Amazon wanted an author bio for their Amazon Connect program which I thought I would give a try. Here’s what they got: Michael Still released his first Open Source project in July 2000, and has been actively developing ever since. He has had a variety of articles published by IBM DeveloperWorks, and once made a…
Author: mikal
Online license plate simulators
Custom number plates in the US are really cheap (less than $100 USD). Some states even give you online simulators for them too: California Virginia California only has a few custom backgrounds, whereas Virginia has over 180! The fight terrorism Virginia plates are pretty odd too.
Gordon’s in Texas
Gordon is in Texas and having a ball, which is good to hear. His picture is quite cool too. He points out some interesting aspects of America in the post as well. Let’s work through them one at a time together: I haven’t stayed in a Best Western yet, but so far I would have…
Color ebook!
By far the most consistent criticism of The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick has been that the sample images need to be in color. I would have to agree with this point, which is why I am delighted that Apress took the time to go back around the production process and produce a version of the…
Exciting news
Today email arrived with the contract for my second book (following on from The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick). This one is a still-secret project hatched with Stewart Smith, and I don’t want to mention the topic in public just yet. There are two reasons for that — there’s always a risk that the whole project…
419 scammer conned into carving wood
Most fantastic 419 reverse scam ever. Scammer conned into carving, among other things, a wooden C64 keyboard. (Via BoingBoing).
Holy crap!
These guys really did deliver 1,000 pizzas to Google’s Mountain View campus. We even ate them. I guess that’s one way of getting publicity…
Did everyone else know this?
Apparently this behaviour has bothered me in the past as well, and I didn’t realize until I googled just now for an answer… I’ve never really thought to hard about this, but it turns out that bash’s return code checking for pipelines is rather dumb. Specifically, bash checks the return code of the last command…
Mental note: Don’t ride unicycle in the snow without chains
Snow chains for your unicycle, so useful it’s indescribable.
Bluetooth GPS data logger
I have a bluetooth GPS now, but to log routes I need to take my Ipaq as well. This bluetooth GPS with a data logger built in looks like a pretty cool alternative to what I do now.