jra's thoughts

Category: Geeking

  • The IBM Tax

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    The IBM tax laid bare, from a promotional spam Amazon sent me: The hourly prices for Amazon EC2 running IBM are as follows: Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Express – starting at $0.38/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Workgroup – starting at $1.31/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Express – starting at $0.38/hour…

  • Post to your blog via e-mail

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    Posterous does the heavy lifting. Nifty. You have to give Posterous access to your blog. It would be nice if WordPress had a delegation feature, where I could make a user with a low privilege level for this.

  • Made me chuckle

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    I am a Slashdot addict, and one of the reasons are gems like these. The geek sense of humor is omnipresent: Police in Norfolk, England already have tracking units, The Automatic Vehicle Location System, installed in their cars that allow a control room to track their exact locations. Later this year a similar system will…

  • My life in DocBook ligature hell

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    I am working on a new project. The result will be a document. I want to publish it in several formats, including HTML, PDF, and Word. (Hot tip: if you rename a RTF file to end in DOC, you’re done. Don’t make DOC files, they suck. Make RTF files, which any editor can read. You…

  • Unlocking the 3Skypephone (AMOI WP-S1, WP-S2 and others)

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    I have a mobile from 3. It has Skype on it. It is the second worst mobile phone I have ever owned. The worst was the Danger Hiptop, a phone with a software bug preventing it from ringing. (You can’t make this stuff up.) The third worst phone I ever used was a Motorola. And…

  • Exiting from xsltproc with an error

    —

    by

    jra
    in ,

    Does anyone out there know why xsltproc and the DocBooc stylesheets are so stuuuupid? When there’s a processing error, they just keep going. OK, fine, maybe useful. But then there’s no return value to say that there was a problem. The man page for xsltproc says it has return values, but it always returns 0…

  • My favorite things, all at once!

    —

    by

    jra
    in , , , , ,

    Yay for old friends, economics, and technology! All at once! kc wrote a blog posting with her humble ideas on how to use IP address space tax. Wait… there’s a tax on address space? Yes, because it has become a scare quantity, because people are too lazy to move to IPv6, IPv4 address space is…

  • You heard it here first, folks…

    —

    by

    jra
    in ,

    More discussion about marks on hard things. I suppose I should really get around to figuring out the physics of my modest proposal. The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project does something clever, which is to start their disk with big text that swirls into microscopic text. The idea is to tempt the reader to want…

  • Some pointers to things I’ve recently liked

    —

    by

    jra
    in ,

    Here’s a random smattering of links to things that I’ve recently checked out, and that I really like: Children of Men: A well made film about an interesting story in dystopic England (though, to be perfectly honest, it’s a bit hard to tell the difference between that England and the one outside my window). I…

  • Knock it off, you two

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    You’re both right. But Dave comes off looking more mature, with more useful things to say. Asa, you made yourself look like a prick, and it’s too bad, since Mozilla seems to be letting you speak for them.