Despite my explorations of Wellington today was the first time I’d been to Mount Victoria. So it was somewhat strange to be following random paths up the side of it and suddenly realising that the place looked familiar. It was where they had filmed the scenes on the road to Bree from The Fellowship of…

Jim Roos invented a neat AJAXy trick because he couldn’t be bothered separating out David Bellot’s card images into separate files. The reason that all the cards images are in one file is because when I invented the image format for aisleriot I’d generated one big image from the previous image format and couldn’t be…

I rediscovered this screen-shot while cleaning up some files: This was while using Dapper Drake during its development phase. The software got updated shortly afterwards and this little bit of amusement has not repeated itself.

I’ve had a little free time to hack on GNOME stuff recently. The result is this: The advantage of the graphical treatment for ping is that it is easy to see any dropped packets and the variation of ping times. If you need the exact numbers the traditional list is still available under the details…

Inflight internet – I’m sure the novelty will wear off soon, but in the middle of my 36 hours journey home I need all the distractions I can get. I started in Bern just after 1pm, flew through Munich and Frankfurt and I’m now on my way to Hong Kong. Eight hours there and then…

I am currently in Bern having spent the last eight days in Torino for the CPEM conference. I really can’t think of any succinct way to describe what happened. It’s not that it isn’t interesting – for starters there are moves afoot to change the SI system – but the amount of background needed is…

Recently I have been integrating some code which liberally used sleep() for its timing into a GTK main loop. I tried several different solutions and thought I’d mention a couple here. The cutest one was to run the function with the sleep calls as a co-routine alongside a glib timer. “sleep (n)” gets replaced with “yield n”.…

I arrived home on Friday evening to an odd smell. Not the odd-smell from the paint-work downstairs that usually greeted me. Something a bit more pleasant. From the front door I could also see that the curtains were pulled. Also strange, since I could clearly remember pulling them that morning. When I walked forward I…

It’s been three years – which must almost be some kind of record for a gnome-games maintainer – but I’ve grown tired. So I’ve just announced my mostly-retirement from the role. There is no successor lined up so I’m not going to abandon it completely. I will keep making releases as necessary, at least until…

I’m going to be in Torino in July for the CPEM conference followed by a trip to Bern to visit Metas. By a strange coincidence this will be the third World Cup final in a row I watch while in Europe. It’s far more interesting to watch the matches with people who have some sort…