This guy’s pretty convinced about his own business card too – it took him 25 years to design it! Love the quote: “I build crowds – guaranteed! What do you do guaranteed?” Hahaha.

Edit: Oh I want to choose more quotes but there’s too many! “It doesn’t fit in a rolodex because it doesn’t belong in a rolodex.”

The business card of W. W. Green of “Enterprises Un Ltd.” also deserves a mention, it’s pretty creative.

I read a blog post that advises not to use an external USB hard disk to host your Parallels VM, but it’s mainly theory based on bus speeds and whatnot. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.

So I thought I’d write a C program to write a fairly large file to both the local hard disk and the USB disk, and time them to see which one is faster. Here are the results:

USB drive (Seagate 3.5″ 320GB 7200rpm with 8MB cache):

/Volumes/EVERYTHING_/writeperf.txt
real 0m10.278s
user 0m0.396s
sys 0m0.386s

Internal drive (Fujitsu 2.5″ 120GB 5400rpm with 8MB cache):

/Users/glennkentwell/Documents/Code/C/writeperf.txt
real 0m2.480s
user 0m0.233s
sys 0m0.414s

As you can see, a huge difference in the real time taken to write the file. There’s not much difference in the amount of CPU time (0.18 seconds) which is not surprising, as most of the time would be spent waiting for the data to transmit across the USB cable, and the SATA bus is very fast. I should really have run this multiple times and taken the average, but I can’t be bothered so instead I’ve just run it a bunch of times and taken a result that looks typical to me

This is hardly an exhaustive test — I didn’t even try reading from the disk or doing random access, because I just wanted a rough idea how big the differences are. Nevertheless, here is my code and the bash script I wrote to run this

C code: (at pastie.org)

I take no responsibility for anything you damage with this code

I chose PmWiki because I was looking for a PHP-based (for web-hosting reasons) wiki that’s small and simple, and then found out that it’s also really extensible and easy to customise to your liking, which of course I’ve done as part of my usual procrastination routine — see my snazzy theme in the attached screenshot. I also very much like and agree with its philosophy:

1. Favor writers over readers
2. Don’t try to replace HTML
3. Avoid gratuitous features (or “creeping featurism”)
4. Support collaborative maintenance of public web pages
5. Be easy to install, configure, and maintain

And just have a look at what PmWiki can do! With the help of the many cookbook recipes you can do all this and more:

• Content Management System Add-Ons (CMS, blogs, forums)
• Web Forms and MySQL queries and reports
• File Uploads
• Multi Media content
• Page Lists / Searching
• Personal Information Management (PIM)
• RSS Feeds

Plus there are a bunch of skins you can use to make your wiki more amenable to your tastes. I also liked the security features, because I use mine like a personal notepad so I don’t want other people being able to scribble all over it, or even to be able to read it, really. So my security needs are pretty simple, but you can go paranoid/berserk if you need to.

Oh, and you can try out PmWiki on your own machine without a full-on web server if you want to by downloading the Standalone recipe which you just need to unzip a directory into your PmWiki directory tree, double-click a .BAT file and type http://localhost/! Easy peasy. You can run on other operating systems with just a PHP script, also provided on the Standalone recipe page. Running locally makes it super easy and quick to customise your PmWiki because you don’t have to upload your changes to a server, or wait for page refreshes to download. Also, you don’t have to worry about messing up your main “production” installation if you have one, you can mess around locally as much as you want to.

Which brings me to my next point, which was that I wanted to do two things:

1. Import my data from ye olde ASPWiki
2. Experiment with a custom skin that would look decent if you used PmWiki as a way to manage a “normal” website, i.e. use it as a content management system.

I’m mainly a C# developer, so I logically decided that I’d write a tool to import my old data in Python. I’ve written the odd Python script before and this didn’t seem like such a big job — some file I/O and some search/replace stuff. It didn’t turn out to be too difficult but it did take a bit longer than I expected as I learned more about the language; or more specifically, how the expat XML parser works. I’m pretty happy with how it works, I ended up getting my 300+ pages imported just fine.

My second mission, to create a skin that would work if using PmWiki for a normal content-based website, is at least a partial success because I’m happy enough with my skin to use it on my wiki — at least for now. My skin is named PmGk, not too imaginatively.

So if you’re looking for a Wiki that can do everything, or even just something, check out PmWiki, it could save your life!

It looks like my dreams are finally coming true; Krispy Kreme is opening in Brisbane! They were going gangbusters in Queen Street Mall today at lunchtime, giving away 500 dozen doughnuts and they had a giant Krispy Kreme sandcastle — I don’t know why they had that but it was awesome.

And they had a van and promo chicks and ex footy players (Paul Sironen) and balloons and what not.

I snapped some pics on my phone (see em on Facebook):

The 2007 esCarpade started in Canberra and Dad drove down from Brisbane with Ray and Tracie (they’re from Gympie and supplied the car) in our HZ Holden Kingswood rally car “The Red Baron” with its 202 Holden motor (3.3 litre), Commodore 4-speed gearbox with sticky linkages, flashing orange lights for dirt roads, knobbly dirt tyres and big steel boxes on top for luggage which you need because the boot fills with dust when you’re bashing down gravel roads.

Everything was going great until before the rally had started when on Thursday arvo, 150km out of Canberra the old six cylinder started spewing oil all over the place and making some unhappy noises. They limped into sunny Canberra as gently as they could, where the esCarpade organisers gave them the number of a top bloke named Charlie of Hughes Mechanical, who were also the support team for the “Ours” esCarpade team. This guy was awesome and the lads worked their asses off until late in the night to get a new motor into the old beast and have it running again for scrutineering the next morning!

So the team managed to enter the rally with a new motor and I was airlifted in Friday night so that I could be there for the start of the rally on Saturday morning.

We headed off with Tracie at the wheel and the old Kingy seemed to be running sweet as a nut until we noticed some banging noises underneath the back end, and it started wagging its tail like a dog over any kind of corrugations. Tracie held on through some hairy moments as the car waggled around on the gravel and we started to think something could have been wrong. We stopped for lunch and had a quick look but everything seemed fine, and then it was my turn to drive.

We were pretty convinced something was pretty messed up under the back of the car as it tried to swap ends any time the road got bumpy and it was scaring the crap out of all of us, and embarassing us too as pretty much every other car in the rally flew past us and we were eating their dust. So we stopped and jacked up the car and we didn’t even have to take of a wheel to notice that the passenger side shock absorber was just hanging around and had snapped at the top where it mounts to the chassis. That explained a few things…

So once again the car was limping to Canberra after every car parts shop in Yass was closed. Repco in Canberra weren’t keen to sell us a pair of shocks over the phone by credit card and they were going to close before we got there, but some desperation, harassment and cajoling eventually convinced Brian to take our credit card over the phone and leave our package of salvation out the back behind a rubbish bin. Then it was Charlie to the rescue again, he put the car on his hoist and had the shocks changed in literally ten minutes and we were driving on with smiles on our dials.

Heaps and heaps more stuff happened on the trip with plenty of cars having mechanical dramas, navigational problems and driving indiscretions, but it was heaps and heaps of fun and in total all the cars raised over $917,000, which was nearly two hundred thousand more than 2006. A top effort.

So now the plan is to build up a car of our own, get some sponsorship and go again next year. Should be awesome.

I came across this Swedish guy’s blog. I’m mentioning this for three reasons:

1. I love the site’s layout; and he links to a few cool things:
2. Roundabout Dogs
3. Stupid Cats (mainly for Bowman but if you like it then good for you. I love the condescending note the phrase “good for you” has)
4. He had this quote: “Norway outlaws the iTunes Store. It�s apparent that Apple will have to Sweden the deal.”

Plus there was a link to a page that linked to a talk by Adam Bosworth that goes into ajax, databases, Google, information organisation and more nerdy cool stuff that you would like if you were as nerdy as me. Adam Bosworth is a mySQL guy who now works for Google by the way, and the talk is from April 2005 but it’s still a feast of info.

Anyway you don’t care about that, you care about finding out what to do when your Philips 17″ 107P monitor picture goes fuzzy, don’t you? This would probably apply to other monitors as well, and anyway you should definitely read this
FAQ called “How do I adjust the focus of my monitor?,” which I used and found inspiring and helpful. Yeah I said inspiring, I wasn’t going to try fixing the screen myself because I nearly killed myself messing about in the insides of a monitor once before.

Anyway, you don’t care about me nearly dying either, you want to know how to fix your blurry Philips 107P screen, don’t you? It’s really easy, you just need a philips head screwdriver.

So what you need to do is take off the plastic cover of ye olde Philips, by removing the screws marked in the pic below:

That pic is kind of unnecessary, basically just keep taking screws out until the plastic cover comes loose. If you take out more than 6, you’ve taken out too many, you fool.

Now all you have to do is use your trusty screwdriver to twiddle the internal focus knobs through the holes in the aluminium shielding, as indicated in the pic below.

I actually took off the aluminium shielding, but you don’t actually need to, I just had no idea what I was doing, and the FAQ linked above said that you may need to take it off, so I did. Now that I’m shining a light to show you the way, you won’t need to go through the pain that I endured. Good luck to you, old chap.

So basically the story is that you need to have the monitor turned on and plugged in to your computer, so you can stick your screwdriver in and twiddle the focus knobs. The top one seems to be the main one, but the middle knob seemed to me to be adjusting the edges of the screen a bit better. But I can’t say for sure what they do, so just twiddle until it looks right.

The bottom knob adjusts brightness or something, you will probably want to leave that one alone.

Good luck adjusting your fuzzy, blurry Philips screen. Don’t electrocute yourself, that would be moronic because you need to be living to be able to enjoy a sharp monitor. Dying is for quitters.

I think he’d even put Maddox to shame, and Maddox knows how to handle MS Paint.