Monthly Archives: December 2009

Finishing unfinished business in the NT

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Jacques Chester

Aboriginal affairs in the NT has always been a mess. It certainly became worse after the 1976 introduction of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) and the replacement of jobs with “sit down money”.
Then came a quarter-decade rule by the CLP, who were hamstrung both by the Act (supported largely by insipid latte-sippers) and [...] Continue reading →

Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, Economics and public policy, Journalism, Politics - Northern Territory | 2 Comments

Musos and Masters

Posted on December 29, 2009 by Jacques Chester

This essay by Zed Shaw resurfaced on Proggit today. Shaw’s essay talks about mastery, as seen from the perspective of martial arts: After reading books on martial arts history for years, and studying everything I can, I started to see … Continue reading →

Posted in Geeky Musings | 2 Comments

Moving a database from Wordpress to Wordpress Mu

Posted on December 16, 2009 by Jacques Chester

Some rough notes, before I forgot what I did. mysqldump –default-character-set=”latin1″ -elt database_name | sed ‘s/wp_/wp_{new blogs id}_/’ > database_name.sql –default-character-set is required because of MySQL’s unrestrained enthusiasm for fucking up encoding by assuming everything is encoded in utf8. Would … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical Notes | 1 Comment

A stray thought about exam questions

Posted on December 15, 2009 by Jacques Chester

Having just finished the final units I need to qualify for an undergraduate degree, the topic of examinations is still fresh in my mind. Generally these fall into two categories: open-book and closed-book; with two major categories of question: multiple-choice and short-answer.
The exact mix of open/closed and MC/SA will vary from professor to professor and [...] Continue reading →

Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, Education, Geeky Musings | Leave a comment

Forgive me, Linode!

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Jacques Chester

Recently I’ve opened a new account with Linode in anticipation of moving a server across to them. So far they’ve been pretty good. My current provider is Slicehost, who are also excellent and whose reliability has been utterly flawless — … Continue reading →

Posted in Geekery | Leave a comment

Dear Woolworths

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Jacques Chester

Stop trying to make me use your crappy “self serve” checkouts.
I noticed you installed them a few months back. A few weeks ago, out of curiousity, I tried it.
It was just that: a curiousity. My experience went as follows:

I was reminded of my first job as a checkout operator, which I utterly detested. It was [...] Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Cross Posted from Club Troppo | Leave a comment