numbersix

announcement heard over the tannoy at Athens airport - 'For your convenience it is forbidden to park outside the terminal building'.

played (and lost) a game of conkers yesterday. most fun, i thoroughly recommend it to anyone over the age of 10.

a definition of infinity - the number of episodes made of little house on the prarie

My other computer is your IIS server.

now there's something i've been wondering about for a while, how to change case with reg expressions, eg in vi :

:%s /./l&/g

will change all characters to lower case, and :

:%s /./u&/g

will change them all to upper

read headline on the BBC news site this morning - Millions wonder at southern eclipse. my first thought was '14 year old science student explains all.'

i think my desk has reached critical mass. i now have 6 pcs either on or under it. well, three pcs (two BSD one windoze), one ultra 5, one (non-working) ipc, and an apple laptop. add to that a two large monitors, a palm pilot, a mobile phone, an ipod, a minidisc player. i fear one more piece of electronic equipment and things could be pushed too far. remember tetsuo? more plants, i think that's the answer. a balance.

interesting interview with Bill Gates a few years ago on the subject of the quality of his software. MS are clearly very un-interested in the quality of their products compared to the amount of money they can make. would you choose to be rich if it meant substantially reducing the quality of your product? not me. seems these days i'm in a minority.

be sure to make room in your diaries for the 7th and 8th of May so you don't miss The Total Sandwich Show. I feel peckish already.

be sure to make room in your diaries for the 7th and 8th of May so you don't miss The Total Sandwich Show. I feel peckish already.

very nice shell scripting trick:

df -k -F ufs -l | while read FILESYSTEM KBYTES USED AVAIL CAPACITY MOUNTED_ON
do
echo $FILESYSTEM
done

mounting an ISO image file in Solaris 8:

# /usr/sbin/lofiadm -a /path/to/iso/file /dev/lofi/1
# mount -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /path/to/mount/point

don't forget to remove the lofi device after you unmount:

# umount /path/to/mount/point
# /usr/sbin/lofiadm -d /dev/lofi/1

# man lofiadm

for more details

FreeBSD equivalent is nicely documented in the handbook.

this song (mp3) has the worst lyrics i have ever heard.

further to the previous post, here's the whole collection

further to the previous post, here's the whole collection

the Melbourne Symphny Orchestra recently accompanied Kiss in concert. ridiculous, but i wish I'd been there.

this is a very funny story about a blimp. 'spect to my bro for the link.

the space hijackers are organising a party on the circle line this evening, so if you find yourself wanting in the bizarre things to do of a friday night dept, get on down.

If you're running Mozilla and want to block ads and flash have a look at this nice piece of CSS (scroll down to 'Mozilla Ad Blocking'). Initial tests prove very positive. Link from /..

just what i need, a duct tape wallet! ta Ben.

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Hermann Goering (or was that G.W. Bush)

Note to self, write a funny sketch based on a miss-typing of 'rabbits' as 'rabbis'. As in "The head of the company has ordered twelve rabbis for his son's 5th birthday party". Maybe too Woody Allen.

Saw my first christmas advert today, September the 18th. It's not even really autumn yet. Feck's sake.

Do you ever have a compelling urge to throw your wallet or keys into the water when you're near a river or lake? Like a little devil on your shoulder battling against your common sense. I was relieved to find out from a friend that I am not the only person who has this. There must be a word or a term for it. Very odd. It's a bit like the (un-suicidal) urge to jump when standing at the top of a tall building, or at the edge of a cliff. This discussion suggests a link to Tourettes Syndrome.

This made me laugh, from Popbitch :

A man goes to the doctor and says,
"Doctor, I'm having trouble with my hearing".
"What are the symptoms?" asks the doctor.
The man replies, "A yellow TV cartoon family".

'ToDo list Tetris' - a term I invented yesterday. I don't think it needs much explanation, and I'm sure most people have played it. I just hope I get a good score this monday morning.

It's a well-known fact that computing devices such as the abacus were invented thousands of years ago. But it's not well known that the first use of a common computer protocol occurred in the Old Testament. This, of course, was when Moses aborted the Egyptians' process with a control-sea.

-- Tom Galloway rec.arts.comics, February 1992

Quoted in Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming.

Seen recently on the back of a toilet door :

"Please ensure that nothing other than paper is flushed down the toilet."

Um, yes.

"Imagine if every thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual
way. This happens all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining" - Ronnie Barker

Nice library of regular expressions : http://regexlib.com/.

"This country is run by idiots. We know that because we sat next to them at school."

The man is a genius, and if you haven't listened to his podgrams then you've missed out.