21 May 2005
The Sydney Morning Herald has had a series of rather unfortunate snippets published of late. I found them immensely amusing (perhaps I’m just childish), and thought I’d share two.
From the article Six stranded on Luna Park ride, the closing paragraph reads thus:
“That accident was believed to have been caused by a cap which blew off a passenger’s head and caught in the Mad Mouse’s car wheels.”
Just for the record, no-one was injured in this incident – It’s just a crap sentence.
And then there was this headline (probably by now ubiquitous due to syndicated news services – this one was from AP) — “Probe ordered into Saddam underwear photos.” I’ll leave the misreading of this to the reader… again, maybe I’m just childish!
UPDATE: The Saddam headline didn’t make it to the next edition’s print, but no such qualms were had about printing the last paragraph of the Luna Park article… ahhh, journalists.
21 May 2005
Thought I’d just praise Bigpond for a moment, seeing it doesn’t happen very often.
I just downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu using wget. The numbers speak for themselves:
18:50:56 (1.09 MB/s) – `ubuntu-5.04-install-i386.iso’ saved [615,307,264/615,307,264]
I was also browsing at normal speed, whilst streaming 96kbps audio and watching Flash video. Cool for $AU60 a month, hey?
21 May 2005
For a hedgehog.
No, really – it’s like Warty, only beautiful. It feels like a far more mature system, and everything just works. They’ve switched it to X.org from the old X server, and the font rendering shows it. Applications which previously clawed your eyes out when upgrades were attempted now work flawlessly (most notably Firefox and Liferea, for myself). Audio works a charm, with even XMMS now playing nice.
It’s good.
Mostly because of the interfaces.
In related news, I downloaded that ISO and didn’t use it – no big deal, seeing as I grabbed it from files.bigpond.com (doesn’t count towards my quota) and it went quickly – because it’s possible to simply edit the sources.list file and use Synaptic to update everything!
Basically change all references from “warty” to “hoary” in your sources.list file ( /etc/apt/sources.list ) and run Synaptic. Took me about an hour and a half from editing the sources.list file to a completed upgrade, no breakages.
Good work, Ubuntu!
20 May 2005
“How do you want to approach this revision?”
“From a distance… with a large, pointy stick.”
– Andrew responds to a teacher’s suggestion that revision be undertaken.
19 May 2005
I’m starting to get a tad sick of my trusty 9 year-old ViewSonic 15GS-3 CRT monitor, with my eyes suffering somewhat due to the inevitable compromise between resolution (screen real estate) and refresh rate (headache-inducing flicker).
It puts up an admirable performance for a 15″ monitor (I’d say probably the best I’ve ever used), and manages 1280*1024 at 60Hz just fine – but a 15″ screen really isn’t meant to be run at that kind of resolution, and 60Hz is just TOO low (I can’t generally pick flicker above 85Hz, but anything below and it’s unpleasant) a refresh rate to use permanently.
The problem with screen resolutions is that it’s impossible to ever go DOWN a notch – I used to run at 1024, then shifted to 1152 for ages, and have recently switched to 1280 to make life easier. All this on the same monitor! So I’m wishing I had a bigger, unflickery screen right about now.
Does anyone have recommendations for a 17″ LCD? Looking for something which does 1280*1024 and has DVI (VGA would be cool, too) input. The response time isn’t particularly important as I don’t do video or games…