Gecko 1.9 is spinning up...

Gecko 1.9 is starting to come together. This will be pretty awesome, not just because it'll help draw smiley faces.

From the roadmap:

• Cairo for rendering; meaning better performance.
• Python for XUL
• Javascript 2
• More oompf for XULRunner - this will directly help songbird, for instance.

I'm kind of excited.

I made it to work in 20:27

I made it to work (8.5km) in 20:27 - it must be a billion degrees outside.

That's a saving of 5-6 minutes and a km from my normal travel time.

I'm awesome - but not as awesome as some.

Accounting in Australia 5E

Accounting in Australia 5E is a complete waste of money, John Wiley is the enemy of easy of use, and open knowledge.

If you wanted to purchase this book in order to learn outside of the framework of university, you are in trouble.

The company refuses to give out the solutions, which are not contained in the back of the book. They are on a password protected website - and they refuse to allow non-university lecturers to access it.

This is severely retarded - the book becomes useless as soon as the website or company goes out of business, and it's already useless if you aren't a university lecturer.

After speaking to a phone flunky at the company there is:
1. No way to purchase the PDF separately.
2. No way to get a university lecturer to authorize you to receive the solutions

In short, this is a complete waste of $115.


Update:

Dear Daniel

Your query sounds eerily like that of another customer's that I have just responded to with almost exactly the same complaint however I will assume you are indeed different people with a similar concern.

The textbook you refer to was written by university lecturers and is used only by students studying an accounting course - the back cover and preface make that very clear as does a flickthrough the textbook that the solutions are not supplied. It is not meant as a casual read to help one understand accounting. There are thousands of other books that do a better job at that because they are designed as such. A quick perusal on any large bookstore website would alert you to that.

Access to solutions for university textbooks is never allowed to students or non students. This is because we give the solutions to lecturers and they decide when they will release the solutions to their students. Lecturers want students to read the text, practice answering the questions and then hand out the solutions so they can see where they have gone wrong. If we were to give out solutions to textbooks the lecturers would not adopt the text for their course. No higher education textbook publisher provides solutions directly to students - it is standard business practice to only supply them to lecturers....in fact our site where you requested the solutions makes that very clear.

Yours sincerely,

Lucy Russell

How the hell does Jabber s2s / federation work?

I have my gmail account, I have my livejournal account, I even have a jabber.org account. I know livejournal is federated with google talk. Only gaim doesn't easily explain in the UI how the hell I sign in to my google talk account but talk to my contacts at livejournal.

What am I missing and why does this suck?

Update: What I really want is buddy adding UI hints.

Cerebal Ballsy for Christmas

Thank god I don't have cerebal ballsy. It's been one of those months.

A screwed code release, performance issues, accounting people who don't know how to write feature specifications screaming about things being on fire (SEV. !1!@), and I terrorized the children of half of the company whilst pretending to be a fat man in a red suit.

Actually, I was a fat man in a red suit. Well the suit was red. I've also kind of put on a bit of extra padding. I'm not that worried, and neither were the damned kids. Infact, my extra pounds appeared to be the least of their worries. At this point, I feel I should probably explain a little more.

Kids. Don't get me started there.

The little tackers are meant to be foolishly naive and believe in Santa. At least, that's what I had thought. That was until I was standing outside of the men's toilets in Tusmore park, sweating and itching in a Santa suit.

Me, and my two non costume wearing helper elves (one who may or may not have been Chloe) were waiting. We were waiting for the other professional looking Santa to beat it; so I could go in, hand out presents to children at the company picnic, and get back to drinking beer.
You see, a few weeks earlier, I'd foolishly volunteered to play Jolly Old Saint Nick in a fit of what I can only describe as heat inspired insanity.

So anyway, I'm standing there, feeling only a tiny bit seedy. In a park. In a red suit. Next to the toilet. Waiting to go and entice children to sit on my lap.
You can see where that train of thought is going. I'm creeping myself out, even now. While I'm feeling distinctly less and less comfortable and lost in jolly introspection, two kids run up.
There's a girl, and a boy. I don't know them from bumpkis. They know me, however.

It's obvious.

I'm Santa. Another potential mark in the Christmas strong arming racket they have.

The little girl gets a crafty look in her eyes, carefully checking out every detail of my ill fitting beard and non regulation boots.

"Santa," she says. "Santa, I won't believe in you if you don't give me a present."

I blink. This is ballsy. Santa doesn't like blackmail, you little shit. Time for some creative lies.

"Ho, ho, ho, that's very funny of you. I don't have a present for you, because my sleigh crashed, and I had to bring only the essentials. That's why I'm here early too, you see. I had to eat the reindeer to survive in the suburban wastelands of Adelaide. You can see how I didn't have any room for your present. It was survival of the fattest.. uh fittest."

She contemplates this for a moment. She's not buying it. She knows the truth, and she's willing to exploit it.
I try to ignore her, but foolishly I look back. That was a mistake. There's more of them now.

Seeing she has my attention, she renews her efforts. "Santa, give me a present."

I turn.

"We have rocks!"

Uh oh. I panic, and make an exit as gracefully as the ill fitting suit will allow me.

I hightail it back to the company picnic, chased by little screaming insurgents. I leave an elf behind to fend them off, and don't look back.

I can only assume that's one elf that made the greatest sacrifice for the greater good.

Shortly thereafter, I get back to the picnic. I'm huffing slightly. They seat me on a bench, and surround me with children. Children as far as the eye can see, but hey, I'm shortsighted so that's not too great of a distance.
The first mother is dragging her child towards me. Before I can think, it begins, and I'm handing out presents to the company kids.
The suit won't stay shut. I keep worrying I'll show too much belly. It's a $5 cheapie, and the kids aren't impressed. First up, and setting a tone for the evening, is my Boss' son, Tom.

I am Tom's dejected Christmas spirit.

Tom breaks out into a big fat wet one, tears gushing from his little face. This does not bode well. Eye contact is a prospect he's not up to. I try my damnedest, and try a bit of the friendly approach.

Suddenly, I remember my parents' frequent warnings about not taking candy from strangers. I understand. It's like Michael Jackson just walked into the kiddy playground at McDonalds. It's just total shock and awe, with an ominous undercurrent of fear.

That's it, time to bail.

I bundle him off with a candy cane and call out the next name.

This kid won't even come near me. A parent sneaks up to me and snatches the gift and cane out of my hand.

I ho, ho, ho a little, and continue on.

Pretty soon, 50% of the children are crying. All are afraid. Only one is clever enough to grab a quick description; and notes the make and model of my shoes, before extorting two candy canes out of me.

I sit through the photos. I sit through the polite coworker ribbing. None too soon it's over - I get the fuck out of there, hitching up my pants, and striding for freedom.
I get changed, and dash back to the beer stash. Damn, Santa really needs beer after that shambles.

Standing next to the cooler is the one clever enough to take down my footwear's licence plate. I go for the beer, and as I'm fishing about in the esky I hear her.

Daddy, he's wearing the same shoes as Santa. Do you think he stole them?


You can't win, can you.

I want named arguments. With no argument about it.

RRR @ this thread, and this summary

Use case for named parameters: You are building a quick and simple html api.

You want to do a print Html::img(src='http://www.foo.com',alt='bah');... and your only recourse is to use an array?!

:'(

PHP, arrggh.

Why is:

$d = dir("/etc/php5");
while (false !== ($entry = $d->read())) {
  echo $entry."\n";
}
$d->close();

just fine, but

while (($temp = socket_read($socket,1024)) !== false) {
 //Stuff
}

... going to loop forever?

Stupid lack of consistency.

Teachers

Teachers is the funniest thing I can find on all of the big, wide TV land.

You can see more about Teachers on BBC America; it's well worth the watch.

Analytics and Valex

I switched on Google Analytics, on just the login page of Valex.
The code made it into production just yesterday - along with the shiny new training site.

For Monday, here's our stats.
Visits: 1,633
Pageviews: 2,228

On the login page. Just the login page. Ack.

84.14% of our users use firefox, with 1.5.0.7 beating 2.0 by a fair bit.
Basically no one is using Internet Explorer 7.

I'm amazed at just how much traffic we're getting. No wonder people won't stop calling me about password resets...

Ethan Blanton (a gaim/c developer) scares me

I'm a list lurker on gaim-devel; and I don't usually read too much of it.

gaim is my one decent alternative to MSN, and it's good.

It's comments like this (emphasis is mine):

Almost a good point. Note that I don't care if there is *ever* a
build for Windows, or if it's ever updated, or if anyone ever uses it.
I am in favor of discontinuing Windows support, and have been from the
start.

Regardless of that, Windows Gaim is almost a different proposition
with respect to this debate ... it's even more beta than Unix Gaim
(largely because Windows is so horribly broken), as are the libraries
it depends on. It's probably inevitable that Windows users would have
to follow releases a bit more closely to stay on top of the bug game.
(NB: I know someone is going to come back and say something like "but
Windows users are users who need the bugfixed 'stable' releases most!"
or some crap ... see the previous paragraph. They can go buy a real
computer if they want.)

... which make me think twice about using it internally at my work.

What the hell world do C c developers live in? They seem so disconnected from end-users; it's astonishing. The world runs windows. Doing some development in windows is hard. Providing a shitty product for windows is easy. Getting your users to hate you is even easier.

For me, the reason I like open source and contribute back to projects is simple. It's the idea that I'm adding value to the world. I'm making life easier for someone - if it's myself; or someone suffering the same problems as I; I'm helping.

I don't think some people think of open source like that at all...

Lijit / Outfoxed

Outfoxed is something I encountered some time ago - it's just like StumbleUpon but provides a bit more under the hood.
It's just become lijit.com; and it's still a firefox extension. It's a bit hard to get started with it - but create an account and find the 'get the extension' link on the left hand side.

Spotrunner

Spotrunner helps you get your ads on local tv - they might be just doing what blogger.com did with their prebuilt templates and platform; but it'll work.

Low cost, easy, and it connects everything. This is probably the first ad agency I like.

Check out the demo.

Amazon, and the Web Services Platform

Read/Write Web has a piece on how Amazon have just implemented one of the final pieces in a web OS - webservices at low cost to replace the need for buying your own hardware; and maintaining it.

Parley

I just stumbled across Parley. You basically model two or three parties in a situation, input how important their interests are in specific aspects of a deal are, and you graph it.

How brilliant.

Why cancel the Glass House

The ABC has axed the Glass House.

All I can think is "WTF". This smells of a world gone mad - the ABC is under the thumb of censorship loving fools.

Glass House axed

By Rebekah van Druten of ABC Online

The ABC has axed its popular comedy show The Glass House.

Comedian Corinne Grant says she and co-hosts Wil Anderson and Dave Hughes have known about the decision for a number of weeks.

"Obviously we're devastated ... it's very upsetting, but it's not an overnight shock to us. We have known about it for a while now. But we don't understand the decision at all," Grant said.

She says when the ABC broke the news no "good" explanation was given.

Lesna Thomas from ABC TV Publicity today confirmed the show has not been renewed for 2007.

She says it has had five years on air and that the national broadcaster has decided to go in a new direction.

Grant says that is ridiculous.

"Only the ABC would cancel a show that is at the height of its ratings success and say it is time to move on. That would be like Pat Cash winning Wimbledon and going 'oh, it's time to move on'," she said.

"We just won an AFI award, we're nominated for another one, we just got nominated this year for the Most Popular Light Entertainment Program for the first time in the Logies - why would you cancel a show when it's at the height of its popularity?"

Grant says suggestions that the show may have been axed because of regular segments poking fun at Prime Minister John Howard or US President George W Bush are speculative.

"If that was the case, and certainly the ABC have not said that at all, but if that was the case that would be extremely concerning," she said.

"That would be a national broadcaster being dictated to by the incumbent government about its content. Which is the kind of thing you see in North Korea, not Australia."

Grant has also denied claims by Liberal NSW Senator Connie Fierravanti-Wells that she is guilty of a serious conflict of interest. The Senator says Grant is the face of the ACTU's workplace relations campaign.

"I am not fronting an ACTU campaign. That Senator is making that up. I am not the face of any ACTU campaign," said Grant.

Grant says a lack of funding may have been behind the ABC's decision.

"The ABC doesn't have a lot of money. Maybe it was the difference between our show and The 7:30 Report getting a new stapler."

The last episode of The Glass House will go to air on November 29.

Overnight Anderson, posting in his MySpace blog, urged fans to tune in.

"We are going to go out guns a'blazin, I promise."