Category Archives: Geekery

I’ve changed my main programming font from Bitstream Vera Sans Mono to Inconsolata. The latter is slightly neater and more compact than the former, but I will always retain fond memories of Vera.

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 →

One of my final semester units at UWA is Game Design & Multimedia. The engine used for this course is NeoAxis, which is a sort of franken-framework built in a lab out of parts of opensource code. For instance, it … Continue reading →

A much easier way to install LuaSQL, on Ubuntu at least, is to use aptitude. I wasn’t using aptitude because I didn’t see the driver for PostgreSQL in aptitude. But it’s there if I upgrade to a later version of … Continue reading →

Lua is a nifty little language that I am putting to work in a personal project. Unfortunately it is lacking in some departments — while it has a library distribution framework in LuaRocks, it doesn’t have momentum enough for this … Continue reading →

Club Troppo, a site that I administer, relies on the cat2email plugin to post certain categories to interested users (there are lots). When I upgraded to WP 2.1, a lot of users began to complain that they were getting improperly … Continue reading →

A petty annoyance on Ubuntu is getting all the bits of mailman to talk to each other: the mailman software itself, and in my case Postfix as the MTA and Apache as the host server. Putting aside my complete failure … Continue reading →

The symptoms are like so: bash: ./configure: /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Permission denied Which has nothing whatever to do with the root cause. The actual problem is that pecl downloads files to /tmp and does its work there. If /tmp is … Continue reading →

Do you have a fancy laser mouse like I do? Isn’t it cool? Don’t all your friends admire it? I know mine do! Wondering why it’s acting funny? Cursor moving too fast or too slow? Cast an unfriendly glare at … Continue reading →

The CEAN distribution of Erlang is fairly useful for OS X dwellers like myself, but note that there is a small “gotcha” to be aware of. It doesn’t come with the c() function – ie the compiler – installed! You … Continue reading →