I have compiled a series of before and after photos for the recent kitchen and bathroom renovations. The page contains a lot of home-brewed javascript – the first I have written in a long time – so be warned about quality. At some point I should add some notes explaining what exactly changed, but for…

I have a new job lined up for November doing Electrical Metrology for Industrial Reseach Ltd. That’s metrology, not meteorology. Measurement standards, not weather. The job will be based near Wellington so I’m going to have to shift north.

I have just merged my preview-2-13 branch of gnome-games back into HEAD. This means a lot of new features: New high scores code to replace gnome-score (me) Preliminary work on a Cairo drawing engine for Ataxx (me) New graphics for Nibbles (Aurélio A. Heckert) Support for Bonjour as the Zeroconf library (but no Avahi support…

The bad news: Cushla’s Grandfather has died. We fly up for the funeral on Wednesday. The good news: My aquarium was placed second in the Tropical Freshwater section of the local tank parade. Furthermore it came first equal in the People’s Choice award. Not bad for a first-time entrant.

During the recent construction work we discovered an old newspaper. To be precise it was The Otago Daily Times for Friday July 4th 1980. I vaguely remember 1980 – I was six at the time – but I hadn’t quite realised how different it was. To illustrate, some of the stories: The Budget – 4%…

My laptop is one of these “widescreen” types. If you are playing movies I suppose this is great, but if you have a document filling the screen it is a disaster. With my traditional panel-at-the-top layout any PDF with a maximized window shows you very little of the text in the vertical direction. So I…

There is now experimental evidence that a USB memory stick can survive a full cycle in a washing machine. Further details have been suppressed to protect the guilty parties.

I’m still looking for a job for once my postdoc runs out. So, on the off-chance that someone who reads this is after someone who can do programming, electronics, lasers and/or a bit of mathematical modelling – here is my CV (pdf).

Steam Boy finally made it to a local cinema. Wow. I don’t care about the plot: this is the most fantastic animation I have ever seen.

I’ve managed to get on top of all the bugs I want to fix before 2.12 but it is way too early to create a gnome-2-12 branch. So instead there is a preview-2-13 branch for gnome-games in CVS. I would prefer it if people tested HEAD rather than this branch and I certainly don’t want…