Building an answering machine using a $10 winmodem
Perhaps I'll use the uber PC I intend to get in the US as an answering machine as well, although going the whole hog with Asterisk is pretty tempting too. [icbm: home]
Packing
It's time for Catherine and I to start thinking of packing for the move, and as ever it's a barrel of laughs. We've made the decision that there is a bunch of stuff which we're not going to bother to take with us... Mainly things like reference books which I haven't used in years, but can't bear parting with. We've therefore entered the exciting world of boxing and listing everything which we're leaving. We're also doing something similar for the things with a lot of value which we're moving to the US. I decided that it was time to roll out an official stillhq wiki to hold this sort of documentation, as well as other things which seem like they should be documented over time. This is the first time that Catherine has used a wiki, and so far it's working well.
Microsoft Australia’s profit
Microsoft Australia's profit drops by 40%. Interesting given that I haven't noticed a marked drop in their sales of desktops and office... The market has grown, and I suspect their share of that market has therefore fallen, but I didn't realize that they were less profitable. Is this because they're not innovating fast enough and there are large gaps between product releases? [icbm: dcs]
People sneak into Google for lunch?
People sneak into Google for lunch? That's just weird... [icbm: home]
Gordon get’s quoted by the Fortune blog
Gordon's blog gets quoted by Fortune, which is really cool, although it does worry me that Fortune seems to think that journalism is blogging about other people's blogs. Does this mean that real journalists have abdicated their responsibility to collect new information? [icbm: home]
ThinkPads return to bricks and mortar retail in the US
I didn't realize they'd ever left stores, but now you can get ThinkPads at bricks and mortar stores in the US. Given my impending travel, come to pappa... [icbm: home]
All racehorses descended from 28 horses
"All thoroughbred racehorses alive today are descended from an elite group of 28 animals imported from the Middle East and North Africa 300 years ago, according to a new genetic study presented at the British Association Festival of Science in Dublin." Interesting. [icbm: work]
What’s happening with frozenchicken.com?
Gordon at work asks me what is happening with www.frozenchicken.com. If you hit the site, then you get the Google search interface. This is because of the DNS configuration for the domain: challenger:~# host www.frozenchicken.com www.frozenchicken.com is an alias for www.google.com. www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com. www.l.google.com has address 66.102.7.147 www.l.google.com has address 66.102.7.99 www.l.google.com has address 66.102.7.104 www.frozenchicken.com is an alias for www.google.com. www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com. www.frozenchicken.com is an alias for www.google.com. www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com. You can see that www.frozenchicken.com is an alias for www.google.com, which in turn points to what is presumably my local cluster. So why do all the links of the Google page then point via www.frozenchicken.com? Well, because they're relative URLs, they use the hostname from the browser.
Bike crash
More details later, but I had a badish bike crash on Wednesday night, and spent a lot of yesterday at doctors and being xrayed. More details when I get the time to write them up... [icbm: work]