Dave's Archives

AI-generated (stable diffusion) ge of "cyclon writing with a pen".

The sporadic blog of David J A Cooper. I write sci-fi, teach software engineering, and occasionally say related (or not related) things.

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  • Redeployment

    Sadly, due to seemingly increasingly frequent downtime at bur.st, I’ve shifted Dave’s Archives over to a paid service – Jumba. In the process, I’ve discovered to my amusement and mild shock that one doesn’t actually need to use the command line anymore in order to set up a website on a Linux machine, even if…

  • Corporate websites

    Trawling through the sites of three hundred or so ICT companies gives you a new perspective of capitalism. It’s a perspective I could have done without. It’s not the graphics-heavy sites, or the menus that pop up in inconvenient places, or the occasional horrifying overuse of flash. It’s the way in which corporate PR people…

  • Just so you know

    I present to you the Frivolous Theorem of Arithmetic: Almost all natural numbers are very, very, very large.

  • Ponderings of sanity

    There are many things to be said about debating in online forums. One, that you learn early on, is that it doesn’t take much effort to find the fruitcakes. It really doesn’t. The people who firmly believe that the World Trade Centre was brought down by explosives, as evidenced by the “indisputable fact” that it…

  • The “S” word

    The circus surrounding the word “sorry” in Australia is, I think, part of the fine legacy of John Howard’s very special brand of politics. By adamantly refusing to say it he only helped to entrench it as a symbol of what was missing from his worldview. The argument of course was that “we” weren’t responsible…

  • In honour of the person who found my blog…

    I present the Kenyan tourism campaign, which due to certain recent events may be seen in a rather unfortunate light.

  • What matters in this election?

    There’s an online poll on the ABC’s 4 Corners website regarding the election. The first question asks “In the last two weeks of the campaign what do you see as the SINGLE most important issue?” You are given a choice between “Economy/Interest rates”, “Climate change”, “Industrial relations”, “Education” and “Health”. Important for whom? Us or…

  • Window focusing

    The user interface of OS X has many things to commend it. Its click-to-focus function is not one of them. OS X, by design apparently, lacks a click-through capability. As far as I can tell there is no way to enable it. This generally means that when you click on a window to select it,…

  • Cron just keeps going and going…

    What happens when you set a cron job to run every fifteen minutes, generating mail, and then leave the computer in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what a cron job is? 266MB and 54500 messages stuck in a mail directory that would never be read. Today it was turned off, and all trace…

  • When statistics attack

    I swear stats is trying to kill me. I’ve redesigned my experiment so that it’s a nice elegant “two-factor repeated measures” flavour. I won’t trouble you with exactly what that means, or exactly what the nine separate hypotheses I’m testing are. What I will trouble you with, for it’s certainly been troubling me, is this:…