01 July 2020
A couple of years ago I decided to throw out my homebrew CMS, which was more trouble than it was worth, and migrate to something that was a little less troublesome to update (in what is probably a misguided hope that I'll write more content that way). Two years later, the server…
09 June 2015
A Windows system made a commit to a branch and then I had to merge it. There were +xs everywhere, and guess who got to clean them up? Perl to the rescue!
29 April 2015
Last night I volunteered to convert a couple of documents to PDF for a friend. ‘It'll be easy’, I thought, ‘it'll only take a few minutes’. The phrase "Ha" comes to mind. Adobe Acrobat can't import DOCX files. This wasn't a huge surprise and I was prepared. One a quick trip to…
22 March 2015
Astro Teller is somewhat missing the point: "I'm amazed by how sensitively people responded to some of the privacy issues," Teller explains, expressing frustration about the backlash against Glass in public, given the prevalence of mobile video. "When someone walks into a bar…
04 March 2014
This is inevitable, and a terrible idea. It is based on two major assumptions: Cell connections are slower than Wifi connections Cell connections are unmetered and Wifi connections are not These are both often wrong. My office sits in a cell signal black spot. I'm lucky to get…
26 February 2014
Yes, this, absolutely. I'm in more-or-less the same boat. My Panasonic is a Blu-Ray player rather than a TV and I hadn't got to the point of discovering that I needed to pay for XBox Gold again (I let it lapse a year or so ago) to get the streaming video app. So, I'm getting…
24 January 2014
I like the idea of @font-face, but some implementations leave a little to be desired. I was trying to read a webpage on a 3G Internet connection and the font was taking more than a little while to download. Unfortunately, Chrome doesn't render text in a fallback font while it is…
17 October 2013
via Charlie's Diary: We have verified that the Queen is not, in fact, a Reptoid. Neither is Prince Philip. Clearly Charlie Stross himself has been kidnapped and replaced by a Reptoid. Be vigilant!
15 September 2013
Half a year ago I accidentally uploaded a hideous redesign and decided to keep it so that I would be motivated to get things fixed. This plan didn't work quite as well as I had hoped. The new CMS went live this afternoon though, so fingers crossed that is is going to run smoothly…
04 April 2013