Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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The Adventures of Captain Hatteras by Jules Verne
There’s a passage towards the end of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, the first official Voyage Extraordinaire, that is so fantastic I really have to share it. The captain and his few remaining crew members are making their final approach to the north pole through a terrible storm, in a tiny boat fashioned from the remains of a shipwreck… (more…)
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JavaScript and UTF-8 in Eclipse
For some reason the usually excellent Eclipse IDE sets the default encoding of JavaScript files to ISO-8859-1, which is pretty much wrong and can be problematic. The correct path to configuring things so that they are right is rather non-obvious; Google failed me in the quest to fix things this time. It’s a small but irritating problem, and apparently I’m not alone in seeking an answer, so I’m posting my solution up here for future reference and for any other frustrated Eclipse JavaScripters that might be out there. (more…)
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Cussedness Theme 1.0.1
As you probably haven’t noticed, because it looks almost the same as the old version, I’ve updated my Wordpress theme. It may just possibly be of interest to someone who wants to build their own theme but can’t be bothered to code it from scratch, as it has a simplified layout, minimal markup and styles, and should therefore be very easy to modify and add to. If you do make something from it, let me know, I’d be interested to see how it turns out.
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Four Generations of Ryans
It turns out that Wilfred is the first Ryan great-grandson with the Ryan surname, meaning that he’s the first-born son of the first-born son of my granddad’s first-born son. If my granddad was king of somewhere that practised agnatic primogeniture, this picture would show the direct line of inheritance. Wilf isn’t the first great-grandchild for my grandparents, though, not by a decade at least, so they were politely interested in him, no more. My dad’s family is rather large, so I imagine that the novelty wore off ages ago; he’s probably about the ninetieth descendent, I don’t know exactly.
One thing I have noticed from this photo is that all the Ryan men have wonky eyes, but whilst Wilf, me and my dad have our right eyes slightly higher than our left, my granddad seems to be the other way round. I really didn’t expect eye-alignment to be genetic, and assumed that my eyes were off-plumb because I got dropped on my head as a baby or something (a theory that also explains several other things), but apparently it’s a heritable characteristic. Gosh.
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1080p Mac Mini Mayhem
I have caved in: after over three years of voluntary exile from normality, I have dragged myself back up to the technological heights of the twentieth century, and bought myself a television. Indeed, I’ve gone further that that, and splashed out on a shiny, 32″ Full-HD LCD job, because I think if you’re going to do something, you may as well buy nice gadgets with which to do it. Naturally, the universe being the contrary and complicated place that it is, my new telly didn’t actually work as desired, and I was required to perform varied rituals in order to appease the gods of consumer electronics so that it would play nicely with my Mac mini. For the sake of other lost souls like myself, those doomed to a lifetime making things that should Just Work actually work, I record below the various problems encountered and the solutions I used to overcome them. (more…)
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Securing MAMP
MAMP is a really easy way of running recent versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL on your Mac for development purposes, something that can take quite a lot of effort if you attempt to set things up on your own. There is one major drawback, however: the default install is really rather insecure, with Apache serving pages up to all and sundry, including the configuration sections of the install, meaning that anyone who happens to spot that port 80 is open can do things like drop databases at will, which would be somewhat irritating to say the least. This tutorial from Eric Keil covers some techniques for securing everything, but I went about it a little differently. (more…)
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Facing The Flag by Jules Verne
The latest novel in my now slightly obsessive quest to read as much Jules Verne as possible, Facing The Flag is a typical Voyage Extraordinaire. We encounter high-tech weaponry and transport, nefarious pirates bent on mayhem and destruction, and a hyper-intelligent eccentric inventor, all seen through the eyes of a slightly dopey French narrator. It even has an island submarine base hidden within the empty magma chamber of an extinct volcano, the third such example I have encountered in the Voyages so far. The story is well paced and culminates in a satisfying conclusion: classic Verne, and thoroughly enjoyable. (more…)
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The Adventures of a Special Correspondent by Jules Verne
This anonymous translation of Claudius Bombarnac, entitled The Aventures of a Special Correspondent may not, I suspect, be the most faithful rendering of Verne’s original text. The eponymous narrator travels from Tbilisi to “Pekin” via the Trans Caspian Railway and assorted other rail and boat connections in search of a story to send back to his newspaper in Paris, and as far as the basic story is concerned, the novel is entertaining and enjoyable. (more…)
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Automatically launch eMusic .emp files from Safari
I use eMusic’s download manager to handle album downloads from that website, and on one of my computers I haven’t bothered to install Firefox, and instead use Safari. Safari 3.x on OS X Leopard (10.5.x) restricts automatic opening of files downloaded from the internet, which is a bit annoying if you want an application to do its thing without a lot of irritating clicking about. Automatic opening is restricted to “safe” files by default, a setting that can be overridden in Safari preferences, although removing this restriction seems to simply prevent any files from opening automatically at all, which is even more useless. There is a way to work around Safari’s overbearing nannying, though. (more…)
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Master Of The World by Jules Verne
Like Lighthouse at the End of the World, Master of the World was one of Verne’s last works; it was published not long before his death in 1905. Unlike Lighthouse, it’s not very good. I don’t know any of the details regarding the writing of this story, or about the English translation available on Project Gutenberg, but Verne clearly wasn’t testing his abilities with this Voyage Extraordinaire. A sequel to Robur the Conqueror, it is flimsier that that already lighthearted work, with little to recommend it beyond a sketch of a fantastical vehicle, named the Terror, capable of high-speed travel on land, on and under water, and in the air.
