Well, I’ve finally moved and now live in Brooklyn, a block from Central Park. (People who think that’s geographically improbable: different Brooklyn, different country.) It is an easy twenty minute walk to the center of town (the walk back up the hill is the hard bit) and it looks like the trip to work will…

As of this evening I am no longer employed by the University of Otago and my life as an atomic physicist is over. It’s been an interesting eight years and well worth it, but now it is time for something new. For the next two weeks my job description will be “Bum”. After that I…

It has been pointed out that while there was a photo of Cushla on holiday yesterday there was none of me. This will now be rectified with a photo of me fresh from a snorkeling trip.

Well, I survived my time in the Whitsunday Islands. The resort on Daydream Island was amusing, although not entirely my style. They did have a shark pool though. We got to feed the stingrays and watch the bats leave the forest at dusk. Of course we went snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. To keep…

For the next week I’m going to be acting as Whanau Support for my wife at a conference. Conveniently this conference is being held on an island near the Great Barrier Reef. I don’t know what internet access will be like, and I don’t care. I’m going to be snorkeling and ignoring the outside world.

GNOME’s Freecell implementation has a very good hint engine. The problem is that it has had to be limited so it returns a hint in a reasonable time after the hint button is clicked. I’ve just changed it so that a separate thread starts calculating a good hint the moment the board is changed. So…

I finally got around to trying out Rockbox on my iRiver iHP-140 mp3 player. Not as functional as the default firmware (no recording or radio for instance) but what does work, works very well. For example, the default firmware’s in-track seek function just runs through the track in a uniform manner. The Rockbox firmware not…

Today I dismantled the home directory I have maintained on the Otago University servers for over ten years. It received its heaviest use from 1994 until 2000 while I was a student. It started out on an DECStation 3100 running Ultrix, went through a phase being used from an Alpha running OSF/1 and eventually a…

I was trying to get some of the examples out of The Seasoned Schemer going this evening with absolutely no luck what-so-ever. Very strange errors were resulting from my macro to implement let-cc, the books short-hand for call-with-current-continuation. Seemingly impossible errors. Eventually it dawned on me: I was dragging in the examples from their previous…

I hate grounding issues. Almost as much as I hate unconventional schematics and nearly undocumented circuit-boards. Naturally they all appeared together. In the end one wire and one cut track gave me an order of magnitude improvement in output noise for the old piezo driver, but it took three days to figure out which track…