I’ve determined exactly what I want in a laptop (he he he).

It shouldd weigh 2kg or less, it should sport a battery life of 3.5 hours at the very least, its processor should perform at at least the level of a 1.5GHz Banias, it should have a 5400 RPM, or faster, hard drive (in any case no Toshiba, thank you very much, they’re dog slow, even the ones with 16MB cache), the 3D graphics should support pixel and vertex shaders and should rack up at least 7000 on 3D Mark 2001, it should have at least 512MB ram at at least 333MHz DDR and the screen can be anything from 12″ to 15″.

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This weekend, I started playing around with CoolTabs. This really useful little program attaches to the side of your desktop somewhere and is always available when you need to drop a URL, document or directory. In the same way, it’s always there when you need to access the files, applications and URLs that you dropped, but without being obtrusive. See the animated screenshots at the bottom of the CoolTabs page.

Under *ix, there’s BasKet, but that’s not quite ready yet. The fact that CoolTabs attaches unobtrusively to the side of the desktop is one of the things that makes it so useful and BasKet does not do this yet.

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Today is the day that I officially begin writing up my thesis.

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Usually, it costs us 62.24 euro cents per minute to call home to ZA. With the “voordeelnummers” discount of KPN, it costs 43.57 euro cents per minute. Obviously we’ve activated this for the numbers we call often.

This weekend I decided to have a look see at the alternative long distance carriers again. We’d had a bad experience with Tele 2, but that was some time ago. After a bit of googling, I came across bel1601: we now call ZA at 7 (yes SEVEN) euro cents per minute and 5 cents startup per call. Tonight I had the privilege of paying EUR 1.90 for 27 minutes of chatting.

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Why do the clever people at Microsoft persist in labelling their buttons with “Ok” and “Cancel”, even when these words have almost nothing to do with the actions that will be performed when such a button is clicked? Take this dialogue for instance (I got to look at it many times as I was debugging an ITK memory allocation error with 700MB of data in memory):

It would be fantastic if one of the brightsparks up at Redmond suggested: “Hey boys, why don’t we rather label those buttons ‘Terminate’ and ‘Debug’?!” But they probably won’t, as labelling buttons with descriptive verbs is Apple territory.

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It seems that (finally) my ADSL will also be upgraded at the beginning of April. The monthly fee stays the same, but my unlimited 1.5Mbit/s down and 256 Kbit/s up will be changed to an unlimited 2Mbit/s down and 1 Mbit/s up connection. I was quite happy with my download bandwidth, but the upload was getting a bit restrictive.

Now I’ll be able to upload home-made porn much faster to the pay-per-view porn site that I run.

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Did you know that (X)Emacs could do this? Now I just have to find a frikking package for my Debian Stable.

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South Africa is a great country, but sometimes things can be completely crazy. It turns out that even prisoners can vote in the upcoming general election (it’s their constitutional right, apparently), but that I can’t, as I am working in a foreign country. Why are my constitutional rights considered less important? Is it because I don’t steal and pillage in my own country but earn a salary elsewhere?

I’m just wondering.

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Caveat emptor! Due to the diamond-like inheritance structures frequently seen with new-style Python objects (i.e. all objects are derived from the “object” class), the Python method resolution order (MRO) has been slightly adapted.

It used to be left-to-right, depth first. With old-style objects, this almost never caused problems. With new-style, because of the common “object” ancestor, this could cause redundant occurrences (obviously due to the diamond structure). Typically Python, this has been solved in a simple yet effective manner.

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Spammers represent the lowest form of life, as we’ve established. They also seem to think it a good idea to paste meaningless comments on one’s weblog in order to promote some other website. This weekend, I deleted about 800 of these comments from my weblog. I wish these spammers all die from some extremely painful but slow-acting disease and that they also realise exactly why this is happening to them.

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