Yesterday I wrote about my initial impressions of Ubuntu 9.04, “Jaunty Jackalope” – but the bulk of the post ended up being about the decision to remove the “Log Out” and “Shut Down” options from the System menu. In the …
Read moreThoughts on Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope
Having upgraded a few machines to Ubuntu 9.04 a few days ago, here are my thoughts on this latest version: Things I Love The speed of the system – both in booting and in general use – seems to be …
Read moreGot a band? Had some hits? Then bloody well play them!
I went to see The Cure on Thursday at the 02 Arena in London (one of my least favourite venues, but that’s another story). It was a sold-out gig, with the stage at one end, which according to that Wikipedia …
Read moreStill the madness continues
One of my earliest posts was a jibe at the crazy notion of selling numerous different versions of Vista. It seems that the madness is set to continue with Windows 7, as Microsoft have confirmed that there will be six …
Read moreWhy is there no AND for regular expressions?
Here’s a Javascript regular expression which will match a string which contains at least one lower case letter: /[a-z]/ And another which will match a string with at least one upper case character: /[A-Z]/ I can even stick these together …
Read moreTransparently stupid
For a long time now it’s been possible to specify CSS colours as RGB triplets, using hexadecimal, decimal, or percentage notation. These all represent the colour white: #ffffff #fff rgb(255, 255, 255) rgb(100%, 100%, 100%) Lots of flexibility – perhaps …
Read moreHmm… that backup seems to be running slowly
Many years ago one of my colleagues purchased a Dell server complete with an expensive SCSI-based tape backup system. About a year ago we began to have recurring problems with the tapes, and the drive itself started to get very …
Read moreApple Newton 2100 (Pt. II)
The Newton 2100 had so many great features that it’s impossible to list them all in a simple blog post. Given that this is one of a series of posts about pen-based computers and PDAs, however, I’ll focus on a …
Read moreApple Newton 2100 (Pt. I)
Fast forward to 1997. I’d finished university and had a real job. It was also one of those rare periods when I had no significant financial burdens. With no major outgoings, and fresh from the penny-pinching days of studenthood, I …
Read moreApple Newton 100 (Pt. III)
For the price I paid, the MP100 was a great device. But looking at it from a more independent (i.e. less money conscious) viewpoint, it was clear that there were several shortcomings with it: The �40, fell-off-the-back-of-an-apple-cart, model lacked any …
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