The overly long title has most of the details. I’ve created a print friendly redirect Greasemonkey script for both Developer.com and Scientific American.com. Hope they are useful.

Azumi 2: Death or Love is a pretty standard Japanese sword fighting film with impressive wirework, well choreographed action scenes, very little plot and a pretty lead, in this case Aya Ueto. It follows on directly from the first film, between the continuation of the plot, a number of the same characters and, aside from a few small flashbacks, it makes no attempt to welcome new viewers. Although as a sequel why should it? Read on →

One of my favourite Windows applications is WinDirStat, a great little utility that breaks down disk usage by file and folder and shows it using a treemap. The tree map is possibly the best way of displaying this kind of information, in addition to the obvious “block size is relative to the file size” you also get colour coded file types (you soon learn to spot clusters of mp3s…) and easy right click access to most of the functionality you’ll want to use while investigating disk hogs. Read on →

One of the annoyances of my (working) life is the build up of mail in obscurely named mailboxes on different machines. While the typical aim is to have all hosts sending their local mail to a central point (for mass filtering and deleting^Wlogging) you - firstly - have to actually implement this change (normally on machines with lots of different mailservers - yum!) and then add a check to ensure that it never gets broken in the future. Read on →

What can I say, one of the most intriguing ideas for a ‘vs’ film. Two of the best alien menaces from the 80s. A big budget. A cast of complete unknowns. A really shite film. While the film needed a human element to get the audience involved the director took it too far and ended up with a human / Predator buddy cop feel by the end of the film. The action scenes were dull, no where near the standard of Aliens and mainstream nature of the two namesakes means a lot of the shock and surprise was lost even before this heavy handed attempt to scare the audience. Read on →

The hit: I recently got sent away to the 2006 Exim Course in Cambridge. The main presenter, Dr Philip Hazel, who’s also the author of Exim, was a good presenter. The material seemed well rehearsed, nicely paced and covered a fair amount of ground over the three days - he also knows pretty much everything about Exim so the audience questions were always quickly answered. There were also two guest speakers, who had an hour each. Read on →

Last year I was quite interested in the Description of a Project (DOAP) project. I added DOAP files to all my Sourceforge projects, wrote some little util scripts, contributed DOAP files to a couple of the Free software projects I use that had asked for them… and then promptly forgot all about it. A couple of recent posts about the Python Package index and DOAP interested me enough to dig out one of my half-finished scripts, it’s the (very messy) first pass of a CPAN META. Read on →

“You do not secure the liberty of our country and value of our democracy by undermining them. That’s the road to hell. – Lord Phillips of Sudbury (source: BBC News - “Police decryption powers ‘flawed’“ I don’t normally post on politics or law because I’m not an expert and, to be honest (judging by my apache logs), they’re only interesting to a small fraction of the people that stop by here. Read on →

Although I’ve been remarkably slack and only managed to make it to a couple of the meetings, the London Ruby User Group Presentation Archive allows me (and you…) to have a peek at what’s been presented. The highlight of the current talks, in my opinion, is “Ruby on Rails from the other side of the tracks” by Tom Armitage - if you do any kind of website work it’s worth a couple of minutes of your time. Read on →

Microsummaries are regularly-updated succinct summaries of web pages. They are compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and are regularly updated as new information becomes available. – Microsummaries - Mozilla Wiki I’ve spent a little while playing with them now and while I like them, smarter page titles are nice, they have their limits. Firstly, they are not the easiest things to install. Read on →