Exasperated Calculator

Weight: 106.3kg Breakfast: Just Right Lunch: Vegemite sandwich Dinner: Mince with pesto & pasta Snacks: 1 muesli bar Total: 1514kCal Exercise: None

Weight: 106.4kg Breakfast: Just Right Lunch: Vegemite sandwich Dinner: Chicken Cacciatore Dessert: WW Chocolate pudding Snacks: 6 rice cakes, Tic Tacs, 2 scoops Ice Cream, Muesli Bar Total: 1939kCal Exercise: None

Weight: 107.9kg Breakfast: Just Right Lunch: Vegemite sandwich Dinner: Rogan Josh Dessert: WW Chocolate pudding Snacks: None Total: 1349kCal Exercise: None

Yes, I know the blog looks horrible at the moment. I’m experimenting with some possibilities for layout, and should have it all working neatly in a week or two.

(Which will also mean fewer posts from me, as my spare time for this blog will go into design rather than content…)

Ever seen a movie and thought afterwards that the trailer you saw looked nothing like that? Well guess how far you can take it…

• The Sound of Music (as a drama, without music).
• The 10 Commandments (as a teen high school comedy).
• Jaws (as a romance).
• Top Gun (as a Brokeback Mountain like movie. There are about 1000 different Brokeback Mountain style trailers, including Shawshank redemption and others. But once you’ve seen this one, you’ll get the idea and won’t need to see the rest).
• The Shining (as a screwball comedy).

And then, of course, there are the trailer mash-ups:

• Sesame Street meets V for Vendetta.
• Toy Story meets Requiem for a Dream.

(Isn’t You Tube fantastic?)

The Australian Government Attorneys General’s Department has just announced (long overdue) changes to copyright law with respect to making personal copies of television shows and CDs. Most of it seems fairly sensible, albeit long overdue. But one aspect of it strikes me as… somewhat optimistic about the willingness of Australians to comply:

The first private use exception will allow consumers to record most television and radio programs to view or listen to once at a later time (known as ‘time-shifting’). This exception will not allow a recording to be used over and over again or to be distributed by others. (Emphasis added).

So you can tape a TV show, but you can only watch it once. Sadly, the current press release does not address the important question of whether or not you’re allowed to rewind the tape to watch a bit again if someone phones you during the program. Or whether you’re allowed to fast forward the ads or not.

(And I note that the genius types at Slashdot failed to pick up on this aspect entirely…)

(And this is probably a good moment to point towards the Disclaimer over on the right).

Me:

Helen:

(Generated using South Park Studio).

Wow! I haven’t been this excited by a movie trailer in a very long time. This looks like a lot of fun.

From today’s news, Jeff Kennett is considering returning to the Victorian lberal party leadership. All I can say is: oh please, let it be true! State politics in Australia is populated by such a group of bland nonentities that I find it very hard to get interested. Jeff Kennet would be such an entertainment.

(He might even be good - I always thought he did a pretty good job in Victoria, although there were certainly problems in some areas).

Update: Damn!.

…I just do not get it. For instance, why would a candidate for political office say this:

“There are only two nations I know of that have been supernaturally blessed: Israel, because God chose them … and the other is the United States,” Jordan said.

Two questions: One, how does he know this? And second, why on Earth would anyone believe that God would do that? (Via Pharyngula).

Hah, I say, HAH!!! (ABC Australia News).

staticICE seems to be a useful search engine for Australian computer hardware prices.

(Nothing very new, but most of the ones on the ‘net are US-centric).

The National Geographic Society has just published another round of its survey that always shows how poor people are at geography. There’s some pretty funny stuff in it (about a third of the sample think America has a population of 1-2 billion…), but some stuff I got wrong myself.

But if you think you’re so smart at geography, try the Geosense online geography quiz, which test where you think various world cities are.

Via Washington Monthly.

Hmmm. Not sure if I’m quite will to run the rockbox open source jukebox firmware on my iPod. Maybe my old iPod. It does look very neat…

Update: I’m closing the comments on this post because it’s become a spam magnet.

Regarding my earlier comments about the Ruby on Rails documentation being out of date, a second edition of the main book Agile Web Development with Rails went came out today.

(Fortunately I bought the PDF recently, so I get an upgrade for free…)

Via Boing Boing, there’s this: Gun-shaped teddy bear crackers ready to liven up wedding receptions.

Several years too late, I’ve also gained an interest in proper version control. I’m using subversion, an open source version control system that has the advantage of integrating well with Rails, as well as being offered easily through my web host.

There’s also this handy guide to how to set up a new rails project into a subversion repository. (From Maniacal Rage).

I’ve fallen victim to the latest craze sweeping the web development world, namely the insidious evil of Ruby on Rails.

Ruby is a nice little object oriented programming language (with perhaps a little bit too much in the way of ‘philosophy’), and Rails is a framework that rests on top of it that makes developing applications for the web easy.

It’s a very nice little framework that’s finally allowing me to play with some of the ideas I’ve had in my head. You spend most of your time working on the logic rather than the implementation. There are some rough edges (like the poor quality of the documentation), but so far it’s been a lot of fun.

Welcome to the new URL (and slightly changed name) for my weblog.

The old content will not be migrated over, because it just wasn’t that good. Here’s to fresh content!