Tomboy notes

I wish that I had a tomboy notes plugin which was like Zemanta; or could otherwise plug in freebase data.

DotNetNuke, RDFa and GoodRelations via NB_Store

Martin Hepp says:

The latest release of the NB_Store module for e-commerce sites based on DotNetNuke CMS seems to support GoodRelations in RDFa.

See here for details:

http://nbstore.codeplex.com/releases/view/45017

Local Government Areas and IDs

The ABS have made their data creative commons; but it's still a pain to get to the data you want.

I'm trying to reconcile LGAs against our work application, freebase, and the census data - but it's a pain.

To make things a bit easier for others treading this path, here's a spreadsheet of LGAs and ABS ids for them, 2006

Most Ridiculous Design Ever

At work, we've got roaming profiles. I've just spent 20 minutes logging on, because I have a 7-8gb shared mailbox in my outlook.ost; and that makes things unhappy.

What beggars belief is how you move your outlook.ost.

Call me stupid; but I rather thought we'd mastered the basics of a "move" file within our operating systems.
Apparently, the outlook 2007 team has some reason to make that impossible to do - the user interface fights you every step of the way.

Unless you disable a tonne of options which should have no bearing on your ability to move, copy, or change the location of your offline mailboxes; Outlook will not let you touch this setting.

Ridiculous.

Home automation and eating

I want a Unitech HT580 Wireless Barcode Scanner; but cheaper.

I want to holster the thing on the side of my cupboard or fridge; so when I'm loading up the fridge I can quickly tag barcoded products.

Most importantly; I want to be able to sync that with my computer to make an instant shopping list.

Failing all of this; I'll just have an internet fridge please

I'm a research subject

Check out The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Human Computation Engine, figure 4.

This application alone received more than 1 million contributions over 14 months with the top contributor casting more than 120k judgments and the top 10 contributors casting half of the total judgments.

Beats the heck out of medical research!

Playdeb, and ubuntu wishlist items

I'm a huge fan of playdeb. The fact there is an apt URI handler available in ubuntu makes everything trivial - and I'd encourage lots of existing games to simply link to playdeb for a stable version.

What does annoy me though - because software installation in ubuntu is nearly flawless as it is - is that I can't have two package managers running at the same time.

Why not? Why can't I queue up several things to install? I can do that in windows; why do I have to wait around and install things one at a time?

If another package manager is working; why not prompt me with a question; rather than an error? "Another package manager is working, would you like to queue this installation task until after it has finished?"



There's some inklings about this, but most miss the point - Bug #74134 wants to make the failure more user friendly; but why should it fail at all?

I've opened a blueprint for it; which is probably a dupe; but I couldn't find anything specifically.


I imagine this to roughly look like the below for apt (if apt were magically written in PHP):

$stdin = fopen("php://stdin");
$path = ...; // /path/to/apt/lock/file/majigger
if (!is_writable($path)) {
   print "Another package manager appears to be working; would you like to queue this installation? [Y|n]";
   $ans = fgets($stdin);
   if ($ans === "n") {
       exit(0);
   }

   while (!is_writable($path)) {
       sleep(1);
   }
}
install($package);

Perhaps you'd want to cover a few more edge cases, or make it unit testable, but you get the idea. It doesn't seem to hard either for others, like update-manager or synaptic - probably beyond papercut size though.