Software is too expensive to build cheaply...

Well, I made myself a blog

I've been thinking of doing this for a while, largely as a journalling exercise for myself. I'm not writing for an audience here, so I'm not concerned with what other people think about what I put down here. :)

I don't know if I'll keep this up; only time will tell. But I know I've got a few things to say here.

Okay, you've found my blog. Congratulations. I hope you enjoy it.

Saw this article in the Sydney Morning Herald. Bloody excellent idea.

About two weeks ago, the server company I go through (iwebserv.com.au) had an "incident"... one of the harddisks on the main server died. This caused an extended outage (almost a week), and a total loss of data. For one reason or another, iwebserv have not been able to resurrect the data on the server yet.

Danny Ayers writes about a global internet tsunami warning system. He missed the point; the SE-Asian Tsunami was detected in minutes by research centers in Hawaii. But there was no way to get the message out.

Some changes to how this blog is set up:

Apparently, next Monday will be the worst day of the year. Naturally, that's the day I start at Wotif.

Fortunately, the formula is based on such variables as the weather, and thus it is only the worst day in the Northern hemisphere. phew.

Did you know that there are places in the world with timezone offsets in quarter-hour increments?

The timezone for Nepal is UTC+5:45. Chatham Island (a territory of New Zealand) uses UTC+12:45. Interesting...

I was listening to the audio presentation by Woz at ITConversations.com recently. I was really interested in his stories about how he got interested in hardware hacking, and it made me reflect on my early experiences with computers.

Actually, I don't. But I have to ask: if they can make it illegal to circumvent copy protection to do something you could legally do without the copy protection, then why can't it be illegal to circumvent pop-up blockers?

Hmmm... considering that pop-up blockers are arguably a security feature, could the US DMCA be used here?

This is a minor annoyance, but hey... iPods seem to have problems with large bookmarkable files. Specifically, they start skipping, which makes the playback annoying.

Large non-bookmarkable files: no problems. So it's something to do with keeping the bookmark in sync with the file. sigh.

So, I either need to split those 1-hour podcasts into things less than about 32MB, or convert them to a lower quality level. Anyone got a decent command-line tool to do this that I can plug into iPodder?

According to the NY Times, some science musuems are refusing to show movies that mention controversial topics, such as evolution or the Big Bang. They should be ashamed to call themselves science musuems.

Well, this entry started as a quick blurb to highlight an article on my boss here at Wotif.com in the Australian Financial Review. But that's not what it's ended up as. :)

Brett's just finished his latest project with no defects. But did he test enough?

I've moved to a new hosting provider, so if there's any quirks over the next few days, that's probably why. I'm also getting around to doing a UI overhaul that I'd been meaning to do for months.

The NY Times is running an article on the upcoming challenge to Florida's contraversial voucher system for student education. There seems to be a point that's been overlooked.

What an amazing idea... My old employer, Suncorp, is having a promotion where you can round up bill payments to the nearest dollar and donate the extra to charity. Simply put, when you pay a bill via their internet banking app, you can donate to charity at the same time. The current charity is the Hear and Say Centre, and I'm more than happy to support them.

By far the most popular post on my site was a humorous entry I reposted: If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers.... So it only seems just that I put a link to this entry, which sort of describes the reverse. )

And remember - if the auto industry had evolved like the computer industry, we'd have cars that go a thousand miles an hour, with no seat belts, that crash when you double press the horn...

Hmmm... salaries are going up again. Speaking as an employee, not an employer, this sounds like good news. :)

Fujitsu is going to roll out trolleys with scanners so that shoopers can avoid the checkout queue. Naturally, this assumes a degree of honesty on the part of the shoppers. What's amusing about this is how they plan to "trust, but verify".

In Google for Robert Watkins. Yay!

Well, that makes it official: Wotif is the third company I've worked in that's decided to go public. Hope it goes better than the last two... the first misread the market badly and went into a several year downturn, while the other managed to burn through nearly all their VC finance, nearly went bankrupt, and got bought out by one of their venture partners.

You work in an airconditioned office. The thermostat for the airconditioner is set to 23.5C. The thermometer gauge says that it is currently 24.2C. Do you:

A) Ignore it;
B) Close the door to the stairwell that all the cold air is escaping down;
C) Set the thermostat to 21C so that it gets colder. After all, it should go down to 21.7C, right?

From Jason Yip:

And if anyone wants to buy it at that price (that's US currency, of course), please feel free to let me know. Contact me before the end of 2005, and I'll even through in a 10% discount... afterwards, of course, the price may be even higher, as I'm always making new value on the site.

Serious offers only, natually. No tire kickers.

Well, it's about time, but Apple have finally rolled out the iTunes Music Store to Australia. Now I can see what all the fuss is about.

I can see that I am impressed with how easy it is - I'll have to make a point to not impulse buy, because it's just so easy to do. The integration with iTunes is so smooth as to be unbelievable - it is very easy to see that this is why they make iTunes and why it's free. (Heck, the only reason I run Windows on my home PC instead of Linux is to use iTunes)

If you're reading the version of this entry on my site, you'll probably already have noticed the new GoogleAds. This is an experiment I'm trying out to see how effective they are at serving up meaningful ads.

This is not an attempt to "monetize" this blog. Heck, monetize isn't even a real word - it's just one of those fake "turn a noun into a verb" type businesey words. I don't expect to make even enough out of it recoup my hosting costs (which would only take one payment per year). Even if I wanted to, this blog doesn't get enough traffic to make any serious money, I expect.

What this actually is is an attempt to aid the reader who comes here from Google (or other search engines). Search engines referalls account for about 60% of my traffic, and nearly all of the traffic to older articles (that hasn't come from spam bots, anyway). By targetting ads there, I hope to provide items of interest to those readers.

So, if you see an ad that interests you, feel free to follow it. However, don't just follow ads because what I've written has interested you. :) Do it for your own sake, not mine.

Purely as an experiment, I'm using FeedBurner to keep track of the site usage.

You don't have to change your RSS feed: I'm redirecting the old ones through to FeedBurner. As a matter of fact, I suggest you don't change your feed - that way, if I drop FeedBurner, you will automatically switch back to the old direct link.

In addition: at this time, it's only the main feed that's been moved to FeedBurner. The category archives, which have a fairly large following of their own, are not going through FeedBurner - yet. :)

Catching up on my podcasts this week, I was listening to a presentation by Ze Frank at PopTech 05 on the way home today.. Having listened to it, I'm convinced it should have come with a health warning: "Warning: Listening to this presentation may cause uncontrollable laughter. Do not drive or operate heavy equipment while listening to this presentation"

I'm considering buying one of those thar MacBook Pros, but at a base price of AU$3199, it's a little pricy. Now, Apple has a long-standing reputation of charging premium prices, but seeing as how the MacBook is Intel-based, it should be possible to do some good price comparison.

Dell has released the new Inspiron 9400, which is also based on the Intel Core Duo chip. So, we can do a comparison that is better than Apples to Oranges on this.

It's official, it's up on our site, so it must be true: Wotif.com is in the last stages before listing, with the offical Prospectus now available for review.

Well, I saw this article showing how Ruby was trending in popularity to Python. Then, with the aid of some co-workers, it got morphed into this

Food for thought

Sorry for the long absence; I've been inundated at work and in my personal life. To top it all off, I had to migrate my domain due to changes at my hosting provider.

However, I expect to start posting again soon - expect the regular stream of quality¹ articles that I used to produce.

¹ Remember - everything has quality. Sometimes, you can even put a nice adjective in front.

I had to disable comments a little while back, due to excessive blog spam (the alternative was to have my ISP kick me off their servers). I've now made some changes to MT to do the CAPTCHA filtering earlier - hopefully it's a bit nicer now. We'll see.