A large bright oddly shaped galaxy with a dark dust band across it

Astrophotography with Mac OS X - Reprise

So, N years later, how is that going? It was going pretty well, but then there was a pandemic with lock-downs and curfews, which rather restricted access to dark skies.The obvious fix was to obtain access to dark skies, by way of a holiday house in the Wimmera.

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A large bright oddly shaped galaxy with a dark dust band across it

Ada Lovelace Day; Women in technology

Posted by cafuego on Wednesday 25 March 2009. In categories &women  &technology  &ald09

I wasn't going to post anything about women in technology, on account of feeling particularly uninspired today.

However, I came across an article in a dutch newpaper when I did my what's-happening-in-the-world round this morning, featuring a woman who manages a gas production platform in the North Sea.

Suzan de Haan is not in IT, but she definitely has a tech job.

You can read the relatively awful Google translation of the print version or the original page in dutch.

STOP: Hammer time!

Posted by cafuego on Tuesday 17 March 2009. In categories &psmisc  &killall  &pulseaudio  &console-kit-daemon  &useless patch

Do you have one or two services or applications that constantly hang or eat far too much CPU? Would you like to tell them they annoy you in a more forceful way than just kill?
Now you can, with the hammer time patch for the psmisc tools.
This patch will add the --with-a-hammer option to killall, so you can feel vindicated when these annoying processes get terminated with extreme prejudice.

mediawiki with drupal authentication

Posted by cafuego on Monday 9 March 2009. In categories &mediawiki  &drupal

In the past few years I've set up and used MediaWikis for various open source related activities, for instance linux.conf.au 2008 and Linux Users of Victoria. Both of these would be prime targets for wikispam if anyone could anonymously edit pages on them, so edit privileges are limited to registered users only.

linux australia site upgrade

Posted by cafuego on Saturday 7 March 2009. In categories &linux australia

I spent some time this morning migrating the Linux Australia web site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.

This will allow us to use more fancy 3rd party modules to provide extra functionality in the future, for users as well as admins. As an immediate effect, the site should be both somewhat quicker and less likely to overload the VM it runs on, because it now uses memcached to cache content, rather than MySQL.

Up next: tuning the MySQL server.

drupal webforms and recaptcha

Posted by cafuego on Sunday 22 February 2009. In categories &spam  &forms  &captcha  &drupal

One of the great features of Drupal is that you can so easily extend its functionality with modules.

For example, the webform module allows you to gather information from users by creating forms using all available HTML form elements and then store these responses in a database and send an email. All without needing to write any PHP code.

Definitions

Posted by cafuego on Saturday 7 February 2009. In categories &hot  &flies  &more hot  &heat  &melting 
Unpleasant \Un*pleas"ant\, a.
     Not pleasant; not amiable or agreeable; displeasing;
     offensive. -- {Un*pleas"ant*ly}, adv. -- {Un*pleas"ant*ness},
     n.
 
     abhorrent, bad, bitter, disagreeable, dislikable, displeasing,
     distasteful, foul-tasting, ill-flavored, intolerable, mislikable,
     odious, rotten, sour, thankless, ugly, unalluring, unappealing,
     unappetizing, unattractive, uncongenial, undelectable, undelicious,
     undesirable, unengaging, unenjoyable, unhappy, uninviting,
     unlikable, unlovable, unpalatable, unpleasing, unsavory,