Sylvain Wallez comments on his new PowerBook hardware and among the good and bad he’s found are a couple of comments that come up a lot but shouldn’t. There’s three problems Sylvain is running into that I want to take a look at: No page up/down No scroll wheel One mouse button The solution for all three problems is to keep your left hand on the keyboard. When you’re typing, keep both hands on the home row (asdfghjkl;), when you use the mouse, slide *both* hands down, your right hand slides down to the track pad and your left hand slides down to sit on it’s “mousing” home row – (fn, ctrl, option, command).

I received my final bill from Optus the other day and in amongst all the crap they send is a notice that from the 15th April 2004 an $8 fee will apply “to any customer who switches their mobile phone number from Optus to another carrier or service provider”. That’s pretty low. The number portability legislation came in to encourage competition between mobile phone providers – effectively breaking down some of the barriers to switching.

I mentioned earlier that MarchFest was coming up. The website has now gone live. If you’re in Brisbane on the 20th of March why not drop by and check out some of Brisbane’s finest local talent?

Why is it that with such a housing boom going on it’s so hard to find a decent place to rent? My housemate and I are looking for a new place to live, house, townhouse, unit, apartment we don’t care. It just needs to be in a reasonable location (in Brisbane that generally equates to somewhere near the SE freeway, or reasonably close to the city), about 2 bedrooms (one can even be really small), an office and space for 2 cars to park (under cover optional) .

Continuing on the “things I didn’t know” theme: I didn’t know there was a kext for OS X that let you mount ext2 and ext3 drives. Very nice to discover, now not only can Linux finally read and write HFS+ drives but OS X can read and write linux drives. Kudos to the people involved.

You may remember a few days ago I argued against a comment regarding my GPL vs The World entry. It’s just been pointed out to me that the “MJR” fellow is actually quite well known. I had no idea….

Every so often, FARK comes up with something truly wierd. This is one of those times. A fish that reportedly wedges itself in your urethra. What really got me though, was a short, largely hidden quote towards the end: There are no confirmed reports of deaths or penectomies–several cases of the latter are thought to have run afoul of piranha. Because if there’s one thing worse than a Candir� up your urethra, ‘7;s a piranha biting it off entirely.

In the comments to my last entry, MJR comments: Interesting opinion, but harmed by some bugs in the basic ideas. For example, “open source” and “commercial” are not opposites, unless you have some particularly strange definition that you use. At least for the GPL this is completely false. The GPL does not give you permission to sell the GPL’d software. The GPL does state: You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.

With the recent debacle over whether or not the ASF license is compatible with the GPL license, Leo Simmons discusses the arrogance of the FSF and concludes with: So I might as well stick to the MIT license. But the arrogance of the FSF makes me feel very much like giving them the finger and just going with the ASL. Personally I agree. I’ve never liked the GPL as a license, it’s just way too restrictive to be considered “free software”.

Well I learnt something new today. All this time that I’ve been doing some extremely funky stuff with XSLT (and I do mean funky), I never actually had the idea of the context node quite right. I discovered this because of a bug I ran into with our updating of XPath expressions that use position(). Essentially in the XML editor I’m developing, we pick out the XPath expressions in the XSLT used to lay out the data for editing so that as their input values change we can update the result like it was a spreadsheet.

Weeeeeee! Eclipse is finally usable on my powerbook. M7 hit the streets a few days ago (or that’s when I noticed it anyway) and the performance improvements are quite nice, particularly on OS X. My plans for getting debian installed on my laptop can now take a bit of a back seat as I don’t need a Linux or Windows box to run Eclipse on anymore. This is actually a major relief since my PC has died recently and the state of Java on Linux for PPC is absolutely abysmal.

David Starkoff writes: What I�m getting at is that the primary audience of judgments is not the general public. The general public couldn�t care less. Further, I wonder whether the primary audience�at least at the appellate levels�should be the general public. I think for the most part, they are decisions argued by lawyers intended for lawyers. There is no doubt that the law is becoming more accessible to the general public.