16 March 2010

Aussie Censorship Error

As a father of three young kids the thought of child porn disgusts me.

If only an Internet filter imposed by the government would be effective against it.

As a professional software engineer I can't help but acknowledge that the proposed filter will be 100% ineffective at stopping child pornography and that hundreds of millions of dollars could be better spent elsewhere.



The proposed censorship by senator Steven Conroy does not propose to stop most material that is unsuitable for children and it does not propose to stop the most common channels of illegal content on the Internet (bit torrents).

Finally any VPN will effectively go straight through the filter so anyone who wishes to can circumvent it using current technology.

15 March 2010

Titanium Reinforced Self

For those of you I know personally, you've probably already seen my impressive X-rays, but for the rest of you I'm announcing that I have recently had cause to become hyper human.

Not content with collar bones constructed of mere bone matter, which I ably demonstrated can break with the aid of a single mountain bike and a spot of bad luck, I opted for hyper human augmentation.



I can wholeheartedly recommend the procedure should you be advised that it's necessary for adequate bone knitting. It completely stopped the disconcerting clunk that occurred in my shoulder on certain movements for the 36 hours prior to surgery.

The only down side was, apart from the usual recovery and healing process, I discovered much to my surprise, morphine is quite disgusting. It certainly blankets almost all pain but at the expense of almost all cognitive ability.

Further, morphine causes the sensation of hanging upside down in a vat of warm butter after having skulled a salmon milkshake. With an automated IV drip, that feeling was only a button press away should I become convinced that it was better than post op pain.

Now I'm back on the bike but my shoulder does not have 100% strength or mobility and my muscles feel wasted and weak all over. So if you happen to pass me on a hill, this is going to be my standing excuse.

09 March 2010

More Cowbell in One Line of Groovy

Sometimes you just need more cowbell.

It is for those times that I wrote this:

groovy -e 's=javax.sound.midi.MidiSystem.synthesizer;s.open();c=s.channels[9];c.noteOn 56,99;Thread.sleep 99;c.noteOff 96;s.close()'

I do often find myself needing more cowbell, such as when invoking a maven comannd which inevitably downloads the internet, like mvn clean. So get this puppy on your PATH and you can do this:

mvn clean && cowbell

...for an audio cue that tells you the internet has been successfully downloaded with a modicum of funk.