Evidence-based Scheduling
Joel Spolsky expands on the Evidence-based Scheduling method that he uses and has mentioned in passing a number of times.
It sounds pretty interesting, but adopting it would mean
Technology
Technology related rants and documentation
Getting started with pre-release Angstrom on Collie (Zaurus SL-5500)
WIP: This page is an incomlete work-in-progress. Furthermore, this is about using Alpha software that may or may not work at all the way you expect it to. Proceed carefully, and just stick with OpenZaurus or similar for now if you are not feeling brave.
When GPL software goes bad
Users of a popular open-source accounting system may have just updated to a license they would never have agreed to had the author actually told them it had changed. What's more, the author is actively censoring attempts to advise the userbase of the license change, and appears to be making an attempt to retrospectively re-license all prior versions as well.
New Server
The great news is - I have put in a new server! Yay!
You should find page loads far more expedient now, the old server (a dual P-II 400MHz with 256MB RAM, slow SCSI disks) was really struggling to do all the things I have it doing, and I now have a (very noisy) HP Netserver LP-2000r (dual P-III 1GHz with 512MB RAM, fastish SCSI disks) serving up the pages.
The Future of Systems Management? Puppets!
For those who administer a number of unix systems you have probably found there is little out there in the way of tools to help you manage multiple systems in a clean and efficient way. While cfengine is perhaps the most advanced F/OSS offering it is lacking in many areas - I know when I checked it out some time ago I got the distinct impression that the Cost/Benefit break-even point would be somewhere beyond 50 machines - I want something that's worth setting up for the ability to replace (or reconfigure) 10 machines without as much effort as it would take to do manually.
Furious at Firefox
Oh. My. God. I can't even begin to describe how insanely stupid this is. I just went to open a site in Firefox (since it wasn't rendering in Konqueror quite right) and I get greeted by the most stupid error message I think I've ever seen:
Korganizer lockups with webcalendar
I ran into a bug when using Korganizer with the CVS version of WebCalendar, two great pieces of software that otherwise seem to work pretty well together.
Google Maps does Street mapping for Australia and New Zealand
You know, I blame conventional media for this. I place my trust in them by watching TV news several times a week, and they miss reporting a massive story like THIS? Google added a street map layer to their Australian and New Zealand maps back on May 18 2006, and then just a few weeks ago on September 6 Google Maps added street Searching too! This is great news indeed - why on earth did I not find out until a friend mentioned it only yesterday?
Using your gittins.id.au email account
So you just got set up with a new gittins.id.au email account, and need to know how to use it. This short page is for you.
Alsa sound broken after update (FC4 x86_64)
I recently applied a whole bundle of updates including alsa-lib on my Fedora Core 4 x86_64 desktop. Since then I started getting the error message
ALSA lib control.c:817:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL default
Open error: No such file or directory
whenever I tried to open alsamixer, and similar errors and crashes running other apps that expected to be able to use the Alsa sound system (which worked quite well before the update).