Tony pointed me to an interesting article on Charles Wright’s Bleeblog about “Zero-Day holes” — security flaws that may have been in products forever, with not even the manufacturer knowing. Not entirely surprising I suppose. From time to time we hear of some research company telling us about the latest problem they’ve found in Windows ... [More]
Category: Geek
Technology fetishism
A flurry of activity at the school yesterday when I dropped the kids off, as a film crew had arrived to record a public service advert to go to air later in the year. SunSmart, or healthy eating, or exercise, one of those types of things. They had wheeled in actors to play the main ... [More]
E-mail overflow
There’s 847 messages in my e-mail Inbox. 70 of them are unread. I think this thing is getting out of hand. I need to spend a few hours one day clearing it out. One day. Not today.
Oops. This fine site was down for a couple of hours last night after my web hosting provider pointed out the bill was three weeks overdue. Nothing like downing your site to make you sit up and take notice. I found the errant bill languishing in my e-mail inbox. Full credit to them though, they ... [More]
Micropayments
Went out to lunch with some colleagues, to some little place off Collins Street. Honey chicken, mixed vegetables and fried rice. And an orange juice. $8.90. Gave $20 to the girl, and she came back with change totalling $19.10. Something obviously went wrong there. Gave her a $5 note back, before realising later that I ... [More]
Just watched Seven Wonders of the Industrial World. Historic geek TV goes prime time. It told of The Great Eastern, Brunel’s doomed gigantic ship. It was in the style of a dramatised documentary, with interviews of the major protagonists as the story unfolded, and didn’t shy away from mentioning the horrific toll of industrial accidents ... [More]
Just another day in the (network) neighbourhood. Thanks to Tony for the tip-off. (Tattersalls building, Dandenong Road, Caulfield/East Malvern)
Just upgrading to WordPress 1.2. I see the comments have vanished. This will be fixed shortly. (Well, after I’ve done the dishes.) 10:30pm. Okay seems to be working. Some of the trackbacks and other wierdo URLs aren’t working ‘cos I have to find time to fiddle the .htaccess file to cope with my old archives. ... [More]
Blog turmoil
There’s been a lot of fuss in the blogging world over the last few days about Movable Type, and their new pricing. In a superb bit of customer relations, marketing and logic, they’ve bumped up their prices just a week or so after freebie tool Blogger delivered a big upgrade. I looked around at various ... [More]
How I became a geek
Recently I’ve been reading some of Jeff “Yak” Minter’s nostalgic look back at how he got into writing computer games in the 1980s, and it’s got me thinking about those days, and how it’s shaped my life — or at least, my professional working life. It’s something I have written about briefly before, but I ... [More]
While some were at the footy on Friday night, Marita and I went to a truly excellent (new?) restaurant at Docklands — Renzo’s Bar. Utterly delicious food, and not expensive in the grand scheme of things — $61 for two, including an entree and some drinks, but no dessert or coffees because we were due ... [More]
Where did these bloody Aga stove things come from? I assume they’re a peculiarly British brand of wanky gourmet stove, because I’ve never seen or heard of them in Australia. Yet they’ve shown up in the last two novels I’ve read, plus had the piss taken out of them in Posh Nosh. I’m afraid I’m ... [More]