Blog

Google’s Do No evil mantra

When last did you access google.com/ig/oscheck? It returns a serialized array — with a weird space-holder — instead of “Do no evil” (which implies that you can be evil, think evil, plan evil, but not execute it), they’ve upped it a notch — all the way to “don’t be evil'” (note the trailing apostrophe). This of course changes the mantra — ...

No more silly Google.com fade-in effect

You’ve seen it, you hate it, you threaten to switch to wolfram or Bing… Or you can just make it go away. Stylish allows you to apply custom stylesheets to sites by wildcard prefix, so that it works and look the way you want it to. For Firefox. For IE, IE8Pro does something similar (YMMV — I haven’t tried it…) All you need to apply is a simple CSS script: @namespace u ...

Dump MS Access data from Ubuntu

The mdbtools package for Ubuntu Jaunty includes a command called mdb-export.  This allows you to dump the contents of tblName from database.mdb to STDOUT in CSV format like this: mdb-export database.mdb tblName Output redirection to capture the output in a file is also supported (not that that’s a feature of the app, as you know): mdb-export sample.mdb tblFoo > capture.txt ...

How a Web Design goes straight to hell…

Many, many, many can attest to the tail of trauma, pain and suffering, as well as deep, well-meant user input created by an environment which is free-flowing, without pre-set specifications, requirements and design parameters. Pain. Argh. Well done, TheOatMeal! He also does a really good piece on What not to Tweet about on Twitter… Oh — and in case you were wondering — here are ...

4 more days to Kilimanjaro!!

Right — now to pack and repack and unpack and repack — need to get the weight and the sorting right so that SAA and the porters carrying the stuff don’t complain. Worrying bit is — 1.5kg of packaging that came off the equipment — just cardboard and plastic for packaging — excluding bags. Wow. I wonder how one would quantify the carbon footprint of packaging mat ...

An update on Operation Aurora

The attack (Operation Aurora) on around 20 companies in the US, including Google, Adobe, Juniper Networks and others using the zero-day exploit of Internet Explorer is partly linked to social engineering — as the carefully crafted emails were plausibly created and structured, users bought into it. Once the machine was owned after the payload was released, the affected machine would contact ...

Now on Technorati too

Wow, that took long! The authority process does take its automatin’ time! And the count-down to Kilimanjaro is on — only a few more days to go to before heading to the top – and Tanzania! 🙂 ...

And in other news…

Matric maths marks are not raised by more than the acceptable 10% (!!!???), and the AbaThembu are all ready to take their plans to Parliament today, saying – hold on, we own most of South Africa, so give us our land, KZN, Northern, Western and the Eastern Cape, and parts of Gauteng, plus R80bn and we’re quits… Ai, ai, ai… ...

And it’s time for 2.9.1

After a few reported issues with prior WordPress version upgrade 2.9, 2.9.1 is here to save the day (full version, not even RC 🙂 From the source: This release addresses a handful of minor issues as well as a rather annoying problem where scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly due to incompatibilities with some hosts. Yipee!! 🙂 ...