Archive for the 'General' Category

We apologised for the wrong thing

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

Today our Prime Minister made an important step in Australian history, by apologising to indigenous Australians for past injustices. However, I think the focus on the so-called Stolen Generation was wrong.

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Comments re-enabled

Monday, February 12th, 2007

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.

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Back again

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

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 quality[1] articles that I used to produce.

fn1. Remember – everything has quality. Sometimes, you can even put a nice adjective in front.

Google Trends

Thursday, May 11th, 2006

Well, I saw “this article”:http://www.jrandolph.com/blog/?p=30 showing how Ruby was trending in popularity to Python. Then, with the aid of some co-workers, it got morphed into “this”:http://www.google.com/trends?q=brittany+spears%2Cjohn+howard&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

Food for thought

Still no tax reform

Tuesday, May 9th, 2006

Well, once again Peter Costello has failed to deliver any significant tax reform. Why? Well, read on.

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Well, that makes it official… Wotif.com is going IPO

Monday, April 24th, 2006

It’s official, it’s up on “our site”:www.wotif.com, so it must be true: Wotif.com is in the last stages before listing, with the offical “Prospectus now available for review”:http://www.macquarie.com.au/wotif.

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Has Apple reached price parity for their laptops?

Thursday, January 19th, 2006

I’m considering buying one of those thar “MacBook Pros”:http://www.apple.com/au/macbookpro/, 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″:http://www1.ap.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/inspn_9400_au?c=au&l=en, 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.

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Ze Frank at PopTech

Tuesday, January 10th, 2006

Catching up on my podcasts this week, I was listening to a presentation by “Ze Frank at PopTech 05″:http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail764.html 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”_

An experiment: running with FeedBurner

Thursday, January 5th, 2006

Purely as an experiment, I’m using “FeedBurner”:http://feedburner.com 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. :)

An experiment in GoogleAds

Saturday, November 5th, 2005

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.