Nonfocussed Personal Blog

The contractors my employer has outsourced HR to are a Windows-shop. This means that they have only just recently upgraded from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7. The HR application we use to manage our leave, check pay slips, update personal contact details, etc, is designed to be 100% bug compatible with IE6. These are the same people who set a default policy across the whole organisation's Windows installs that prohibits mere mortals from using right-click anywhere in Internet Explorer (ie: no "view source" for mere mortals).

( The impact of this is that those of us who are not Microsoft sycophants cannot apply for leave. )

Guess my trip to Europe next year will have to wait ;)

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/11/48444-you-dont-know-jack-about-software-maintenance/fulltext

Just slapping this up here so I can refer to it later, in my copious spare time.

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

— John F. Woods

Sometimes when working through the Django shell (really just the Python shell, with Django libraries preloaded), I'll find I need to make a change to a model. At this point, I need to reload the model so I can continue using it through the shell.

Simply reload the model into the shell:

import people.models
reload(people.models)
from people.models import *

Try this one on for size: you are signed up for a 24 month contract (never again!), with a $19/month plan. You're also paying the phone off at $20/month. If you wish to terminate the contract before the end date, you have to pay $540 plus all remaining payments on the phone.

( Or you could save money by buying a prepaid SIM and leaving the Optus account unused. )

I got this rather unhelpful error from FrontRow last night, trying to show off my library of flower pictures to a friend visiting for dinner.

The solution for me was to delete some blank photos as outlined in the thread "Front Row has an error finding iPhoto library" on the Apple Support forums. Note that the first response (suggesting a rebuild of the thumbnail cache) on that thread should actually suggest holding down Command+Option when opening iPhoto, not FrontRow. Just to clarify, the problem didn't go away when I rebuilt the thumbnail cache, but did go away when I deleted the blank photos.

Now I can get back to showing my friend a thousand-odd photos of flowers.

I tried installing Python using MacPorts this morning to get back into developing an inventory sales manager for EVE Online. For whatever reason, the Port manager decided to include Tk, which means that the python26 port will by default include a complete X11 installation.

Since I'm mostly working on web applications, I don't care two hoots for X11. Thankfully the python26 port includes a no_tkinter variant (why isn't that a variant that you have to specifically ask for?).

Because it's not clean.

Favourite quote: “When you see a child’s footprints and Tonka toys in canyons where there is plutonium, there is reason to believe that a lot more work needs to be done to make the environment safe.”

http://www.airbagindustries.com/archives/airbag/spaceman.php

Wired has this article about the culture of fear that is growing towards vaccinations.

My response is twofold:

First, too many medical professionals are unaware of the risks of vaccines - not because of the vaccines themselves, but because the vaccines are cultured in chicken eggs. If you're allergic to chicken egg and you get a rubella vaccine, the vaccine will kill you.

Second, I cannot trust a system which allowed Baxter Pharmaceuticals to ship live viruses throughout Europe disguised as vaccines against that virus. They claim it was a mistake - but how could such a mistake happen?

On one hand we have people pushing vaccinations who have such low awareness of the health risks due to the vaccine's manufacturing process, on the other we have companies who are accidentally introducing live viruses of a different strain into samples destined for pharma labs.

It's not the theory of vaccination that I'm opposed to, it's the practise.

Joshua Works introduces a nice idea: moving the Dock to one extreme of the side that it's anchored to.

( That article was in response to a 'show us your desktop' series by Grace Smith )

Maybe one day I can be an organisational maven like these folks!

http://www.macworld.com/article/143529/2009/10/slexposetips2.html?lsrc=rss_main

Couple of nice tips here, the one I like the best is changing the behaviour of "show windows for this app" (default is F10) from showing all the windows for the app from all Spaces, to only showing the windows from this Space. This is the behaviour I'm used to, and it's the behaviour I want.

Get Keynote as part of iWork '09.

Get Keynote Remote from the iTunes App Store.

You can now connect the Mac (in my case, MacBook) and iPhone/iPod to the same WiFi network and control Keynote from the iPhone. In addition, you can read the presenter notes on the iPhone while the audience sees just the slide show.

Nifty!

Mac vs Windows - what's the biggest difference, historically?

( I think it boils down to folks who will accept the cheapest tool, closest at hand, that gets the job done, versus folks who prefer their tools to be polished, and preferably reusable. )

But then, I'm clearly biased towards Mac OS X and Apple's computers. So what does my opinion matter?

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/23744?nwwpkg=iphone

This guy talks about fancy features such as using the camera for motion detection (ie: like the scanner in an optical mouse), being able to wave your hand in front of the camera to put the phone to sleep after it wakes you up with the alarm...

Sounds good in theory, huh?

Describe your idea for a video on embodied energy. Here's mine:

A person reaches a chip back into a bag. The bag seals, goes back into the shopping bag. A counter pops up showing 0 tonnes, 0 kJ. ( We follow the chip back in time to when the forest that was cleared to make the palm oil was pristine, the counters showing the total embodied energy. )

Then our consumer - still in the shop making a choice about chips or some other snack, picks the cauliflower and sour cream to make crudites and dip.

I rode home with the Ay Up lights for the first time tonight. ( I was most impressed! )

Once the sun had well and truly gone down, I was much happier with the ride. All that was left for me was navigating the back streets and paths, which was made a little easier for me by having enough light to see what light patches were concrete paths versus goat tracks. Not to mention having maps handy with B.iCycle, a nifty app for cyclists who also have an iPhone.

Not that I'm evangelising products that I enjoy using at all. No way. Not me.

Derek started a flame war with his post about how Search Engine Optimisers are evil people poisoning the knowledge-well of the Internet. Worth reading, just for the irate SEO people ranting about how they're not evil at all (make sure you read the precursor article too, it's linked in the one I've linked).

I have need to post this here. What would Brian Boitano do? - a skit from the movie, "Southpark: Bigger, Longer, Uncut." Beware, it's Southpark - which means don't watch it if you don't know what that means.

Now, off to kick an arse or two.

Sometimes, science is about providing hard evidence to support what people have "known" for a long time.

( Contented cows are more productive, but melancholy humans are more productive ) So for managing humans, you'd want to ensure that people aren't fearful in the workplace, but you don't want them being happy (and thus careless) either.