I was exceptionally pleased when my python/gtk/sqlite program I had been developing on my Linux box at work ran first time and without problems when I dropped it onto the Windows-based machine running our mains-power testing rig. There’s too much legacy code to do an OS replacement (Testpoint and Excel macros – ugh), but being…

This is a response to Murray’s article. I think he misses the obvious problem, I think a lot of people do. I’m going to base these comments on my experience in the realm of physics, but I suspect the same thing happens in any male-dominated field. The problem as I see it is that when…

Last week got a bit exciting. I had a course to attend in Christchurch (the Asia-Pacific Microwave Measurement Course) so I’d flown down to Dunedin the weekend before with the intention of driving up to Christchurch and then nipping back down to Dunedin for the next weekend before flying back to Wellington. A really good…

I’ve always wondered who “they” were, apparently it is me. So here is the official word: “They” definitely approves of fiddling with free software. In fact “they” approves of tinkering with almost anything. “They” also approves of anyone who has made neat graphics for Same GNOME, and wants to share, sending him their work. For…

Today: with a scalpel. Our three-phase power supply has been a bit uppity recently. By uppity I mean: beeping insistently, leaving the outputs at 110V and ignoring the stop button. This behaviour is not appreciated. Opening it up revealed that the front-panel is connected to the power modules via a fibre ring. This is nice…

Thanks to the marvellous help from Paolo Borelli, Thomas Thurman and Thomas Andersen, all 15 games in the gnome-games package have now been converted to GOption. This was Thomas Andersen’s first ever patch and he did a fine job. A quick tip for everyone else porting to GOption: now is a very good time to…

My flight to Dunedin was delayed about an hour last night. As we left the gate the plane’s sound system was playing The Animals’ “We gotta get out of this place.” Very appropriate.

OK, so it appears some people took my previous post the wrong way. I am guilty of not putting down my actual thoughts in the post and of being far from subtle in my title. The point was meant to be that a C++ compiler has to put arbitrary limits on the code it can…

Every now and again you hear someone complaining about the difficulty of parsing C++. You will probably also have heard that templates are Turing complete. The two statements are of course linked; the following code is valid C++, but will never compile. #include template struct Forever {   enum { value = Forever::value }; }; int…

I’ll be walking the Greenstone-Caples track from Saturday until Tuesday. Anyone trying to get hold of me will be out of luck. In the meantime, here is a picture of some chimpanzees.