Tuesday, June 2. 2009
Did you know that most pan makers recently were forced to increase their prices because their pan lids (covers?) have the handle on the upper side? The reason is that the maker of our recently purchased pan lid has patented the innovative “this side down” technique and is now busy collecting license fees from pan lid makers who didn't previously have this idea.
(Yeah, sorry, the picture is crap, I didn't pay enough for my mobile phone. But if you doubt me, please have a coffee at my house and admire this high-tech implement.)
Thursday, May 28. 2009
Thinking that this might be worth hacking on tail (because I felt the functionality would be better kept there than in head), I started to have a look at its source. Lo and behold! tail -n +N already does exactly this...
(Obviously a followup to Zack's comment on my previous posting.)
Tuesday, April 21. 2009
While probably nobody has missed the news of the wekk (year?) in the IT industry, I'd still like to award a small virtual prize to Jonathan Corbet for the best headline:
Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun
Thursday, April 2. 2009
While yesterday was April Fool's day (I guess that's why Schneier posted this on his blog), the actual quote seems to be genuine (It wasn't added yesterday, and anyway it's on Wikipedia, so it must be true...)
Prompted by the theft of Eileen, MOBA staff installed a fake video
camera over a sign at their Dedham branch reading: "Warning. This
gallery is protected by fake video cameras."
Quote from the Wikipedia article about the Museum of Bad Art
Friday, January 9. 2009
Upgrading a laptop that has not been updated for ca. 2 months. Now it requests me to restart the system after every 5 minutes of downloading and installing packages. Repeatedly: I had to restart the upgrade process about 10 times already. In addition, I'm sure I've seen it updating some of the packages at least three times. But I'm sure by the end of today I'll be there.
OpenSUSE. For when Windows was not annoying enough.
Thursday, November 27. 2008
Looking at access logs: Because of a recent entry in this blog, I have the doubtful honour to come up third (right now) in a somewhat unexpected query on Google...
“Wasted” time on the parts of both developers and users. On the other hand, isn't the whole point about computers that they waste the time they could have saved in any case?
LILO boot screen with breakout game. Thanks to Florian Rehnisch for making me stumble upon this. (The description references SuSE Linux 7.2, so I'm probably the last person on earth who hasn't seen this before. Oh, welll...)
Wednesday, November 12. 2008
‘But, Archchancellor,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, ‘it's still too damn far.’
(If you don't know who wrote this, you really should do some reading!)
Contagioned by Kees:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open it to page 56.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
- Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
Monday, November 3. 2008
On a traffic sign in Wales: the welsh text reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.” and was received by the responsible agency in reply to their emailed request to translate the english text. (Reported widely, I've read it in the dead tree variant of my daily newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung; on the net, for example, here or on BBC.)
Tuesday, October 21. 2008
Quote Unquote Records
Since I expect they'll change it at some time, I've copied the base image of the background here. Btw, the record label might be interesting to some, at least some of their music is supposed to be licensed under a CC license. I've not looked further, though.
Thursday, October 16. 2008
I occasionally send quotes that make me smile to Joey, but this time I can't resist circulating it more widely...
>
> Marek Vasut (1):
> i2c/tps65010: Vibrator hookup to gpiolib
Guys, I know we geeks aren't known for our sex-life, but do we have to
make it so obvious?
(Linus Torvalds)
Wednesday, October 1. 2008
I recently received an email from Amy Wilcox from Murphy & Associates, representing Microsoft (the mail was sent from a Microsoft address, via smtp.microsoft.com, so it appears to be genuine.) They asked me to remove the ban for Microsoft search from my robots.txt because “customers complained they couldn't find my site”
First, cowards, they (the people complaining to MS) should have contacted me directly. I don't exactly hide my email address. Second: apparently they still did know about my site, else they wouldn't have complained to MS. In any case, I responded that the removal of this robots.txt entry would be a commercial opportunity for me if they cared to take me up on this offer. I will, of course, amend the omission of not putting a robots.txt on my new blog.fortytwo.ch domain...
Friday, September 19. 2008
Lucas just found the single most interesting fact of this day: the size of the biggest clique in the GPG key graph is ... wait for it ... fortytwo. Yep, I'm just parroting his finding here, but I'm sure you can see why.
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Comments
Wed, 03.06.2009 21:54
Benjamin, you're of course cor rect. You can all sell the pa n lids again that you hoarded in expectation of a big [...]
Wed, 03.06.2009 20:29
In Poland invention needs to b e innovative (http://definr.co m/innovative) and no informati on about invention has t [...]
Wed, 03.06.2009 16:51
I assume (hope?) you're making up the back story to fit the picture. I read the picture as being two disconnected [...]
Tue, 02.06.2009 22:52
So who's the maker who started the stupid patent? Let us kn ow so we can do our best to av oid them.
Fri, 29.05.2009 09:47
The script would be much more portable without using buthead ... sed -n 5,\$p