Author Archives: Jacques Chester

An important milestone

My absolutely unedited, unreviewed, unchecked, unimproved, uncorrected, un-followed-up-on-TODOs-yet draft of my dissertation is done! FILE: dissertation.tex Words in text: 9634 Words in headers: 252 Words in float captions: 590 Number of headers: 66 Number of floats: 35 Number of math … Continue reading

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If you rely on refereed material …

Then a lot of stuff that happened just 10-15 years ago didn’t happen at all. Some of my research is done “Just In Time”. I think of something I want to refer to, then I hit up IEEE Xplore and … Continue reading

Posted in History, IT and Internet, Studies | Leave a comment

Progress

According to SLOCCount: SLOC Directory SLOC-by-Language (Sorted) 500 classifier ruby=500 200 tracker ruby=200 101 sql ruby=101 59 publisher php=59 8 https_experiment ruby=8 Totals grouped by language (dominant language first): ruby: 809 (93.20%) php: 59 (6.80%) Total Physical Source Lines of … Continue reading

Posted in Startup, Studies | Leave a comment

Hacked!

Those few of you who visit my blog will have noticed Google’s scary warning popping up when navigating to my site. Until now I’ve hosted my personal blog at Dreamhost for several years. Mostly because it’s been easy to set … Continue reading

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Installing the pg gem on OS X with MacPorts

The pg gem, used to connect ruby programs to the PostgreSQL server, is notoriously difficult to install on OS X. I’m using MacPorts and have PostgreSQL 9 installed. Here’s what I did: jacques$ sudo bash root$ export PATH=/opt/local/lib/postgresql90/bin:${PATH} root$ env … Continue reading

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It’s not every day you get to compete with Damon Kelly and Itte Detenamo

Here in Darwin, we host the biennial sports festival called the Arafura Games. At this year’s games, the weightlifting competition also included the Oceania and South Pacific championships. As a resident of the Northern Territory, I was able to qualify … Continue reading

Posted in Weightlifting | 4 Comments

Fixing blogger imports into Wordpress

I’ve been expanding my Ozblogistan network and have run into an interesting bug. When importing from Google’s blogspot, all post titles and post content wind up with the ‘>’ symbol prepended. This is annoying. If you have database access, the … Continue reading

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More Mongrel2 / OS X notes

Having a bit of spare time this Sunday, I’m continuing to work through the Mongrel2 manual (it’s good, as such things go). There are still places where Mac OS X does not behave according to the expectations of the manual … Continue reading

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Building Mongrel2 on OS X with MacPorts

The documentation says “make all install” — use “make macports install” instead. That’s what I get for not reading the damn makefile first. Update: To build the procer utility mentioned in the Mongrel2 manual, a quick-and-dirty hack is to copy … Continue reading

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“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”

It’s pretty obvious that there were two versions of the script. In the original version of the script, which has no doubt lain in a filing cabinet for several years, there’s the plot involving Gordon Gekko and Forgettable Protagonist. Then, … Continue reading

Posted in Films and TV | Leave a comment