Archive: 2013-02
One does not simply … (Turbolinks edition)
The web is a profoundly broken medium in many ways. The network is unreliable, servers are unreliable, and the human beings who write code for dynamic services are most unreliable of all. Nonetheless, amongst all those problems, one that I’ve never really found significant is the milliseconds taken to load and process a page’s JavaScript and CSS—and if that were an issue, I think my solution would be to optimise and minimise the JavaScript and CSS, not write more of it!
Thesaurus attack!
I received a scam email today that had obviously been put through some kind of automatic synonym replacement filter with results that were both amusing (see below) and pointless (because it was flagged as spam anyway):
One trillion bytes
I see that Google are offering 1 TB of free online storage as a sweetener for people who buy the rather expensive 239 PPI Chromebook Pixel:
Using UPnP IGD for simpler port forwarding
If your router or ADSL modem supports the UPnP Internet Gateway Device protocol (and most of them do), you can forward ports to services on your network much more easily and more flexibly than through the admin interface.
LRUG lightning talk: 1 + 2 = 3
Along with eight other people, I presented a lightning talk at LRUG on Monday night. Twenty slides, twenty seconds each, with automatic advance, a bit like Pecha Kucha or Ignite.
Lubuntu 12.10: problems and solutions
In my ongoing quest for computing minimalism, I’m using the LXDE desktop environment (via Lubuntu) on my new laptop in place of XFCE, which (via Xubuntu) I’d been using for the past few years. I’m happy with it: it’s fast, flexible, and it doesn’t get in the way. It didn’t quite work right out of the box, though. The fixes were all simple, but not so easy to find.
Notes from FOSDEM 2013
Given that FOSDEM has been going for thirteen years, that it’s all about open source development, which I’ve been involved with for about the same length of time, that it’s held in Brussels, where I used to work, that it’s enormous (about 5,000 attendees), and that it costs nothing to attend, it’s perhaps surprising that I’d never been before. In fact, I wasn’t even really aware of it until late last year.