The joy of taking stuff apart

The joy of taking stuff apart. At the risk of sounding like a doom and gloom merchant, I do worry about the implicit training opportunities for engineering talent in a world of pre-packaged, solid-state opacity in all things electro-mechanical.

Tech Camp Ireland

Tech Camp Ireland looks interesting. I've signed up and offered to talk about XML or Python or ... something...anything. I think its a great idea.

OpenOffice Indexing with Google Desktop Search

A friend of mine who knows I'm an OpenOffice user pointed me at a Google Desktop Search Plug-in for indexing OpenOffice files. Further evidence of the growth in OpenOffice usage out there.

The Law of the Driver

The Law of the Driver (which has just occurred to me) states:

Over time, the distance between a PC peripheral device and the driver CD that came with it, approaches infinity.

Spam inspection tip

You have run your spam filters and now have a folder full of mails that have been marked as spam. You want to quickly check through them for false positives.

Sort them by sender rather than by date.

If your spam is anything like mine there are lots of duplicated senders and variations on senders name that are much easier to spot when the folder is sorted in name order.

Speeds up the process of looking for false positives considerably.

Documentation, by any other name, would smell...

I refer to machine generated documentation. The kind that replaces rather than supplements, human-generated narrative. Like the pretty - but content-free - guff that is generated from XML Schema authoring tools for example. To be worthy of the name "documentation", there must be more at stake than just a report of what you previously explained to the machine.

Viruses as productivity black holes

I've had an attack of the Win32.Linkbot.U's. Also known as the Poebot-K, the WORM_POEBOT, the Backdoor.Win32.PoeBot.b and a number of other names besides.

I won't bore you with the details, the mess I ended up in, the trouble I had had getting back to normality...

I'll just say this:

TWO DAYS LOST.

Grrrrr.