
- Dave Robertson at the Front: Dave Robertson has a gig at the Front in Lyneham.…
- Homeward Bound: Every evening as I head home on the intertown, the view west from the bridge reminds me of all that I love most about Canberra. The sun setting behind Black Mountain, with the ANU tucked in amongst the trees and the lake there, all still and calm, a…
- auDA Community Geographic Domain Name Review: From auDA > Policy Reviews > CGDN Review - Aug 2007
auDA is conducting a 12 month review of the Policy Rules and Guidelines for Community Geographic Domain Names (CGDNs). Send your comments to Jo Lim (Chief Policy Officer, auDA) at jo.lim@auda.org…
- How CGDNs might help build a sense of belonging.: My brain is feeling pretty groggy at the moment, so excuse any pointlessness in this post. Not that there's ever any point to my posts, but that's beside the point. I'm at work, almost thinking that the afternoon's nearly half-gone and so, well, wh…
- Cycle Against the Nuclear Cycle: From the CANC3 people:
Bring your bike to Canberra, for the ride toward a nuclear free future.
The Cycle Against the Nuclear Cycle (CANC3) campaign
are arriving in Canberra. They have cycled 2,500 km from Rockhampton, Queensland to spread …
- The ANU Food Co-op party: Come and help us celebrate! See the Co-op's wiki for more.…
- I Don't Go In Cars: I'm writing a more in-depth article on this topic at the moment, and I'll post it soon, but for now I just want to mention a couple of things.
The team that I am part of at IBM looks after servers that are spread over two different data-centres, o…
- Fake World DOES Contain Humans: All has gone well, since my last post, with my intra-office carlessness. My announcement ("I don't go in cars; don't ask me to.") has been met with near universal acceptance (or silence), to my great relief. I had wondered whether the conversations…
- Why I Refuse to Travel in Cars: In July 2004 I made the decision to completely stop travelling in all cars.
Since then, I have refused to get in any car whatsoever (even if it’s “going there anyway” or an electric vehicle), and although my life has become more geographical…
- Addressbook plugin now on wordpress.org: I have finally got around to registering the Addressbook plugin on wordpress.org. From now on, I will use the Subversion repository there for managing the plugin, and not this site; I will still post update announcements here, though.
See wordpre…
- Young Greens meeting: The second Young Greens meeting will be on the 20th. See the new YG blog for more.…
- Dispatches: I've just discovered the ABC's blogs (blogs.abc.net.au) and I quite like what I've read so far. Maybe it's just the idea of far-away correspondents filing these 'letters home' that appeals. A chap with a laptop (I'd like to think he'd be writing in…
- Ummm...: Things have cheered up since yesterday, primarily because of my morning's start of good fruit toast (thanks to a trip to the Co-op last night) and a coffee. I don't usually have a coffee in the morning, that's why I mention it. Even then, it's not …
- Where I Write: I have often thought that one of the greatest attractions for me to writing in ink, on paper, in a properly-bound book, is that where one writes the words is where they will remain, and the only place they will ever be. That's not the case when writ…
- Addressbook v.0.5: Moving Addressbook to Wordpress' Subversion repository (and changing things to conform to the standard plugin guidelines) meant that a few links got broken, and I've only just had time to fix things. So, I apologise to anyone who got a broken copy; …
- You can't "double your vote" in Australia: On Sunday 2007-08-20, Steve Dalton of the Gold Coast Greens posted the following:
Reposting this excellent cartoon that everyone should see to get an understanding of preferential voting and why it is so important to Vote 1 Green!
Excep…
- Addressbook v.0.6: This is a minor release in which I have added a field for miscellaneous notes. Download it now from the Wordpress site.
Please leave bug reports, comments, and suggestions below.…
- Addressbook v.0.7 and other plugins: I have been ignoring this blog lately, I know. I've just been rather annoyed with Wordpress, to tell the truth, and have been off playing in PmWiki at my own little place under archives.org.au. So, sorry, no exciting updates from Life At IBM (ha! a…
- '11th Hour' Greens' fundraiser: I'm sure I'll feel oh-so-inclined to Do More about climate change after watching this. Not that I'm feeling sick and tired of mainstream hipocracy about this stuff or anything. Just imagine Marvin: "Climate change? Don't talk to me about climate c…
- Bookkeeping v.0.1: This is the first public release of this plugin, and it's not very polished yet. But it does work! Download it from wordpress.org now, and let me know what needs fixing.
I've been using it pretty much as-is for the past six months or so, and the…
- That on which the coding rests: Just to intersperse this stream of codeish posts with something a little more real…
I rode part of the way to work today, and then put my bicycle on the bus for the remainder of the journey. (An odd feeling, looking through the bus' windscreen …
- Blog Action Day: Bloggers unite. Today is blog action day, when we write about 'the environment' in order to 'save it'. Oh yeah.
Tom Worthington calls for less emails; but I concur with Paul Kingsnorth, and say: smash your computer and lock on to the nearest air…
- Squirrelmail Variable Sent Folder Plugin: I've just submitted a patch for Squirrelmail's Variable Sent Folder plugin, fixing that plugin's lack of respect for the user's choice of folder-select-box display. It's been annoying me for a while. Here's the patched version (0.4sw).…
- walk walk walk: [about walk walk walk]
The above is about walking in a local urban area, and doing so to get to know where you live. A great idea, I think, and it's something that I'm very keen on. …
- Urban Adventure in Rotterdam: Urban Adventure in Rotterdam
Not that I'm bored today at work or anything, as you can see: not posting for a month, then here I am warbling on about urban exploration! But then I would really rather be out charting the course of a drain, or sketc…
- 2007 AGM - ANU Food Co-op: 2007 AGM - ANU Food Co-op Wiki
…
- One speed: slow?: Another gap in posts for this blog; sorry. (Not that there's anyone reading this to say sorry to, but as they say: meh.) It's not that I haven't been writing lately, I have, but in places that the web doesn't reach; I've been enjoying that.
But …
- Turning Over an Old Leaf: So here I am, back in the office, and bored again.
I have spent the morning trawling the Arts Full Text database; from the 'Notebooks' category, to 'Reading and Books', and thence to things about binding, I've been remembering that thrill of quiet…
- if:book: ephemera: I'm bored and tired this Monday morning, but still I flick through my blog feeds; I found this: [if:book: ephemera] from the Institute for the Future of the Book.
It's an interesting idea: that the inconsequential, unconsidered, printed matter of …
- Addressbook v.0.8: Sorry about my long silence on the coding front; the new version of the address book plugin is now available. You can download it from the official Wordpress plugin repository.…
- Image-Flicker v.0.2: The second version of Image-Flicker now available. This release fixes a problem with quoting and entities in the description field. If there's anything I've missed, please let me know in a comment to this post. Thanks!…
- A 'New' Way to Read and Write: I have been reading, lately, about writers' relationships with computers, specifically the idea that the technology used to write (pen versus keyboard, etc.) affects what's written. Nothing new in that discussion, but I have noticed one thing: that …
- Addressbook Version One! (was v.0.9): [This post was about version 0.9, but I've sorted out a major bug, and added Gravatars, and because my daft consecutive version numbering system was up to it, I've had to release Version One twenty minutes after 0.9; I didn't see the point of writing…
- Image-Flicker v.0.3: I have finally gotten around to fixing the most major bug that's been festering in the Image Flicker documentation. Sorry for my laxity in this. To make up for being slow, I've added a widget, to make it easier to use the thing. Isn't that jolly e…
- Addressbook v.1.1: Bugfix release 1.1 for Addressbook is now available from the WP plugin repository. I'll get to the outstanding feature requests soon, I promise (feel free to hassle me here though — and don't email me, it doesn't work).…
- Teleworking: Last night I went to an ACS talk about teleworking. Against my expectations, I actually really enjoyed it. Within five minutes the presenter -- Bevis England: a neat, friendly, almost English-sounding Kiwi -- had mentioned peak oil and the way in w…
- History is Fanfiction?: Reading history is a bit like reading fantasy or sci-fi; it's just that the fanfic of history is generally more consistent than that of fantasy. I have been reading history lately (Victoria and Disraeli by Theo Aronson, the last couple of days, to b…
- Up the Hills and Far Away: I've come up the east hill today, just to see where it goes, what's up here, and what I can see. I can't believe I've been this way before. It's such an obvious high point, from which I can see all of (tiny) Tuggeranong spread out along the valley,…
- Afternoon in the Office: Right. Well then.
My idea, this week, is to write more. So far, I have failed.
I have nothing to say. There is nothing going on, nothing worth talking about. But I want to write.
* * *
I have six weeks and two days to go at IBM. I've…
- Drystone: I really shouldn't have bothered with that last post; siting in that office, my brain confuddled with fluro lights, cake, and the 'net, I can never think well enough to write anything. I should get that by now.
So I've left the place, earlier tha…
- Catching up…: I have been playing around with a different form for this website for the last couple of weeks. Because I don't particularly care if people don't have access to it all the time, I made the changes to the live site, and so it's looked pretty bad late…
- Back to the bench (and a bit of code): I have arrived at long last! I've been in WA for two weeks already, and I have only in the last couple of days a) been for a swim, and b) unpacked my tools and started to think (once again) about wood. I've been more concerned, for some reason, abo…
- My Shed: My new home:
…
- Silence on the Fourth Floor: I yearn for quiet (I'm a Quaker, after all, and feel silence to be a necessary precondition for hearing the ssvw). Especially when I'm reading.
But public libraries are not silent.
Libraries, you see, are meant to be fun. In the morning, the…
- Indexing Newspapers: I have been working again this morning down at the Local History Collection at the library. The newspaper clippings' catalogue is progressing — up to a hundred and thirty clippings so far — and proving to be quite an interesting project. This…
- Documentation: The documenting of how we live, where we live, what we do — that's what I'm interested in. And it's a waste of time, really, in that it doesn't contribute to any of those things (oh, of course that's simplifying it too much; oh well). It's also n…
- I am wondering what Twitter is...: I am wondering what Twitter is all about. It seems rather silly to me, so far. In fact, I suspect it IS rather silly. Especially the word l…
- Who is _beetlebeb?: Who is _beetlebeb?…
- Aha! Now I know who _beetlebe...: Aha! Now I know who _beetlebeb is (but I'm not saying).…
- NaBloPoMo, and Don’t Read This.: Thanks to all the modern things I have just this morning become aware of NaBloPoMo, which seems to be the alternative, for those lacking in ambition (like myself), to NaNoWriMo. The idea is to write one post per day for the whole month. Why? We…
- Addressbook Update: Right. There we go. What was I saying? Yes, Addressbook Plugin…
Desiderata thus far (taken from comments and emails, and in order of proposed implementation):
Export CSV;
Import CSV;
Photo upload (probably over-ride the Gravatar, but …
- Free Culture Libraries, Based on Discrete Blobs: I have been reading Lessig's Free Culture, specifically about the four different types of content-sharing that he identifies on p2p networks: sharing content that the user would otherwise buy (bad); sharing content as a precursor to buying it (good);…
- Coding; Quakerism; and a Boring Title: I had hoped to be able to post an announcement today about a new version of the Addressbook plugin, but unfortunately it's not quite ready. I've done a bit of fiddling (this will only add 0.0.1 to the version after all), and have just a little more…
- Right. Well, Facebook's a was...: Right. Well, Facebook's a waste of time just like it used to be. What a suprise.…
- Tom M. Wilson » Prehensile Precursor: Tom M. Wilson » Prehensile Precursor: My brother, remembering the pepermint trees in the park near where we grew up.
The trees are still there, with their crows-nests of safety, and they have grown: seemingly at the same rate as myself, so that w…
- Thoughts of more deep seclusion: Monday morning. A weekend of much work and little writing, in which I thought (yet again) to chuck the blog, chuck the computer, and return to Moleskine and ink. I didn’t; I just went to work.
And two comments on my last post, in as many days …
- WordPress Distributed Bibliography: I’m not actually all that enthusiastic about this silly address book plugin, y’know. I’d rather be back fiddling with a little idea I had a while ago for a distributed bibliography thing for WP. Something a bit like LibraryThing, except that al…
- Returning To This Blog’s Roots: I have been wanting to re-focus my blogging, and return to writing only about my woodworking. I’ve set up a wiki, and installed a new instance of WordPress, and tried all sorts of technical things, but just don’t seem to be able to get the flow o…
- At long last, and after so ver...: At long last, and after so very many Guardian articles, it seems that someone I know is actually USING twitter. Or perhaps not...…
- Cantonment Hill and Wikimedia Commons: The news that Flickr Commons is full prompted me, yesterday afternoon, to cycle down to Cantonment Hill to get some photos to add to the hill's Wikipedia article. Why? Because I added a short note to Wikinews the other day about the imminent return…
- Literate Documentation: Writing about the code: This morning I’m returning to work on some code that I haven’t touched for a few months, and I’ve been rather dreading getting back to it. I’ve forgotten all the details; never knew many of them anyway. I was working with someone else on this…
- Concatenating a PDF and a bunch of JPGs: Someone here at work wanted to know how to add a three-page PDF to a Word document, and then add a dozen photos after it, and then save the whole mess as a new PDF.
I suggested ImageMagick’s convert and pdftk.
Combine all the images into o…
- A walk through Manning Reserve and Spearwood: 3:15PM. I stood on pretty much this exact spot some years ago, and then as now it was the view that I had been waiting for on the walk — before I could get out my notebook to write.
I've been walking for half an hour, or maybe a bit more, t…
- I have returned to Facebook! ...: I have returned to Facebook! And identi.ca, and my blog... it seems to be time to rejoin the 'social' world. Hello, world.…
- WebDB database interface, a Kohana module: For the past month or so I have been working on rebuilding my little database interface — called WebDB — as a Kohana module. It's now ready for a first alpha release; you can find it at github.com/samwilson/kohana_webdb. I'll be putting a demo …
- High on coffee: High on coffee, and I'm setting up a demo site for #WebDB. A good morning.…
- First feedback about WebDB: First feedback about #WebDB: http://forum.kohanaframework.org/discussion/6112. Hurrah for #Kohana!…
- Extracting coordinates from single 60 bit hex numbers: Thanks to the wonderful people on Stackoverflow, I'm making some progress with figuring out how some geographic information is saved in a DB2 database that I'm working with.
it turns out that, rather than using the spatial functionality of DB2 (wh…
- The Food Co-op has a new domain name: The ANU Food Co-operative is now called the Food Co-op Shop, and (thanks to a pint bottle of Little Creatures Pale, and an hour or so of shuffling files around and fiddling with databases when I got home from work this evening) can now be found onlin…
- #Finns now have the legal #rig...: #Finns now have the legal #right to #broadband access: http://gu.com/p/2t4g8…
- Saving query string parameters between requests: In which I try to implement column sorting in WebDB, but end up building a general system for persisting query string variables between HTTP requests. Sort of.
In the old, Zend-based, WebDB, column sort order was passed as a $_GET parameter and t…
- Fremantle Society website: I have recently started helping to maintain The Fremantle Society's website (fremantlesociety.org.au), and it's reminding me of why I work in IT and of how much I've been missing being part of any greater endevour (with people, I mean, and working to…
- A photo from #RoelLoopers of a...: A photo from #RoelLoopers of a #FremantlePorts line crew: http://freoview.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/out-of-the-blues/…
- Why is it that when I'm tired ...: Why is it that when I'm tired I want no text other than ink on paper?! That the screen drags me onwards, the keyboard hooks me forwards...?…
- Off to Nanga for the weekend! ...: Off to Nanga for the weekend! Huzza!!…
- Nanga Music Festival: Just back from Nanga.
A wonderful weekend. I'm just posting a few photos here now, because otherwise I know I'll never get around to it. I am far too tired to think about writing anything meaningful about any of it!
[gallery orderby="titl…
- Richard Stallman: A big audience this evening for Richard Stallman at the Hyatt in Perth: a sharp divide between the suits and the t-shirts. RMS does not seem to quite gel with the ACS! In fact, David Clarke, in introducing him, said that he had no idea that the tal…
- WordPress TwentyTen theme ported to MediaWiki: Last week I needed a simple, reader-focused skin for a MediaWiki install, and I figured WordPress' TwentyTen theme would be suitable. So I ported it to MediaWiki.
The skin can be downloaded from Github, and I've also added it to the MediaWiki…
- Stone found my website, and co...: Stone found my website, and couldn't find even a single mention of him. So now there is.…
- @stevenwalling Thanks for the ...: @stevenwalling Thanks for the kudos re #TwentyTen theme port!…
- PHP's Fileinfo extension under PHP 5.2 on Windows: I have been pulling my hair out this morning trying to get the PHP Fileinfo extension working under PHP 5.2.14 on Windows Server 2003 SE. Actually, to be accurate: I've been trying to get the PHP Fileinfo extension working; the pulling out of hair i…
- Freo on the web: I am trying to get my head around all of the various places that Fremantle features (regularly, topically) on the Web. I want to figure out where the Fremantle Society's website fits in, and what it might be used for (what might be missing from else…
- NaBloPoMo day II, and already nothing to say.: It's hot! The first sight of the firey face of summer? Perhaps so. I've not been in this house for a summer yet, but I think it's going to be okay. I'm even rather looking forward to it. Getting home from work, cracking open a beer, sitting down…
- Finding all date ranges (which may be open-ended) that overlap with a given range: Given a database table listing events and their date ranges: events { id, start_date, end_date, ... }, where either or both of the dates can be null, how is one to find all of the events that fall within (even partially) a given date range? (This is…
- Cory Doctorow on Ubuntu-ThinkPad: My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven, Cory Doctorow, The Guardian. [Local archive]
This article will probably even appeal to Mac fans; certainly reminds me of my idea a few months ago to get one of these machines...…
- What my blog is: I want my blog to be the hub of my online life. I've come back to using WordPress because I want to be able to show other people how easy it is to avoid the walled-gardens of Facebook, Twitter, et al. So I need to explain what I want my blog to be.…
- West 86th - Paperwork Explosion:
“Machines should work, people should think.” The message repeats itself several times; it’s the core of the film’s techno-utopian vision. We can imagine IBM executives and lawyers and public relations agents sitting across a table from Jim …
- Home work: Summer is over, so we've taken the shadecloth down in the courtyard, and started work on the vegie garden. My first ever attempt at bricklaying! It's fun; a bit like cob building, but not as messy and with the added element of greater permanence. …
- The Rise of "Logical Punctuation":
…When I asked Feal and Carol Saller, who oversees the Chicago Manual of Style, if there was a chance their organizations would go over to the other side, they both replied, in essence: "How about never? Is never good for you?"…
— The Rise …
- Open Data Kit:
Open Data Kit (ODK) is a free and open-source set of tools which help organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions. ODK provides an out-of-the-box solution for users to:
Build a data collection form or survey;
Coll…
- Joined Wikimedia Australia: Today I joined Wikimedia Australia.…
- Interpretive Demolition: Wasn't there a sign there last week?
Perhaps someone took Tilden's fourth principle to heart? The chief aim of Interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.…
- FreoWiki event calendar: Setting up a event calendar in FreoWiki: freo.org.au/wiki/Events.…
- 2011 Fremantle Heritage Awards: Best Book award for Fighting For Fremantle! And a few crappy photos from my phone:
[gallery link="file" columns="4"]…
- What will the Internet look like in ten years?: The Internet Society's Future Internet Scenarios.…
- The launch of Freospace: I've just returned from the official launch of Freospace, the council's new publishing platform for precincts (not to be too alliterative about it or anything), at the North Fremantle bowling club. It's a collection of blogs, one for each precinct, …
- Mapping Hilton: The OpenStreetMap of Hilton currently looks like this:
[source]
Which is pretty good, considering some parts of Perth; but it could be much better. So I've downloaded some Walking Papers (it's rather an easy way to get a map printed on a grid …
- Preventing duplicate rows in a tabular HTML form: I am working on a bespoke issue-tracking system at the moment (not for code issue-tracking, in case anyone thinks we're cloning Redmine; although there certainly are overlaps...) in which each issue has a list of personnel, each of whom have a role o…
- Freo Bloggers' meetup: There's going to be a Freo Bloggers' meetup in three weeks, at X-Wray cafe on August 2nd, from about 5:30PM.
Photo by Pedro Figueiredo [CC-BY-SA-2.0]Partly inspired by the activity starting to happen on Freospace blogs (and the possibilities of di…
- Marco Arment on why you should own your online identity: Own your identity by Marco Arment:
If you care about your online presence, you must own it. I do, and that’s why my email address has always been at my own domain, not the domain of any employer or webmail service.
...
Sadly, most people…
- What Technology Wants: Kevin Kelly, in The European:
Most of the problems today have been generated by technology, and most future problems will be generated by technology as well. I am so technocentric that I say: The solution to technological problems is more technolo…
- Trust the Tech:
Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish...
—Neal Stephenson, Innovation Starvation
It is the first day of a new month. Does that mean anyth…
- The Fremantle Society AGM: The Fremantle Society AGM was held last night, at FTI. Always inspiring to talk to people (before and after the meeting) about why they care about Freo. Perhaps less so concerning some of the discussions (during the meeting) — that seem at ti…
- Thank you, Tree: Is there anything more important in the landscape than a beautiful tree? Cutting one down should never be undertaken lightly, and should never be the sole decision of a land-owner; they effect everyone else's amenity far too greatly. The ACT has a …
- Kitchen Stone, Part II:
…
- Waverley by Walter Scott:
[openbook booknumber="0140430717"]…
- Carnival, by Compton MacKenzie: …
- The Quakers by Pink Dandelion: …
- Switching an SVN directory to and from an 'externals' definition: There seems to be quite a few posts out there about how to replace Subversion externals definitions with local directories, but not so much for going the other way. I'm not sure why; it seems to me more likely that one would start off with some smal…
- Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck: …
- Of course we can do it: I read a few posts this morning about the wonders of open software and how it can help 'the 99%'. Nothing new there, in the techno-optimism, nor with the "yes, but" reactions to it. It's heartening to read it, though; there's far too many people har…
- Publication dates:
I knew Kernighan and Plauger were forward-thinking, but hadn't realised they were 22 years ahead of their time!
(Oh, and for my own future reference: How to tear in Gimp.)…
- Getting sorted for the new year, in the Mocca Lounge: A new cafe, on the way home from a ride this morning: the Mocca Lounge, it seems to be called. I guess they mean brown and not quite one thing nor another, but at least relaxing. It's a reasonable place to sit for a while and read a book. It's an …
- Piccadilly Jim, by P. G. Wodehouse: …
- Rules for Making: Yanagi Sōetsu's call to arms tools...
That the crafted item be
produced by anonymous crafts people;
made by hand, and in quantity;
inexpensive;
used by the masses;
functional in daily life;
representative of the region in whic…
- George Steiner, a certain idea of knowledge:
Trees have roots; I have legs. And believe me, that is a huge advantage. [...] Is it possible to read Plato while wearing a Walkman? [...] Books are a great bulwark for private life. [...] Imagine a world where neuro-chemistry could explain Mozart.…
- How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton (1997):
p.41, on reading the 'news-in-brief' section of the daily paper:
Tragic end for Verona lovebirds: after mistakenly thinking his sweetheart dead, a young man took his life. Having discovered the fate of her lover, the woman killed herself…
- Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive: We offered unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, for ever, for free — to anybody who has something to share that belongs in a library.
—Brewster Kahle, Entertainment Gathering Conference 2007 (republished as a TED Talk). The above quote is …
- Wikisource now exports: Wikisource has begun, at long last, to be able to produce export formats for its books. PDF and Epub have been made available in the last week or so, the first via the WMF-wide book creator tool (which has just started supporting the <pages />…
- Sitting near a fence: I am sitting on hot concrete near a fence and a sing that reads "NO THOROUGHFARE". The concrete is a path (leading to the sign), the fence is pretty normal, and the sign doesn't tell anyone anything that the locked gate doesn't. I don't suppose th…
- And What Do You Do, Mr Gable?, by Richard Flanagan: …
- Sorry, Apple Inc., I've met something I like more than you: I first used a Mac in about 1993 — a Quadra I think it might've been, or a Performa. I'd come from DOS and Amiga and didn't really know anything about anything — I didn't even know there was anything to be known. I remember hearing someone talk…
- Ripping: I am ripping down a piece of 135mm tas oak for a drawer-bottom. Straight down the guts of it, I mean: the sectional cut of greatest area; the big-board-to-two-thin-boards break; if you see what I mean. The sort of thing done in twenty-five seconds …
- Bike paths should be as good as roads: I rode again this afternoon and evening on the bike path that runs down from Hampton Road to South Terrace, and was reminded of the poorly-laid new surface that has been installed on the lower part of it. It's rough and bumpy and looks like an amatu…
- ninthfloor.org: This looks great. A community Linux host for email accounts, shell access, and a pile of other uses. They stand for "free access to computers; always yield to the hands-on imperative; freedom of information; decentralization; mistrust of bogus judg…
- Printable WeRelate.org: I've just put up a little script I've been playing with that creates family trees from werelate.org data, using GraphViz. Here's what my tree is currently looking like (click for a clickable SVG, if you're using a good browser):
…
- Contributing to Github-hosted projects: This post has moved to: http://wiki.samwilson.id.au/git…
- Coffee: Roll in to work, settle in for half an hour or so, and then head to the tearoom to make a cup of coffee. A good way to get one's head in for a nice morning building databases. But that's further down the list of Best Ways to Drink Coffee...
A …
- Hami Hill to get a real café?!: Probably not worth getting excited about yet, but it's heartening to see that something might be done with the shops on Winterfold Road one of these days! They'll have at least one grateful customer, here.
(From the Cockburn City Herald, Satu…
- rsync.net: I signed up for an rsync.net account a bit over a month ago. They're a reasonably-priced off-site filesystem provider, seemingly run by people who care about security and doing things normally. By 'normally', I mean rsync for starters (oddly enough…
- Archiving a password-protected site with wget: The combination of wget and the Export Cookies add-on for Firefox is useful for creating offline, complete, static archives of websites that are only accessible with a password:
First log in to the site and export cookies.txt,
Then runwget
-…
- Where did the road go?: Ah! Just there. :-)
The Openstreetmap has just undergone a major change, in the form of the removal of all contributions by people who did not agree to the new licence (or the change of the licence; or something like that). I've been tinkering …
- Digital Permanence: Manton Reececited wrote some sensible words about the permanence of material on the Internet, and Dave Winercited followed suit shortly after (and then againcited). It's an important topic.
We need places — secure, digital, permanent places —…
- WebDB updated: Yesterday I added a little fix to WebDB for a bug that prevented filtering on column names that occur in both the table being filtered and any of the tables referred to by foreign keys. This most often applied to id columns.
[Update:] And today I…
- Wiki Wednesday: Because I never make the time elsewhere to get anything done, I have decided to schedule in an hour or so -- just a tiny bit of time, but regular (and here I am, for the second time) -- every Wednesday afternoon at the local library, to focus on Wiki…
- QRpedia generator: I've been tinkering with a QRpedia 'plaque generator' (freo.org.au/qrpedia) that takes a list of Wikipedia page names as input and spits out a printable set of QRpedia codes with 'Wikipedia' written across the top, and the article name below the QR c…
- Bookpress, free to a good home:
I built this press in 2003 out of pine salvaged from bed frames that were being thrown out by University House at the ANU. I've barely used it since, and the time has come to admit that I'm never going to be the small-time bookbinder fellow that…
- Getting a proper %DATE% variable in batch files: Windows batch files are hideous things, if one is used to *nix shell scripting. Everything feels wrong! Of course, that's mostly just because they have a different syntax... but sometimes it's because they are wrong.
Date formatting, for instanc…
- On What Gets Kept, and Changing How Over Time: "Make things that can be archived (databases cannot be, not if you don't also store the application that reads them). Make it possible to change one's data structures (the ways in which things are stored — not the file formats, so much), and leave…
- Silas Marner, by George Eliiot (1860): Open Library catalogue entry.…
- Deleting files with special characters in their names, in Windows: A couple of directories in Windows couldn't be deleted by Windows Explorer, because they had unprintable characters (I'm assuming) in their names.
D:tmp>dir
Volume in drive D is Data
Volume Serial Number is 8C47-34BD
Directory of D:tmp
…
- Bugchasing: I hate it when my bug turns out to be somebody else's! Hours gone! Still, it's a relief... :-)…
- 'Behind the Lines' podcast, only 2,976 days late: I was digging through some old files, and found an episode of Behind the Lines, a political radio programme from the Canberra station 2XXFM, hosted by Theo Coulthard. It's from 2004. I think at the time I was meant to do something with it, so I've …
- Rails Through the Bush: Gunzburg, Adrian; Austin, Geff (2008). Rails through the Bush: Timber and Firewood Tramways and Railway Contractors of Western Australia. Perth, Western Australia: Rail Heritage WA. pp. 208–210. ISBN 978-0-9803922-2-7. OL12330925W.
…
- Backup Rotation Calendar: A little tool for printing schedules for tape (or other backup media) rotations:
static.samwilson.id.au/2012/backup-cal
…
- Setting up USB drives for backup: I use USB hard drives for backing up one of my machines, swapping them regularly but leaving everything else up to the backup script that runs daily. This means that I want to mount them at the same place every time, regardless of which drive I plug…
- Wiki Tuesday:
The first of the November wiki-Tuesdays this evening. Four of us, and a few new articles created. No power points! But perhaps that'll be recified by next week.
…
- Don't Write Code (write descriptions of things): I wish I didn't know how to code.
For a programmer, the solution to every problem is to write more code.
But sometimes, all that is needed is to write proper words. To explain things and explore them through prose.
Not to remove oneself to …
- Freopedia advertising:
This week's Gazette has an announcement about Freopedia and the editing sessions we're holding at the Fremantle Library.
(That QR code, by the way, goes to http://www.fremantle.wa.gov.au/home/List_of_News_and_Media/November_2012/Help_promote_you…
- When Apache invents filename extensions and /index = /index.php: I have now had this problem about every year for the last three or four years, and every time have completely forgotten how I resolved it the previous time. It's especially annoying, because usually involves searching for such common terms as index.…
- Joining DB records to the 'highest' of their related (1:m) data: I often have cause to query a database table and join it with a subtable of related data (i.e. a table with which this one has a one-to-many relationship), and to retrieve only the highest (or lowest) of related records (based on some sortable field;…
- Quiet Libraries: Oh for some quiet space in a library!
Bring back shushing librarians [arc'd] by Laura Miller in Salon, 2013-01-31.
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- Jeffersonian Yeoman bloggers: Great post yesterday from The Blasphemous Bicycler about people not controlling their own data:
The reasons for this are fairly easy to deduce. We were all swept away by “social media.” To send a tweet, update your Facebook status, or post a…
- Clare Davies (new exhibition): Clare Davies
24 April – 12 May 2013
opening 6 – 8pm, 24 April
c3 Contemporary Art Space
Abbotsford Convent Foundation
1 St Heliers St. Abbotsford VIC 3067 Australia
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- Footpath floods: The reticulation in the garden beds on the corner of Clontarf and Mather Roads is broken. Again.…
- Facebook is NOT the web: Facebook wants to get people into their clutches, and obscure the fact that there is a world-wide web of stuff out there. They will probably succeed, too; more's the pity. Still, I'll continue to avoid them, just in case they do require my particip…
- My new Kobo Mini: Today I bought a Kobo Mini ereader. It's lovely: small and simple, feeling light and nice to touch. It's got an on button on the top edge, and a USB plug on the bottom; the rest is screen, bezel, and back (the latter two of a sort of micro-fluffy t…
- Where the bus stop went: A few weeks ago I mentioned that the Clontarf Road bus stop had been attached by a hiab. We found its remains the other day on a stroll through the Beaconfield quarry.
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- GluePHP: I like simple things like GluePHP.…
- Printable WeRelate: Last year I wrote a little script for producing GraphViz graphs, and LaTeX books, from werelate.org family history data. I've been tweaking it a bit now and then, and using it for my mum's genealogical research. It works, but the more I want to do …
- CoF feed broken: The news feed from the City of Fremantle is currently invalid. :-( They just need to fix the date formats, really.…
- History of West Australia by W. B. Kimberly: How thoughtful of Nature to not be disturbed by people.
It was near to the ship, and there Mr. Broadhurst found the traces of two distinct camps, which nearly a century and a half had not obliterated. Indentations were still apparent in the grou…
- Perth Linux Users' Group: I'm now a member of:
:-)
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- Better sync'ing for Printable WeRelate: Printable WeRelate now will synchronize all 'starting-points' pages (i.e. any page with a <printablewerelate> element), rather than being required to have just a single page listed on the command-line. This means that a cron job just needs to c…
- Backing up thunderbird email: When backing up Thunderbird, the only files I worry about are the actual mbox files that store the 'Local Folders' (archived) email, and the *.mab addresbook files. Everything else is operational cruft. This might seem a bit extreme—after all, why …
- WebDB 2013-05-07: Yet another new release of WebDB.…
- forking wikis: I wish wikis were less collaborative! I wish they were more like software projects, where if one wants to modify anything, one gets one's own copy and does anything at all to it.
No, I'm not really saying that there should be fewer centralised pla…
