Buy this book!
How Awesome Will It Be? A Teenager's Guide to Understanding and Preparing for the Second Coming (Paperback). Wow. Via Alan on Techtalkblogs.
ATO to use luxury ownership as audit trigger
The ATO has announced it will be auditing people who have nice cars. The bar for "nice carness" is pretty low though at $55,000. I suspect this sort of thing is quite effective though.
Twisted Python and Jabber SSL
Ok, so I thought it would be cool to be able to send Google Talk messages to my MythTV box. Can't be too hard to write a twisted python jabber client can it? Well, after an hour of surfing, I give up. I have the simple jabber client example, but it totally doesn't work with the Google servers, I suspect because it doesn't do SSL. I can see one of the twisted.words maintainers filing bugs against the xish stuff too, which I suspect means it's going to be a while. A little bit disappointing me thinks.
Stop using all the loo paper!
If your toilet paper has a paw print motif, then someone might be trying to tell you something.
Tagging air force one
Video of someone tagging air force one. Presumably real footage, although Schneier seems to have some doubts.
Random linkage
Yucca Mountain is part of the 87% of Nevada which is federal property. It's also where the US intends to store it's nuclear waste, instead of in dry cask storage. Before it starts glowing in the dark, I should consider going on the tour.
On clusterssh once more
Chris came on a little strong I think with the title "Google alternative to DSH". Clusterssh being in no way associated (that I am aware of) with Google. It's simply was the first distributed ssh Andrew and I came across, and it does everything I want, so it will be staying in the toolkit. [btags:]
Blogging essential to a successful career
The Boston Globe says you should blog. Unless you're a retiree. The article also suggests single focus blogs, which is interesting. I will meditate on that aspect further.
MySQL User Conference coming up
Stewart has a new toy for his MySQL User Conference presentation, which is probably for the best as I fully intend to ask why MySQL replication is so unreliable, why Innodb hot backup appears to hate me, and lots of other biting questions if I think of them. It does make me wonder what other Aussies are going to be in town for the conference? I have a survey for you to complete: My name is: ________________________________ I am arriving: ________________________________ I will be staying in: ______________________________ (name of city only please) I would be interested in drinking so much I fall off my chair: yes / no (please circle) I would like to know where you can get Coopers beer in Silicon Valley: yes / no (please circle) Is Frys really as dodgy as it looks? yes / no (please circle) Let me know if you're going to be in town for the conference, and perhaps we can all get together and do something geeky. If there aren't too many of you, then perhaps I can organise a tour of the Googleplex or something. Hopefully it wont be raining the whole time like it has for the last few…
On freely available guide data
One of the flaws with Microsoft's Media Center flavour of Windows XP when it was released in Australia, was that it suffered from the same inherent flaw as every other PVR option in Australia. No guide data. It really says something about Australia's television networks that they don't want to help people with even vaguely modern computing setups watch their content -- it's a situation which reminds me a lot of the RIAA's stand over tactics, and I think it's equally doomed. That's one of the joys of my MythTV setup in the US -- the guide data is trivially available in return for doing a simple four or five question survey every three months or so. What could be easier than that? Well, when I was using a TiVo in Australia the OzTiVo folk had a solution to these problems, and were working with the XMLTV / MythTV people to make it more generic. I hadn't been paying much attention to it until today when I was randomly surfing on the topic, but it's interesting to see that they also now provide instructions for how to import their guide data into a Windows Media Center PC. It's cool to…