Category: Uncategorized

Cushla and myself are forming a company to handle the income from our rental property. The critical decision with any new company is choosing the name. Much to our delight we discovered that the name Partners in Crime was still available. We also discovered that the New Zealand Companies Office is quick, efficient, and not…

A quick survey of New Zealand contributions to the Mii Contest Channel reveals that well over 1% of contributions are Adolf Hitler. Of these, a large percentage believe that his hobby is dancing. I have no idea what this says about the New Zealand psyche. In hopefully unrelated news, there has finally been a gnome-applets…

Thanks to Michael Hofmann there is now an updated version of the deskbar calculator suitable for the 2.20 release of the deskbar applet. You can find it as a tarball here, or if you just want to drag it directly into the deskbar preferences pane, try this link. If you have an older version of…

… we have World 45 t-shirts. Available wherever Nicolas decides to promote us next.

It has been a very long time since I wrote anything here. I’ve started my new job at World 45. It isn’t exactly what I expected, somewhat better in fact. We work with Sun’s Niagara processors writing offload applications to run in raw (OS-less) logical domains. Most of my time has been spent writing an…

Today was my last day at IRL. I’m moving back to Dunedin (living with my wife, what a novel concept!) and on Monday I start a job at World 45 doing multicore programming on Sun hardware. Metrology has been an interesting, but brief, career and if circumstances had been different maybe I’d have stayed. I’m…

I spent most of ANZAC day playing with the floating point unit in my Pentium-M. Some notes: If your calculation involves Nan it slows down by about a factor of 50. Quoting Intel: “Out-of-range numbers cause very high overhead.” On a Pentium-M fxch is essentially free. However, according to Intel’s optimisation manual, it is very…

Don’t mix visual basic work and chocolate-covered coffee beans. The beans actually manage to make it worse.

A co-worker on prehistoric animals: “There used to be giant dragonflies, but now we have consultants. There was more oxygen back then.”

There is a new release of the deskbar calculator available. There are no new features, but now works with python 2.5 and a nasty hack that fiddled with deskbar’s internals has been removed thanks to advice from Jason LeBrun. For those of you that came in late: The deskbar-calculator is a plug-in for the deskbar…