Alec the Geek

The British rail system has deployed a web based interactive robot, called Lisa, to help people with rail travel enquiries. Much innocent fun can be had if you are not busy. For example…

You asked: Are you a train spotter?
Lisa says: I’m not a Train Spotter. But I do have some guidelines for railway enthusiasts, if you’d like to take a look?

You asked: Does it include how to avoid dressing in an anorak?

Lisa says: I’m afraid my specialty is travelling by train and I cannot answer questions about clothing.

You asked: But I need to meet girls and want help on how to dress

Lisa says: If you let the Train Operating Company know you’ll need assistance in advance (ideally, 24 hours before), they can usually arrange for staff to meet you at your departure station, accompany you to the train and see you safely on board.

Police get extra powers for torch relay - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Police in Canberra have been given extra powers to search people and seize items during the Olympic torch relay next week. The ACT Government has made declarations under major events security laws, designed to prevent dangerous items from being brought into the torch relay area. Police will have greater authority to search people and to seize items, including eggs,…

When we will get warnings on the egg cartons and the public education program?

(I don’t usually do politics here unless there is a technology connection, but I couldn’t resist this.)

I’ve just bitten the bullet and upgraded from MS Office 2004 (for the Mac) to Office 2008. I actually prefer NeoOffice and Thunderbird, but we use Exchange for our corporate email and I am desperate for better calendar and address book support.

I can now check colleagues availability when making appointments, however I can’t view shared calendars.

At the moment it keeps asking for access to my keychain every 10 mins and the normal fix does not work

So far I can’t access our global address book either.

I wish we used Zimbra!

Enjoy

After a couple of weeks with Leopard here are my top reasons to switch

• WiFi management just works! I had to keep choosing my favourite SSID every time my Macbook woke up under Tiger. Worth the price of entry alone
• It’s faster
• Finder is slightly better at displaying information
• I think I like spaces…, but still trying to get used to that
• Stacks is useful
• erhh.. that’s it for me. I don’t use AppleMail,iCal, iChat etc etc.

BBC NEWS | Business | Yahoo to put adverts in PDF files

Yahoo to put adverts in PDF files

It’s not clear from this article how it would work, but my first reaction is that I don’t want my documents to have adverts in them and I should consider publishing my documents in PostScript instead of PDF.

Update: A little research on the Yahoo web site reveals that PDF publishers have to opt-in, so that’s cool (as much as targeting advertising can be).

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Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?

the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change

Poul-Henning Kamp’s original article that makes a persuasive case that’s it often best to shut the hell up and let people get on with their job.

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When I was browsing in a local bookshop today I saw the Linux mascot, Tux, now appearing on the front of Australian Women’s’ Weekly cookery books.

Wow! the geeks have become domesticated.

I wonder if they remembered to acknowledge Larry’s copyright?

Here is a link to their website

Well the proposal count for OSDC 07 seems to be at 99 (their web site is not very secure!)

Assuming eight papers a day (which is probably too many) in three streams plus keynotes they would appear to have more papers than they need — which is very good news. Perhaps we will get a fourth stream?

I have not looked at how many of the 99 are tutorials, which take place on a fourth day so my numbers are slightly askew.

Wonder if I will be accepted…

Ever since I migrated to WordPress (about 12 months now) I’ve been reviewing spam comments to make sure there were no false positives. Out of over 3,200 pieces of spam there were three flagged in error by Askimet and none at all in the last few months.

So from now on I am no longer going to check the spam queue. If your post does not show up straight away then you will have to email me (it’s easy to find my address) to get me to check the spam queue for your comment.

This seems to be a really cool feature (thanks to IMified) , but it seems like a total waste for time

After attending Amanda’s excellent tutorial on CSS it appears that I have been completlty wrong in setting up my links to open in an external page, like this one.

Aplogies to anyone who has found this really annoying. I will do better in the future and hopefully I’ll go back and fix old posts as I make updates.

I just read Scott’s new blog entry, luckily Wikipedia came to my rescue and explained what ‘Drinking the Kool-Aid‘ means

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I just notice that Mozilla Thunderbird’s new calendar extension, Lightning has been released (well 0.3 anyway). As a productivity pr0n additct I am looking forward to kicking the tyres. However first I will have to build it for my 64 bit platform, but it’s too far down my list of next actions

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Thanks Nick (The Perl Foundation)
Nick Ing-Simmons, who amongst othe things created Perl/Tk, died this week. It’s always a little sad when someone in your community dies. When a geek goes it aways seems a greater shock to me because most of us have not yet hit the third age. I used Perl/Tk on many occasions and it was incredbly useful

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At the risk of sounding like a 70 year old COBOL programmer I just want to say the GUI based tools are an abomination. Too much goes on you can’t see!

The free (as in beer) XML editor from XMLMind is jolly useful for editing Openmake TGT files.

A South African man is found guilty of hacking to death an interior designer who was unimpressed with his home. [BBC World News]

If you ignore the fact that someone tragically died, this is bloody funny!

TheyWorkForYou.com: Is your MP working for you in Parliament?

Wow! Now this could empower democracy — worth a look

Well — I need somewhere to track my C# (plus .NET) and Java (and J2EE) adventures. So maybe this is it.