http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog The personal blog of Dr Sam Stainsby, who lives in Brisbane, Australia. Thu, 08 Jul 2010 02:20:40 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=50 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=50#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:17:21 +0000 Sam Stainsby http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=50 Different leader, same dogma. Everyone should think very carefully about this before we hand the government AN INSTANT OFF SWITCH FOR ANY WEBSITE or page on the Internet, and keep such actions secret. Gillard: “The underlying principle, you can’t dispute: why should you treat the internet differently from any form of communications like films and [...]]]> http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?feed=rss2&p=50 0 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=28 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=28#comments Thu, 30 Apr 2009 04:24:26 +0000 Sam Stainsby http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=28
After upgrading my local machines to Ubuntu Jaunty, I found that all of my Plone test environments failed to start. It turns out that Ubuntu packages such a python-imaging, python-xml and python-ldap quietly drop support for python 2.4 in Jaunty. Here is how I got Plone running. We run a mixture of Plone 3.0.x and [...]]]> http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?feed=rss2&p=28 5 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=19 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=19#comments Sun, 19 Oct 2008 10:36:17 +0000 Sam Stainsby http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=19
I was pleasantly surprised to find that Extel’s HSPA offering works out-of-the-box with the current Ubuntu Intrepid beta. The CLI fiddling of the past is no longer needed – Network Manager takes care of everything. After losing ADSL for almost a week, I decided I needed a fallback solution that was better than dialup. Once [...]]]> http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?feed=rss2&p=19 2 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=18 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=18#comments Tue, 20 May 2008 05:49:44 +0000 Sam Stainsby http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=18 Australian of the year, well-known scientist and climate change activist, Tim Flannery is sounding decidedly panicky as he suggests a technical plan to save us from climate change. The plan essentially amounts to terraforming the planet by pumping sulphur into the upper atmosphere in the hope that global dimming will counteract the effects of warming [...]]]> http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?feed=rss2&p=18 6 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=17 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=17#comments Sat, 17 May 2008 12:44:59 +0000 Sam Stainsby http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=17 Should married people that own their homes be checking their daily coffee? Seven years of research by Australian Unity and Deakin University on ‘wellbeing’ have yielded some interesting findings about the Australian population. Somewhat surprising is the revelation that widowers are happier than married people, provided that they already own their home. I can hear [...]]]> http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?feed=rss2&p=17 0 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=16 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=16#comments Thu, 15 May 2008 04:07:21 +0000 Sam Stainsby http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=16 Google ‘bamboo clothing’ (without the quotes) and you will find a bonanza of shops selling clothing made from bamboo. Reading the descriptions on the sites, you would think that this is humankind’s sustainability dream come true. The three top sites (by Googling) in the Australian domain state: “[Our] fabric is made from bamboo plants which [...]]]> http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?feed=rss2&p=16 9 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=15 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=15#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 00:19:34 +0000 Sam Stainsby http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=15
Following on from my initial report about Hardy, I have another grumble: Firefox 3.0 beta 5 comes with Hardy, but has significant performance issues due to some problems with some internal databases. I’m not sure, but I expect 3.0 beta 5 is the default version of Firefox that gets installed with Hardy.  People that did [...]]]> http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?feed=rss2&p=15 6 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=12 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=12#comments Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:17:29 +0000 Sam Stainsby http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=12 Recently, an article in the Courier Mail about same-sex couples being banned from attending a religious school’s formal sparked over a thousand comments. Many of these comments were strongly polarised into two groups: supporting the outspoken Churchie students, and those not. There was a very low percentage of comments that fell into a middle ground. [...]]]> http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?feed=rss2&p=12 1 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=11 http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=11#comments Mon, 28 Apr 2008 03:43:27 +0000 admin http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=11
Well I updated my AMD64 machine to Ubuntu Hardy Heron on the weekend. Unfortunately, three things immediately broke: the Wacom tablet, the Nvidia graphic driver and the RT61-based wireless card. Not the glitzy update I was imagining. I can imagine a newbie being left completely bamboozled by these occurences. The Nvidia driver problem was easily [...]]]> http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?feed=rss2&p=11 4