July 18, 2008
Afterglow
Why I Don’t Interact with Clients
An input test for a web site poll module I wrote: Are you wearing pants? Yes No Maybe. I feel a draft. What are pants? I don’t have any legs.July 16, 2008
Afterglow
It’s the Pleats
Random link time: Isaac Asimov’s short story The Last Question Banned words from US school textbooks? How to not rid yourself of a bee problem How to not sell cigarettes Corporate rockets falling over rocket falls How to say nothing in 500 words “I’m going to give him my number.” Robot done right Preaching to the perverted Why are victims of cancer always courageous? Black [...]July 15, 2008
Simon Howard
Gnome 3.0
The Gnome 3.0 announcement is a win for sanity and demonstrates the maturity of the people running the project. There's an elegance about a project that aims to be boring-but-functional, rather than exciting-and-unstable. Rather ironic for a project that was once described as a "cascade of attention-deficit teenagers".July 14, 2008
Afterglow
Mobile Phone Service of the Stone Age
So, you can’t update your My5 with Rogers in Firefox. You get the oh-so descriptive error: AM002. That’s it. I was told by a rep in their eCare department to use Internet Explorer or Safari since they’re aware of the issue. How is a simple POST form submission a known issue that has been broken [...]July 09, 2008
Afterglow
My Sarcasm is a Coping Mechanism
Note to self: don’t finish reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, watching The Orphanage, and looking at paintings by Zdzislaw Beksinski all within the same day if you wish to maintain a positive outlook on life. But read this article. I cleansed the palette by watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall, probably the funniest movie of the year so [...]July 05, 2008
Afterglow
Snow Crash
…condensing fact from the vapor of nuance. Fact: the last book I read took me more than a year. After completing Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon last June, I decided to backtrack in his catalogue to read his cyberpunk classic, Snow Crash. Problem is, if it’sn’t on a moving screen, I tend to lack [...]July 02, 2008
Jon Dowland
My site is (slowly) moving
I've decided to give my website a spring-clean. One of the things that is overdue a change is my domain name.
You can find out more about the history of the "alcopop" name at /about/ if you are so inclined. I've been using it for a long time and haven't really thought about what people might presume about me from the name.
Over the next few months, the site will be moving to the more neutral jmtd.net (my initials). From this point forward, any new content will go there only. This log will probably stay where it is for a while, however.
I'm taking this opportunity to migrate to ikiwiki which is a really useful bit of software and has managed to scratch an itch that I thought nothing would quite manage.
Introducing debgtd
debgtd in action
Recently the number of open bugs that I had submitted hit 100. I had completely lost track of which bugs I was interested in, which ones needed my attention, etc. so I started developing a prototype tool to try and help me keep track of it all. I've called it "debgtd", after getting things done, the self-improvement method which has proven very popular in IT culture.
The current prototype will import the list of bugs that you have submitted from the BTS and let you display them sorted either by severity or package name. You can "sleep" a bug if it does not require your attention at present (e.g. awaiting maintainer feedback), or "ignore" it if you no longer want to keep track of it (e.g. you've stopped using the package in question). Double-clicking a row invokes your system's default X web browser on the bug page.
This is enough at the moment to help me work through my backlog, although once I've done that I have ambitious plans for encoding more workflow into it (such as waking sleeping bugs up on events etc.).
Try it out and see what you think: : code and a more rambling explanation of plans for the tool are available here. It's written in python and uses pygtk for the UI.
July 01, 2008
Mike Watson
Actually I... I've got one of these.
Strangely enough after much soul searching I think I might actually be looking forward to The Golden Army more than The Dark Knight even though I would consider Batman Begins superior to Hellboy and they both have retained their cast and director. Crazy. I will see both. Also on a related note Wanted is not a very good movie (but tolerab...June 29, 2008