The Graceful Exits blog

Geeknight #2: "virtual reality and htmls"

jp.stacey 13 April 2007

Organisation and work pressures combined a couple of nights ago to prevent me going to the second Geek Night.

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Twittering on and on

jp.stacey 19 March 2007

This week will be a busy week: between Oxfringe, newly-discovered other fringes, and the ever-present official festival I may not be near email as often as I normally would. To this end I've put a Twitter box in the right-hand column of this blog. It's a nasty piece of Shockwave Flash but it at least means you should be able to find me if you fancy coming to the same events as me.

How to get Dell to provide more Linux-installed machines: people power!

jp.stacey 15 March 2007

I'm not one for passing on memes and crazy petitions, but Sean McGrath has pointed out that Dell are requesting advice on expanding their pre-installed Linux range.

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Oxfringe 2007: more events announced

jp.stacey 13 March 2007

There've been some exciting developments with the upcoming Oxford Fringe: Oxfringe has teamed up with On The Fringe, another local creative group with official festival recognition, so we now have even more events planned.

Throughout next week (March 20--25) there'll be Fringe events every lunchtime (12.30--1.30) in the café at Blackwell's on Broad Street. It's open-mic, so come along and bring something to read out, or just come along to hear the freshest new talent in Oxford.

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All roads lead to home

jp.stacey 8 March 2007

This morning a colleague had hardware problems, and duly googled for 'g200 ubuntu dual head'. Shortly afterwards I did the same, for 'coldfusion introspection "line number"'. We may be on track to produce a zettabyte of data by 2010, but from the looks of it some people are keeping most of it to themselves.

New version of rmrip

jp.stacey 25 February 2007

Following user requests, I’ve uploaded a new version of rmrip which takes a command-line argument specifying your configuration file:

./rmrip.py foo.conf

As the user himself implied, this has the added bonus of making it more crontab-friendly e.g. you can have a crontab entry saying:

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Efficient petitions

jp.stacey 20 February 2007

Those of you who signed it will probably already know, but the government replied to my petition about efficiency ratings. You can read the petition and its signatories too.

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Oxfringe 2007

jp.stacey 14 February 2007

I'm helping to organise a literary night towards the end of March: read on, and sign up for free if you're interested.

In the shadow of the official Oxford Literary Festival lurks… Oxfringe, an independent fringe event for local writers and new talent. We’re hosting a one-night session of stories, poetry and hilarious musical acts (time permitting) on 22nd March '07 in the St Aldate’s Tavern, opposite the main Festival venue of Christ Church.

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CFJavaXML - a component for cached XML transformations

jp.stacey 9 February 2007

Mark Mandel wrote his own version of Coldfusion’s XmlTransform() function, using the underlying Java transform classes. Although one of his annoyances—that XmlTransform() won’t take any parameters—has been solved in CFMX7, XmlTransform() is nonetheless a slow operation, as the transform engine has to be cranked up, the XSL compiled, the transform effected and then everything garbage-collected, each call to the function, each request.

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.php? .cgi? .who-cares?

jp.stacey 8 February 2007

Simon makes the case for disambiguated URLs. He’s right, largely. I would say as a proviso, though, that URLs need to be hackable by the developer as well as by the user.

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