voyager.tzn

Comments on this site have been moderated because of comment spam. I have now enabled re-captcha and disabled the moderation queue. Let's see if it works :-)

disasswimble (v) To take a portable elecronic device apart so that it might dry after an unfortunate dunking

Thanks to @jerith for formulating the definition and the true life incident that lead to us discussing it.

Soon after I had installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my new laptop I realised that something was not well with the networking.

Finally something worth blogging about. I finally put the purchase of a laptop high on my list of priorities for this year. My only real criteria were a decent amount of RAM, and that it's not a Celeron-based machine. After strongly resisting the temptation of spending R11000 on a HP Pavillion with all the bells and whistles, and then drooling over a Lenovo N500 at R7500 I finally settled for a more modest Dell Vostro A860.

The DailyWTF post What the Ad? - Portability, 1980's Style featured the TRS-80, which just happens to be the nifty little device that gave me my first taste of programming - all the way back in Std 1 (that's 3rd grade for those who don't know their lekker from their kiff).

I just discoved DesignBay. It works like this: I want a some graphic design work done. I submit a "Design Contest", paying USD30 and providing a design brief and a budget. Designers respond to this, submitting proposals. If I find something I like, I choose one hand over the cash. Or not... and all I lose is USD30.

The following is part of my home-grown compilation environment in emacs.

Looks like there is a new marketing campaign for Django. I wonder what the target demographic is...

Recent versions Emacs has built in xml support, and there are libraries available that give you DOM and even XPath capabilities. I've started experimenting with it as I want to process Eclipse Workspaces. Ideally, I should be using XPath, but that has too many dependencies for now (it depends on parts of Semantic). So, using the xml-parse examples on EmacsWiki.org, here is some simple code to get a the "userid" attibutes from all the "to" elements of the following xml data:

I only heard about Opera Software's scheduled visit to Durban on Monday. While I couldn't attend the lectures at DUT or UKZN I made damn sure that I could attend Thursday's "informal gathering" at the Suncoast News Café. You see, I started using Opera when it was still ad-supported (and I honestly don't remember the first version number that I used). Before Firefox even existed I was using a tabbed browser with mouse gestures, cool keyboard short-cuts, colour themes, customizable everything and built-in mail client. But I digress...