I know that around this time of year, a lot of people are in a giving mood. And it's not just limited to exchanging gifts, but also donating to charity. In addition to the humanitarian causes that many people support during the holiday season, consider helping out these somewhat geekier groups too.
I recently had the opportunity to visit the historic Bletchley Park, home of British codebreaking efforts during the Second World War. Aside from the military historical significance, this mansion surrounded by temporary sheds is also important to the history of computing. It was there that several of the earliest computers were built, including the famous Colossus codebreaker. It was also where Alan Turing was stationed and worked on the new practical applications of his hitherto theoretical discipline of Computer Science (not that they would have called it that at the time).
Bletchley Park is also the site of the National Museum of Computing, and I was able to take some video footage of the fascinating machines they have there.
I just dug up a couple of book reviews (on The Senate of the Roman Republic, Execution, and Economics for Everyone) I wrote on a flight a while ago and forgot to post. The “recent” moniker doesn't really apply anymore, though.
Firefox's cross-platform nature means that it doesn't always fully integrate natively into your desktop. This was particularly apparent to me when using dark-coloured GTK themes under Ubuntu Linux. By default, Firefox looks something like this:
But, with a bit of tweaking to your userChrome.css file, which
lives under ~/.mozilla/firefox/<random-looking-name>.default/chrome/,
we can make it a bit nicer:
I recently remembered that I hadn't yet cleaned up and done an “official” public release of my pdfmunge utility. It's a little Python script that I wrote about a month ago to help me deal with PDFs more effectively on my eBook reader. If you're lucky enough to own a big-screened Kindle DX, you can stop reading now. The rest of us have to deal with reflowing the text of PDFs in order to bring them up to a legible size on tiny screens. Of course, most PDFs don't take kindly to being reflowed, and if they contain any kind of technical diagrams, source code, or images, you're pretty much out of luck. That's where pdfmunge comes in.
I am a software developer in Ontario, Canada, sharing interesting pieces of information about technology, programming, and other subjects. More details can be found in my biographic summary.
In addition to the blog, I also have a library of things I've written, along with books and links written by others that I find useful.
