Growing up is optional

The day has arrived, I leave for WE04. My 3 hour flight arrives 1 hour after I leave, going from GMT +12 to GMT + 10. Shortly after I get back to NZ we switch over to daylight saving (GMT + 13). Monday morning will be hard.

My soccer team had a great victory today, beating our 1st team (we’re the 2nd team). A great way to finish the season. Although the team plays next week in the annual ‘poms vs. kiwis’ (actually rest of the world vs. kiwis) match.

Unfortunately, I’ll be in aus at WE04 (woohoo), so wont be playing. Them’s the breaks.

Got some plastic aussie money today too.

Rumour has it that Google are developing a browser. I expect that they have made a bad mistake if they are not.

My money would be on them coming out with some sort of OS or at least some sort of run-anywhere terminal program that hooks into their powerful platform.

For those that want to, and are willing to see google’s ads, the need for relatively ’smart’ desktop is going to diminish. PCs could be replaced with relatively dumb ‘Gboxes’, powered by ‘G’OS that ‘Glink’ into the ‘Gplatform‘. (Now that I think more, isn’t that what the Xbox is trying to do?)

This is all speculation. Time will tell.

UPDATE: The more I think on this the more I see the similarities between where Google and MS are heading. The only major difference appears to be where the funding comes from. Google’s from advertising, MS from licencing, although that could all change.

Just when I am about to rant about how 1024×768 is the new 800×600 Cameron Adams comes out with a fantastic resolution dependent layout. Very cool

I like the simplicity of PHP, but have just found a problem. The problem is the coder’s, not the language’s.

I like to code with all of the errors and notices turned on. It makes it so much easier to debug. I also use a liberal dose of echo and print_r. The one thing that I will now be adding to my things I always do when coding is initialising variables.

I’m sure all of the OO programmers out there would know this from COMP101, but us self-taught generalist learn the hard way.

All those going to WE04 that want to catch up with other make contact here. I don’t know anyone else that’s going so if you want to meetup comment here.

I’m staying at the Mercure on George street. From memory there’s a bar on the corner that’s OK so if anyone is keen for a quite ale (to start with) on Wednesday night let me know.

Also anyone that wants to share a taxi to/from Sydney airport let me know.

UPDATE: I see the ‘event’ on Thursday has been removed from the program. Something will have to be done. Sydney locals: I’m sure you can arrange something.

UPDATE 2: The event is back on. Russ has posted on the WE04 blog to arrange meetups

The New Zealand Meteorological Service have relaunched with a new personalised weather service. You can sign-up (free), log in and customise your forecast to your preferences.

The javascript that drives the customisation even works in Firefox

The only gripe I have is that login is not automatic. UPDATE: I contacted them and autologin is on their development list.

The great discrimination debate rages. I had a dicussion at work yesterday about the term chairman. Apparently that is discriminatry against women. I disagree.

The term chairman has nothing to do with gender. The focus on ‘man’ in chairman as being male is incorrect. It is from the latin manus (of the hand), the same root as manger, manual etc.

On the other hand (ooh that’s bad…) ‘man’ , denoting mankind, although also used for males, is from germanic roots.

For anyone that disagrees: Are we to write instruction womanuals? Are female labourers to be referred to as womanual labourers? Are their bosses womangers?

Get over it.