http://abortrephrase.com Random commentary on stuff Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:29:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This is rather nifty. It shows me that if I moved a few blocks south, east, or west, I'd have ADSL2+. (This is my way of saying that despite Internode's port-availability-checking doover, there were in fact no Optus ports left in the exchange, so stuck with ADSL1 until such time ... http://abortrephrase.com/2008/07/19/ha-bloody-ha/ Having been entertained during the day by the "Waaah! How dare they release a product which isn't accessible to the totally blind! Sue the heretics!" on a certain blindness-related mailing list, it occured to me that with a decent screen and a camera on the back of the thing ... http://abortrephrase.com/2008/07/14/iphone-as-at/ I've been meaning to do something more sophisticated (and rather higher-capacity!) than the current setup for ages. Right now it's a Ubuntu box with a 320GB disk running Samba. At a hardware level the plan is to nab a pair of 1TB SATA disks. They can be had for ... http://abortrephrase.com/2008/07/13/home-file-server/ I have been resisting the move to a laptop for years. My vision is pretty bad, so I've doggedly stuck to using a desktop system with a big screen, and that's served me well. But recently I bought a laptop, expecting mostly to use it as a portable desktop: ... http://abortrephrase.com/2008/07/06/laptop-adjustments/ "“Thank you,” said Himmler, who found the Windows file management system a diabolical confoundment. And they accuse me of crimes against humanity, he thought as he settled himself in at his desk. Wilhelm Gates, you are a beast, and your family will pay." -- John Birmingham, Final Impact http://abortrephrase.com/2008/06/27/quote/ The Age reports that the Government is prepared to reduce the performance requirements for the rail network operators, on the grounds that increased patronage makes it harder to achieve on-time requirements. There's some truth to that, but the real game is almost certainly rigging things so that the performance statistics look ... http://abortrephrase.com/2008/06/24/if-you-cant-perform-rejig-the-measure/ Not sure when this happened, but I've just noticed it a few minutes ago and haven't seen any announcements in the press or from Apple: the iTunes Australian store now has a TV Shows section. The range of content is pretty small: a few shows each from ABC (US), ... http://abortrephrase.com/2008/06/24/tv-shows-on-itunes-australia/ Looking around for information on getting the VMware Server 2.0 beta running on Ubuntu Server 8.04 -- I find it best to look online to see if people are having trouble before I waste time trying to make something work -- I saw a fair few complaints about performance not ... http://abortrephrase.com/2008/06/22/vmware-performance/ The new laptop arrived on Tuesday. Life events (sick dog) rather took the shine off the new-toy-lust, but that's OK. To recap, this is a Dell XPS M1530, T9300 CPU, 4GB RAM, GF8600MGT video. Essentially a 15" desktop-replacement type system, about as grunty a GPU as you're going to ... http://abortrephrase.com/2008/06/19/new-lapdog/ We have a decent wodge of credit with Amazon (a friend paying us back for some stuff) but not much idea what to do with it. Our original plan -- pre-orders of Spore and Wrath of the Lich King have gone out the window as they only want to ... http://abortrephrase.com/2008/06/13/what-to-buy/