AUUG 2005 Call for papers closes soon
The AUUG 2005 call for papers closes in a week. Have you put your paper proposal in yet? AUUG is an interesting conference in that it's smaller and more personal than linux.conf.au, and aimed at a corporate world where proprietary software is still a reality. [tags: unix conference] [icbm: work]
Russian scavengers life off abandoned space junk
Mad max anyone? [tags: space junk russia scavenge] [icbm: dcs]
Why is a CD the length it is?
There are some theories about the length of CDs being related to performances. Interesting... [tags: audio cd length] [icbm: work]
Stop! Hammer time…
I need this sign on my bedroom wall. [tags: hammertime music] [icbm: home]
Pngtools 0.3 released
On the suggestion of Sven from the Gimp project I have added offset display to the features of pnginfo. It's bundled in the 0.3 release. A historical note from November 2020: this code is quite old, but still actively used. I have therefore converted the old subversion repository to git and it is hosted at https://github.com/mikalstill/pngtools. I will monitor there for issues and patches and try my best to remember what I was thinking 20 years ago...
Tipping point: windscreen washers
Ian comments on being accosted by a window washer in the CBD, and therefore forces my hand in commenting on this part of my current reading book, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. In the section in cleaning up crime in New York during the early 1990's, I was interested to note that one of the big things they did to clean up crime in the city was have the police stop people from standing on street corners insisting on washing people's wind screens. This was basically part of the broken windows philosophy of crime control. People apparently behave in a different way on a dirty street with lots of broken windows than they do in a nicer part of town. So, how do you stop crime? Fix the broken windows. (Hey, it worked in New York.) Ian, worse than losing $2, you were the victim of the leading edge of a rising tidal wave of crime. Soon wild gangs will be roaming the streets. [tags: crime windscreen washer]
No strings attached
It's interesting to know that the phrase "no strings attached" is a tailoring term which denotes no defects in the cloth. [tags:] [icbm: home]
Curse my lack of facial hair
I'll never win the beard competition now... [tags: beard] [icbm: work]
Peter Vogel’s latest gig
Peter Vogel is a cool Australian. He worked on the team which came up with the first commercial sampler. He hangs out on the OzTiVo list. Now he's planning on making commercial TV's business model a thing of the past. Frankly, I don't watch commercial TV any more because of the adverts, so I like this idea. [tags: tv commercial advertising] [icbm: work]