You know, Verdana is the kind of font that really grows on you. My boss has been madly changing every CSS file he sees to use “Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif” for the past month or so and considering that the content of those files (only default templates) are copied into the users document, it’s been a rather annoying obsession. I’ve got to admit though, I’m kind of getting to like it as you might note from the recent change to “Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif” around here.

Apparently, fears of an HIV epidemic are putting the breaks on porn production in the US for the next 2 months. Does this mean the spam will stop for 2 months too? On a side note, I’m almost afraid of what the “The Google Says” box over there on the right is going to contain for this entry….

For some reason my email notifications for comments have stopped working or at least are intermittent. While I wasn’t watching, a whole heap of spam comments snuck onto this blog. I’ve now installed MT-Blacklist to see if that can fix the problem (it certainly seems to have cleaned out the existing comments nicely). If not, I’ll be disabling comment entirely. It’s such a shame greedy, selfish people have to go and make life difficult for everyone.

The RAM is a coming, oh yeah…. Ordered another 512Mb of RAM for my shiny new powerbook (it currently has 256Mb). Strangely overnight delivery was $2 cheaper than standard delivery. So I should get a happy little package sometime tomorrow. Then I’ll really see what this little baby can do.

aka: Why people think Americans have no concept of the world outside the USA. Sometimes on this big intarweb thingy, we come into contact with people from different countries and they might have different ways of expressing things or even (shock horror), spelling things. Witness this slashdot posting (which has no particularly worthwhile content but a non-american spelling of “gaol”). Note the flamewar that ensues. The first response (regarding the nineteenth century wanting it’s spelling back) is naive yet funny.

Since my new laptop has bluetooth builtin, I’ve been using my MS bluetooth mouse a lot more. The extra buttons on the side are set up as the Expos� triggers and'7;m now completely addicted to using them. I honestly never thought anything would be able to replace my good old faithful, “Hide Application” method. Where I once used to have a completely clean screen, devoid of all windows but the ones I was specifically working on – I never have absolute chaos with every window I might ever need open.

(I’m starting a $NAME has lost it series if you were wondering. Blame Leo.) Anyway, Stallman’s lost it. But the major source of this problem today is Java, because people who write free software often feel Java is sexy Oh Java, you sexy thing you. Admittedly the sexiness of Java is starting to make life a little difficult. I can’t get any work done because I just sit there looking at it.

A young friend of mine who’s just starting out in the world of programming and has ambitions of becoming a software engineer asked me for work experience today. I couldn’t think of anyway that could give him the support he needs (note: if you know of a company in Brisbane or surrounding areas that could provide some work experience for a year 11 student that’s starting out in programming please let me know – I think a September timeframe fits in with his school well).

Rich Bowen commented on a local church holding a festival in a local park as outreach. His comments hit home pretty hard with me because just recently I helped organise a festival for my local church. In other words, the primary purpose of advertising is to lie to the customer in order to get them to find your product attractive. Evangelism is advertising. Advertising is all about getting a message out about something, it doesn’t have to be a product and it doesn’t have to be a lie.

Following my complaints yesterday I think I’ve finally managed to get XSLT working correctly in perl. The secret: ignore the obvious choice (XML::XSLT) and use XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT in combination. Then use fink heavily as well. Try to avoid using CPAN or installing perl modules by hand until you don’t have a choice. Step 1: Install expat, libxml, libxslt and sablotron using fink. Install anything else that looks vaguely XML related while you’re there too.

I’ve been wanting to develop a “dashboard” style system to information from a bunch of different systems at work. Since we use an awful lot of XML around the place at work the easiest way to do that is most likely to use XSLT to transform the various XML feeds into HTML to be displayed and piece it all together into one page. Systems that don’t speak XML could have a gateway developed for them easily enough.

I hate how slow Entourage is when accessing an imap server. Most of it’s problems stem from the fact that it only downloads things from the server when you actually ask for them. While that’s great for saving bandwidth, it means a lot of latency between clicking on a message and actually getting to see it – particularly since Entourage and imapd don’t seem to get on much and occassionally just hang the connection.