omad.net

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!