Archive for March, 2009
AND & OR, a cautionary tale
The inspiration for this post is a situation where having the string “OR” or “AND” as an input to a piece of SAS Macro code breaking a program that I had written. Here is a simplified example of what I was doing: %macro test; %let doms=GE GT NE LT LE AND OR; %let lv_count=1; %do %while [...]
Programming
No autofocus?
I recently treated myself to a Sigma 18-125mm f/3.8-5.6 DC HSM zoom lens for my Pentax K10D. There was a wait for the item to appear and I then found that the lens’ autofocus facility wasn’t compatible with the body. Standard wisdom would have it that I sent the thing back and ask for a [...]
Photographic EquipmentNavigation shortcuts
I may have been slow off the mark on this but I recently discovered keyboard equivalents to browser and forward buttons. They are: Alt+[Let Arrow] for back and Alt+[Right Arrow] for forward. I may have first discovered their existence in Firefox but they seem to be more widely available than that with the same trickery [...]
Investigating Textpattern
With the profusion of Content Management Systems out there, open source and otherwise, my curiosity has been aroused for a while now. In fact, Automattic’s aspirations for WordPress (the engine powering this blog) now seem to go beyond blogging and include wider CMS-style usage. Some may even have put the thing to those kinds of uses [...]
Suffering from neglect?
There have been several recorded instances of Google acquiring something and then not developing it to its full potential. FeedBurner is yet another acquisition where this sort of thing has been suspected. Changeovers by monolithic edict and lack of responsiveness from support fora are the sorts of things that breed resentment in some that share [...]
A performance improvement?
I have just upgraded to VirtualBox 2.1.4 and noticed something surprising: a performance improvement. I didn’t notice this with a Windows 200 guest but a Windows XP one now ran freely when it felt like it was immersed in treacle before. Since I had some photos to process for the hillwalking blog, that was a [...]