I just got a message from a guy at the University of Auckland, Brent Simpson, who is looking for a Python programmer to hire on a fixed-term contract to do some Python/JavaScript hacking on a web project, and perhaps do some XUL/JavaScript work inside a Mozilla-based application (I think). He says: Ideally we'd like someone in Auckland, but I...

This morning, driving to work, I saw beautiful blue sky out the left side of the car, and dark clouds on the right. What's it going to be? At 1pm, the sky still sort of looks like that. Nasty-looking clouds, with perfect blue sky behind them. It's warmed up a little, but is still a little windy outside. New Zealand weather is really...

Someone just created a bunch of spam pages in the Topic Exchange's wiki, with names like these: # (diff) Table Of Contents 1:40 am . . . . . 221.148.110.xxx # (diff) Avoiding Memory Leaks 1:40 am . . . . . 221.148.110.xxx # (diff) fuelhose 1:40 am . . . . . 221.148.110.xxx # (diff) fbbja 1:40 am . . . . . 221.148.110.xxx # (diff) www 1:40 am ...

In Japan I picked up this thing: it's called an Oshirase Mail Doraemon (おしらせメールドラ&# 12360;もん). Doraemon is a popular cartoon character (about which plenty of English-language information is available). This thing connects to your PC via USB, and identifies itself as a...

I've been busy at work for quite a few months, and then on holiday: one week in Chicago and a week and a half in Tokyo. But now I'm back in Christchurch, just in time for summer. It's odd to be in New Zealand again after Japan: the roads seem so wide, and where are all the people? I used to think Christchurch's population of 350,000 was...

Weird feeling - finding an advertisement for cut-price airfares for people to come here. Is that a return fare? That seems really cheap. I suppose it's about NZD 1250 or so, but we pay several hundred dollars more than that to fly the opposite route. I can't believe that it only costs USD 460 for a return trip from Los Angeles to London,...

Have been trying out PearPC over the last day or so. It spent last night installing Jaguar, but it failed to boot this morning (hung saying "waiting for root device"), so it spent today installing Darwin, which worked (booted fine after install) and is now installing Jaguar again over the top of the bootable Darwin installation. It takes a...

Mark Pilgrim: The next logical step after that, of course, is to automate the process entirely. Don't like RSS? Change it! Why don't you set up a web form where users can check off the elements they want, arbitrarily misspell some elements (like you did when you stole RSS from Netscape), add or remove allowed HTML entities (like you did when you...

Lovely: CORRECT: Those who use Adobe® Photoshop® software to manipulate images as a hobby see their work as an art form. INCORRECT: A photoshopper sees his hobby as an art form. Adobe and Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. Comment

This is totally odd -- Scripting.Com appears to be allowing the creation of new Manila sites. Is this a mistake, or a sign of things to come? Anyway, here's myelin.scripting.com, currently mostly empty. Heh. Comment

An item in an RSS 2.0 feed looks like this: <item>     <title>title</title>     <link>http://example.com/path/to/post</link>    <guid>http://example.com/path/to/post</guid>     <description>an rss2 item looks like this:  ...

Mikel Maron: There are many unsolved and half-solved problems in aggregation software. And at least there's no one place to find the consensus, or pros and cons on each issue. Examples.. : auto-discovery formats : methods for publishing blogrolls and subscription lists, and interchanging them among aggregation tools : aggregation subscription...

Mikel Maron: ATTENTION: WORLD WIDE CALL OUT! Requested immediately; A group of Mexicans or Californians, with experience in Taquerias; Your assistance is desperately needed throughout Europe; Must be able to make burritos that weigh 3 pounds, wrapped in tin foil for easy transport; Must definitely resist the local pressure to add mayonaise to...

Getting further from what it was originally meant for (you can blame Marc Canter for this!), but towards something else useful :-) You can now use it to host blogrolls. Here's one: Click the '(ite)' link at the bottom to get to the documentation and see how to make your own one. You can also upload images, but please don't upload too many as I...

Damn - you apparently can't compile DTrace static providers on Nexenta :( I was hoping that having GNU/Solaris up and running would let me use Wez Furlong's PHP DTrace provider to trace PeopleAggregator PHP code, but it looks like that's not going to happen tonight. Downloading SchilliX now to see if I have better luck there. Comment