Sep 13, 2007 · 4 minute read
FeaturedGeneral
After my extremely annoying experience with a broken network connection last weekend that cost me about an hour of writing, I've been thinking about what could be done to make sure such a thing couldn't happen again. I believe looking into offline access for WordPress may represent a viable solution. I think having offline access to your blog's post writing would be a great feature to have for blog authors. It means, for example, that you'd be able to take a laptop on holiday with you and know that you can at least write your blog posts when they're in your head and you can upload them to your server when you have an internet connection.
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Sep 13, 2007 · 2 minute read
General
Yesterday I attended the talk [The Power of Procrastination][1] by Jorge Cham, the creator of PHD comics. I am a big fan of the comics, despite the fact that I'm not a grad student/postgrad, and hearing Jorge's talk it was great to listen to the guy who makes them. The talk was entertaining as you would expect, with plenty of jokes about the life of a grad student and their relationship with the rest of the world.
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Sep 13, 2007 · 1 minute read
News
[Microsoft opens up test suites and development assistance for Moonlight][1], AMD opens up the specifications for their ATI GPUs and now QNX have announced they will open up the code for their Neutrino operating system! Has the world gone open crazy? Unfortunately the QNX source code is not really "open" in the sense that it's open source – it's still being released under a commercial license, it's just that the code can now be used for education and non-commercial projects.
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Sep 11, 2007 · 1 minute read
Asides
This Saturday is Software Freedom Day, a day celebrating free and open source software and acting as a means of educating the public about FOSS and encouraging its use. There is an event in Melbourne, called Software Freedom Day Bazaar, at the Melbourne Town Hall from 11am until 4pm. Cost of admission is free. Were it not for Manifest running on the same day I'd be interested in attending.
Sep 11, 2007 · 1 minute read
Asides
Version 1.2 of the jQuery JavaScript library has been released. There seems to have been quite a few subtle alterations to the selector and AJAX systems so if you've done some development with jQuery and want to upgrade then you should read How To Upgrade on the jQuery wiki. I myself shall be looking into this in the near future.
Sep 10, 2007 · 6 minute read
Reviews
I've recently been looking into new Linux desktop torrent programs to possibly use as a replacement for Azureus. Deluge is the first one that I looked at and, overall, I've found it to be satisfactory and is well worth considering if you're after a native Linux client. Version 0.5.5 was released a couple days ago so I got to try out the older version and the latest one before I write this.
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Sep 10, 2007 · 1 minute read
News
The title for the next Indiana Jones film has been announced: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I am of mixed feelings about this movie. Yes we've got the old hands on board (notably Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford) and it's Indiana Jones, which is totally awesome, but it is 20 years since the last film came out. We've seen what can happen when you try to restart a series after so long.
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Sep 7, 2007 · 1 minute read
Asides
If you enjoyed my previous post on the topic of [semantics in HTML][1] then you might like to head over to microformatique to check out their series about Semantics in HTML, composed of Part 1: Traditional HTML Semantics, Part 2: Standardizing Vocabularies and Part 3: Directions in HTML Semantics. If you're interested in web development I recommend giving the series a read. [1]: http://www.chnorton.com.au/2007/06/27/arguing-semantics-html/
Sep 7, 2007 · 1 minute read
Asides
CoScripter is a new experimental Firefox extension by IBM that allows you to automate manual process that you do on the web. So, for example, if your bank forces you through a couple steps to get to your bank balance then you can use CoScripter to handle all the clicks and forms for you. You could also use it as a form of semi-automated web testing, in a similar manner to Selenium, except that it would be more limited.
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Sep 5, 2007 · 2 minute read
Reviews
Despite what I wrote my [previous post on tracker][1], it turns out that there is a desktop search utility that connects to tracker. I stumbled upon it by accident today when I was looking for something else in my menu. It's found in Applications -> Accessories -> Tracker Search Tool. The application is pretty basic at this point – searches can be run and the results are displayed in a list which includes the name of the file, an icon as would be found in Nautilus and a text snippet which contains the relevant search terms (displayed in bold).
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