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New Zealand, 1843

Kerry — Thu, 15 May 2008 09:23:00 +0100

Very cool(for me anyway) map of New Zealand from 1843. A couple of noticeable name differences are:

New Ulster, New Munster, and New Leinster are the North, South and Stewart Islands respectively.
Tasman Bay is known as Blind Bay(Tasman Bay of D’Urville).

This comes from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection which has plenty of other cool maps to checkout.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Kerry — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:42:00 +0100

Clay Shirky: Gin, Television, and Social Software

“And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.”

I found it hard to pull just a single quote of this piece out, it’s a quick read that just makes you start thinking. If the calculation of how much effort has gone into Wikipedia is even close, this is an amazing way to look at it.

My consumption to production ratio is so low it’s embarrassing.

Internet Asshattery

Kerry — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:43:00 +0100

Leonard Lin: Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition

iPlayer hacked again

Kerry — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:37:00 +0000

The hack for the iPlayer from last week was closed by the BBC, but only by more obsfucation. Therefore, there is a patch for last weeks script which fixes the problem.

Reading the comments there are a few people out there working on making this better, and it looks like there is a script to generate an RSS feed for the iplayer website.

New London Architecture

Kerry — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:36:00 +0000

Went and saw the Underground: Londons Hidden Architecture at New London Architecture this weekend.

They had a big model of central London which was pretty cool.

Command line Gnome Notification

Kerry — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:38:00 +0000

From the “it’s almost certainly been done better somewhere else” department, here is my script to fire off a Gnome Notification after a shell command finishes.

a python script:

#!/usr/bin/python
from pynotify import *
import sys

def notify(message=""):
    n = Notification("Command Line Completed", message)
    n.show()

init("cli notify")
if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    notify(sys.argv[1])
else:
    notify()

Then just add it to your path and you can append it onto some command:

echo monkey && mynotify.py "some message"

You then get a notification like so:

BBC iPlayer downloads for Linux

Kerry — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 08:59:00 +0000

BBC’s iPlayer is good, but this makes it better.

Found via

Thinking about scalable systems

Kerry — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 10:38:00 +0100

Joe Armstrong: Scalable fault-tolerant upgradable systems, part 1.

A system that is fault-tolerant can easily be made scalable and easily made so that we can do in-service upgrade.

Part 1, cool. Looking forward to the rest of this.

Eponymous Laws of Software

Kerry — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 07:36:00 +0100

19 Eponymous Laws Of Software Development

The Web Services Peninsula

Kerry — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:01:00 +0100

Elliotte Rusty Harold: North and South

WS-* is North Korea and REST is South Korea. While REST will go on to become an economic powerhouse with steadily increasing standards of living for all its citizens, WS-* is doomed to sixty+ years of starvation, poverty, tyranny, and defections until it eventually collapses from its own fundamental inadequacies and is absorbed into the more sensible policies of its neighbor to the South.