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Category Archives: rants

Fairfax media – incompetent boobs

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Well I logged into the Fairfax site BrisbaneTimes.com.au this morning for my dose of occasional local newspaper media (the Brisbane Times is really a web-only copy of the SMH with some local content). Wanted to comment on an article; it seemed they changed their login system and my old login didn’t work. That’s OK, I [...]

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On Christopher Hitchens

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

WARNING: Contains Politics and Religion. See this link to my history blog, On Christopher Hitchens (inlustre monumentum est)

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Air France stops maintenance in China after screws missing from plane

Friday, December 2, 2011

This is why I don’t trust off-shoring of aircraft maintenance. The same reason that poisonous substitutions are made in toothpaste or cheap lead paint used on a children’s toy; it’s the whole idea of taking something based in complex skills and knowledge-based engineering and buying on price, which ends up in a business environment like [...]

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High-performance system design by declarative specification

Monday, November 28, 2011

“I want to get from London to New York in 12 minutes.” “Ok, we will have to design and build some sort of ICBM or buy one, that will cost a lot of money. Also, I’m not even sure you can get an ICBM that’s fast enough for that distance. And have we thought about [...]

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UNIX timezone database shut down

Friday, October 7, 2011

The UNIX time zone database has been shut down because of copyright complaints! Overthrow the DCMA! http://blog.joda.org/2011/10/today-time-zone-database-was-closed.html

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if this then that

Thursday, September 22, 2011

I have recently been using “if this then that” to integrate my Google Reader with this blog and other places, like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and tumblr (I have a Classics-related tumblr). It’s a great way to do simple integration between these services but one annoyance is that it lacks any way to discriminate actions. For [...]

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Instructions: first open the box then read the instructions

Monday, June 6, 2011

I’m using Scrivener to organise my PhD research, and it will end up being used for the first draft of the actual PhD as well. But Scrivener does not have an iPad app, which make a bit of sense. So I have been looking for an editor that will work with Dropbox (even though its quite [...]

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Busted-arse Apple Mobile Me Calendar forced onto me.com users

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Got this email from Apple’s Me.com service today; from MobileMe <MobileMe@insideapple.apple.com> date Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 13:02 subject Upgrade to the new MobileMe Calendar by May 5, 2011 Upgrade to the new MobileMe Calendar by May 5, 2011 Dear MobileMe member: On May 5, 2011, MobileMe will transition completely to the new Calendar service [...]

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A terrible, terrible Eclipse bug

Thursday, March 10, 2011

I found a massive bug in Eclipse – it has a copy and paste function. In Eclipse’s defence, Intellij IDEA and Netbeans also exhibit identical broken functionality.

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Come back Gavin King, all is forgiven (Spring is the new EJB 2.1)

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

I’ve just spent the past two days trying to make Spring transaction management work with JPA-annotated Hibernate-backed persistence classes that need to have multiple persistence units with transaction propagation REQUIRES_NEW between the two. For a start, the documentation is merely a series of outlines of brief hints. One measly section.The laughably short Spring 3 doco [...]

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