Graceful Exits

I don’t know how well this reflects on me.
As I was wondering idly when the delivery would arrive containing OGN5’s book lottery giveaways (thanks again, Friends of ED!) I started making a note of calendar dates for different bits of OGN organisation. I was working with Trac milestones at the time, so they were all [...]

FixMyStreet is getting some great press, this time a Guardian article comparing it favourably to Facebook. We were lucky to have Tom Steinberg at the fourth Oxford Geek Night, and his plucky lieutenant Matthew Somerville (I may get in trouble for that) back at the third OGN. They’re both fascinating speakers (and I still turn [...]

The fifth Oxford Geek Night is shaping up to be a really great night. Following on from our keynote confirmations, we’ve now got a full house of microslotters.
Not only that, but we’ve also sorted our extra sponsorship. Joining the ever-indulgent, ever-understanding Torchbox are Google and Friends of ED. In return for sponsoring us, Google have [...]

Flickr is working with the Library of Congress on new project The Commons. Currently there are around three thousand photographs up there from two collections, and according to the Commons homepage they’re all copyright-free. More information in the relevant post on the Flickr blog.
This is wonderful news, especially because the collection is being released through [...]

Carbon rationing action groups (CRAGs) are groups of people who agree to measure their carbon (dioxide) use. They also agree on an upper limit for the year, and a per-tonne levy for anyone exceeding it. As the twelve months pass them by, they meet, chat, swap tips and advice, and generally try to meet the [...]

Simon Willison mentioned a while back a link to help on how to undo a svn commit in subversion (more a kind of internal branching than an actual undo, of course: but that’s subversion). That’s all very well, but how about undoing the log message for a particular commit?
Say you have a codebase that only [...]

Now that Gutsy Gibbon is fairly mature, I’ve managed to upgrade my machine to it and am now running the 2.6.22-14-386 kernel. More importantly, with a minimum of fuss I now have video, wireless and sound!
Long-term readers of Graceful Exits might remember that the too-new hardware in my Dell Precision M4300 needed some rather nasty [...]

Steve Yegge on code’s worst enemy:
… This brings us to the second obviously-bad thing that can go wrong with code bases: copy and paste. It doesn’t take very long for programmers to learn this lesson the hard way. It’s not so much a rule you have to memorize as a scar you’re going to get [...]

The fifth Oxford Geek Night is on February 6, 2008. We’ve got sponsorship from Torchbox and Google—thanks for that, chaps—and two really interesting keynote speakers booked: Rufus Pollock and Denise Wilton.

Rufus is an executive director of the Open Knowledge Foundation and economics research fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He’ll be talking about promoting the opening [...]