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On a regular basis I go driving or cycling with a GPS in logging mode. This creates a nice big GPX file of where I was on a second-by-second basis.
Whilst on such travels, I often take photos. My camera timestamps these photos, but doesn’t have a built in GPS.
So, I want something that takes the [...]

So Mint has won the TechCrunch40 award. It’s good to see the world of personal finance software being shaken up again by companies like Mint and Wesabe - it could certainly do with it.
I’ve ranted before (many times, in fact) about how badly business accounting software sucks. I doubt it will surprise anyone if I [...]

It seems like it should be quite the showdown. In the one corner we have one of Northern California’s “Top 100 intellectual property attorneys”, who has been published in CIO magazine advising software companies to build or purchase a portfolio of software patents, who has recently assisted a Global Fortune 100 company in “establishing an [...]

In his latest post, Joel explains how creating great software involves finding, and fixing, the tens of thousands of tiny things that should be better. The unfortunate side effect he describes is familiar to all who know me: “It takes a mindset of constant criticism to find them. You have to reshape your mind until [...]

Jerry Weinberg has a wonderful post on the power of language.
Two snippets:
When someone hears that a dog is attack trained, chances are about one in three that they’ll turn to the dog and command: KILL!
As a joke.
Or just to see what the dog will do.
To protect against this idiotic human behavior, this carelessness with words, [...]

Recently I’ve had to do some heavy-duty maintenance work on a MySQL database that’s still in heavy use, can’t take more than about 30 seconds of downtime, is having serious problems due to a 50 million row table that really needs trimmed down, but is missing the crucial indexes that would allow that to [...]

If anyone is visiting Glasgow at any time soon, I would strongly recommend a visit to Sharmanka. Their website is very 1997, and doesn’t really do them justice, but this is a truly amazing collection of pieces created from old sewing machines, bicycles, and other scrap, with hundreds of little carved figures pulling and pushing [...]

I’ve been beating my head against Apache’s RedirectMatch syntax for the past few days.
I have a Media Wiki installation that was configured to have URLs of the form h**p://site.com/index.php?Article_Name
Following the advice on MetaWiki, I managed to make the URLs be of the form, h**p://site.com/wiki/Article_Name
But now I’m finding it completely impossible to set it up so [...]

One of the other things that’s changed quite dramatically in the past three months is the way in which I deal with my mail. I’ve been through a number of different mail clients and setups in the past, and have never quite found any approach that quite fits my needs. I was a long term [...]

I have over 40 modules on CPAN, and probably average about 1 bug report a week (not including all the discussion that goes on the Class::DBI mailing list). Most of them are really simple to fix without much effort at all (such as typos in the docs), but like most of these things, if I [...]

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