Dorward

Blog Entries Page 1

Hello, Brave New World

01 July 2020

A couple of years ago I decided to throw out my homebrew CMS, which was more trouble than it was worth, and migrate to something that was a little less troublesome to update (in what is probably a misguided hope that I'll write more content that way). Two years later, the server…

Windows touched my file permissions

09 June 2015

A Windows system made a commit to a branch and then I had to merge it. There were +xs everywhere, and guess who got to clean them up? Perl to the rescue!

A self-indulgent rant about software with a happy ending

29 April 2015

Last night I volunteered to convert a couple of documents to PDF for a friend. ‘It'll be easy’, I thought, ‘it'll only take a few minutes’. The phrase "Ha" comes to mind. Adobe Acrobat can't import DOCX files. This wasn't a huge surprise and I was prepared. One a quick trip to…

CCTV and Google Glass

22 March 2015

Astro Teller is somewhat missing the point: "I'm amazed by how sensitively people responded to some of the privacy issues," Teller explains, expressing frustration about the backlash against Glass in public, given the prevalence of mobile video. "When someone walks into a bar…

Cell or Wifi

04 March 2014

This is inevitable, and a terrible idea. It is based on two major assumptions: Cell connections are slower than Wifi connections Cell connections are unmetered and Wifi connections are not These are both often wrong. My office sits in a cell signal black spot. I'm lucky to get…

I do not want to be part of your ecosystem either

26 February 2014

Yes, this, absolutely. I'm in more-or-less the same boat. My Panasonic is a Blu-Ray player rather than a TV and I hadn't got to the point of discovering that I needed to pay for XBox Gold again (I let it lapse a year or so ago) to get the streaming video app. So, I'm getting…

@font-face is a nice idea but…

24 January 2014

I like the idea of @font-face, but some implementations leave a little to be desired. I was trying to read a webpage on a 3G Internet connection and the font was taking more than a little while to download. Unfortunately, Chrome doesn't render text in a fallback font while it is…

Recall is live

15 September 2013

Half a year ago I accidentally uploaded a hideous redesign and decided to keep it so that I would be motivated to get things fixed. This plan didn't work quite as well as I had hoped. The new CMS went live this afternoon though, so fingers crossed that is is going to run smoothly…