Posted by Damien at July 3rd, 2008
My big holiday begins!
It’s 2am in Singapore, the first stop off on my way to Italy, and I’m making use of the free internet facilities at the airport. That was the longest leg of the flight, the next two portions are each half an hour shorter. There’s sooo much to watch on the plane, but nothing can keep my attention, am going to try and sleep some more this leg.
Posted by Damien at October 25th, 2007
Neil Creek posted a few weeks back, a wonderful item on the right question to ask about photos and photography. Why?
Having bought a DSLR a month ago, I’ve been struggling to get out and enjoy taking pictures. It’s time to sit down and work out why I want to, and rediscover some motivation.
Posted by Damien at February 27th, 2007
Last week I finally started work again after only about 3 months holiday. I’m not helping a Brisbane based web startup called MyNight. Everything’s going well so far, and it’s great not to be sitting around the house any more.
I’ve also changed the layout of my site. Hopefully only temporary (hah), and just a stock theme, but at least not THE stock theme.
Posted by Damien at February 13th, 2007
Last weekend it was finally time to sort out the mess of data on my computer. First task was to free up some space to move, and burning a few of the ripped DVDs would help a lot. I’ve managed before in linux, using the command line, but this time I wanted a GUI.
Low and behold, recent versions of K3b actually allow this, it was only a few months ago that I was foiled.
It’s nice when things (finally) just work!
Posted by Damien at February 2nd, 2007
I’m back home now, after my two month summer climbing holiday taking in the best Australia has to offer. Starting out in the Blue Mountains in a house with QUT Cliffhangers, then continuing on camping at numerous places before ending up at Arapiles. Australia’s climbing ‘Mecca’.
It’s actually been a week and a half since I’ve been home, not a lot to report.
Posted by Damien at November 15th, 2006
Hail storms are fun! A rather impressive specimen just roared through Brisbane. Luckily I was home to batten down the hatches.
Posted by Damien at November 7th, 2006
The lunch and sweeps organised at work today for the Melbourne Cup were too much effort, so I’m now home for lunch. I’m not going to watch the race here either, thanks to an allergic reaction to the advertisement for ‘Dancing with the Stars‘, and then the painfully inane statistics being spouted by Bruce McAvaney.
Instead I’ll sit here enjoying my pasta lunch listening to the tuneful melodies of The Shin’s latest album.
Posted by Damien at November 6th, 2006
There is nothing that annoys me more than the variety of different ways different countries write their dates!
The main problem affecting me occurs with Australian/UK and US formats, there is often no way to tell which is which. Most well designs APIs avoid them both, and sensibly order elements year-month-day, but many people decide dates are simple and reimplement it themselves, fools. The PHP date functions expect things to be ordered in the American way, and blindly produce errors for the unwary programmer.
Java solved the problem by adding layers of confusion. If you want to use dates in Java in a particular format, you need to learn about dates, and then date formaters, and then locales, and then cross your fingers and hope for the best.
Beware the evil dates!
Posted by Damien at November 6th, 2006
I finally got around to replacing the broken IDE cable in my computer last night. It had been limping along with an old UDMA33 cable, and now has a proper UDMA100 cable.
Before:
damo@omad:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/hdc /dev/hdd /dev/hdc: Timing buffered disk reads: 86 MB in 3.07 seconds = 28.05 MB/sec /dev/hdd: Timing buffered disk reads: 86 MB in 3.06 seconds = 28.14 MB/sec
After:
damo@omad:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/hdc /dev/hdd /dev/hdc: Timing buffered disk reads: 172 MB in 3.01 seconds = 57.15 MB/sec /dev/hdd: Timing buffered disk reads: 170 MB in 3.02 seconds = 56.23 MB/sec
Now my media drives are running approximately twice as fast. I should have done it months ago!
Posted by Damien at July 28th, 2006
Last Friday I took some time out and entered my first Top Coder competition.
For those who’ve never heard of it, Top Coder is an online competition for computer programmers. There’s several different categories to compete in with the most interesting to me being Algorithms.
Each week thousands of coders from around the world enter, and are given 3 programming challenges, with limited amount of time to compete them. Points are awarded for correct solutions, based on the difficulty of the problem, and the amount of time spent working on them.
I heard about Top Coder from an online interview with a Google employee, who attributes his success in obtaining a much coveted position there largely to his high standings in the competition. He also highly recommended it for anyone wishing to practice their programming skills.
The problems are hard, it’s a bit of fun, and provides good motivation to improve.
