Archive for July, 2008
Boffins
Friday, July 18th, 2008Back in 2003, when I had first moved to Sydney, I worked in a small computer store, selling PCs. As a salesperson I was good, as a mathmatician I was useless and as a techie I was very good. Then one day my manager said to me (probably after I screwed something up), “Mark we’re [...]
We live in a digital world.
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008I’ve always been really conscious of the ‘waste’ of the world – in terms of how we, as humans, are just eating up the resources that this planet has to offer – without so much as a thought for the future, and implications this will bring it. I suppose that is why we’re exploring other [...]
Howto: Answer A SIMPLE Question
Sunday, July 13th, 2008Honestly, who writes a howto about answering a question? I mean, everyone knows from childhood how to answer a question right? Yet, the art of answering a question properly seems to be a fading (or perhaps never overly developed) skill. This isn’t restricted to a particular demographic as far as I can tell, but seems [...]
License to Code…
Thursday, July 10th, 2008Update: If you think licensing doesn’t matter to you as a programmer… check out this article about how the PwnageTool developers may have lost control of their source code. Licenses do matter! You know, I really haven’t been alive for that along. Less than 3 decades still. And yet, I am often in awe at [...]
Oldschool
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008I’m not much of a gamer, if I’m honest. Sparky and I pretty much play C&C Generals and C&C3: Tiberium Wars against each other. If you asked me what my favourite games are, they would all be over 5 years old. My favourite and most immersive game of all time comes from 1994 (Relentless/Little Big [...]
On the contrary (subtitled: Rapid Application Development)
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008In complete and utter polar opposite to Insanity’s last post, my job as a programmer does not require me to write a single line of code. Ever. I can (and my boss has, more than once) build massive enterprise systems without ever encountering a syntax error, a mis-placed semi-colon or an any sort of incompatibility. [...]
Hurts so sweet…
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008Well… it’s been a long and seemingly unproductive day today. Anyone who’s ever used Linux for a period of time can probably relate to this feeling: you have an issue, but no matter what you do the program/problem wont behave as you would like. In my case, I have been attempting to get Steam, Wine [...]
Joel and leaving things un-finished
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008I was going to write a bit about automatic SQL Index Selection and why I’m hating it at the moment, but the blog isn’t letting me upload media, so it’ll have to wait and you can read something else I wrote to fill in the blank space: If any of you are not familiar with [...]
Introducing the Anti-Mark
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008Hi all. So, introductions first. I am the Anti-Mark. My name, specifically, is not Mark, I don’t work for any enterprise businesses, I find Microsoft’s business tactics to be more offensive than it’s software, and I never feel more safe and at home than when I’m tweaking my Ubuntu Hardy install to try and do [...]
Not high – just misinformed
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008Recently, I saw the following on the cover of a computer magazine, which had the latest release of ‘Ubuntu‘ on it’s monthly DVD: Now, apart from the general ‘hype’ around anything that’s meant to be able to ‘kill’ or be a ‘better’ alternative to Microsoft’s latest operating system, the idea that this particular version/distribution of [...]