All posts by bigpresh

Uncategorized

Geograph hits one million photos

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Paul Dixon writes that the Geograph project has now reached one million photographs!

A fantastic achievement for the project, congratulations!

In case you’ve not seen it, the Geograph British Isles project aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland.

There are some fantastic photographs on there, it’s well worth a look, and it’s easy to contribute your own photos too (see some by me).
Continue reading Geograph hits one million photos →

Linux

yaourt for Arch Linux

Found yaourt this evening – excellent tool for Arch Linux users, a wrapper around pacman (the standard Arch package manager) which also supports finding packages in the AUR (Arch User Repository) and installing from there.

Excellent tool.

Linux, Perl, Programming

Playing with Ohloh

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I’ve been having a quick play with Ohloh, and it seems pretty good. It’s “a website which provides a web services suite and online community platform that aims to map the landscape of open source software development.”

I figured it was worth getting my Perl modules listed, if only to boost the amount of Perl code listed there – I don’t think enough people sing Perl’s praises as they’re busy doing real work with it, so it appears to some to be going “the way of the dinosaurs”.

Ohloh seems impressive so far, with features to hook in to your source control system (Subversion in my case) to see contributors, change history etc. The only drawback is that it does not like re-organisation of the repo, and I re-organised mine to get all the code I’m willing to publically expose under a certain path in the repo, so I can point svnserve at that path, whilst some other code sits at another level. This means that, as far as Ohloh can see, there’s only ever been one commit to my projects. It’s a known problem (according to this forum post).

So far I’ve added SMS::AQL and HTML::Table::FromDatabase – other projects to follow.

Linux

xmkmf missing – install imake

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I was installing a fairly old piece of software on Arch Linux, and it was failing because I didn’t have xmkmf installed. After some longer Googling than would be expected, I found that xmkmf is part of imake (which was distributed with XFree86, but is no longer used by XOrg).

So, for the benefit of anyone Googling for, say, “xmkmf: command not found” on an Arch Linux system, install the imake package (pacman -S imake) and all will be well.

Linux, reviews

KDE 4.1 – very nice

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KDE 4.1 was released today, and is already in Arch Linux‘s repos, so I decided to update and give it a try.

First impressions – pretty slick indeed, especially after turning on proper compositing support for various funky effects including see-thru windows, “wobbly windows” etc – lots of which is fairly pointless but very nice at the same time :)

So far it seems very polished, it looks like the KDE team have put in a whole lot of work here!

Screenshots/videos may follow, if I get a chance (although I’m sure there’s enough out there already).

Even with the extra eye-candy enabled, the system feels at least as responsive as it did under KDE 3.5, and I think even more responsive actually.

Humour, Uncategorized

Economic Models and Business Strategies explained with Cows

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Shamelessly robbed from Metcountymounty’s post on Sheepdogs & Wolves (but also seen several times on other sites… yes, it’s an old one :) )

I think Britain most definately fits under the Socialism description here.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes one of them and gives it to your work-shy neighbour.
They laugh in your face.
Continue reading Economic Models and Business Strategies explained with Cows →