i am proposing a new standard time for NZ - trademe time

watching an auction the other day, i realised how handy it would be to have my system clock set to “trademe time”, so i could count down the seconds to last possible bid.

i’m firmly of the opinion that there is only ever one bid which counts on tardme, and it’s not the highest but the last within a set period; this is a defining feature of online auctions that eludes many folks, but obviously not you because you’re the kind of clever sod who reads crap like this.

this got me wondering:
across new zealand, how many people have digital watches with the seconds set to TRADEME TIME?
could this be our replacement for the national radio pips? after all, clock lady (0800000000) only gives you the minute, not the seconds …

anyway, one day when i have too much time, i’ll knock up a timeScraperBot that pulls the ticking time off trademe, and offer this to the world, my gift to tardme nerds and freaks nationwide, a standard time system.

once there was a lady charged with delivering the time to all of london. shane told me that, it must be true :) […]

this wasn’t in feisty, so i built a copy, and figured it might help someone out to throw it up on googlebrain’s synaptic whatnot

enjoy (hah, i’ve worked with firebird too, i know what this really means …) […]

wow :) […]

got sad jumping
rainbows fluffy clouds
sad quite all for she
quite forgot you were
sad jumping rainbows
quite forgot you quite
i saw it i quite forgot
quite forgot you were
indeed
i think i was alone or
so

Indeed. The above an excerpt from “Got Sad Jumping” by Quaker Jack on the schubert.halo.gen.nz charts where a robotic music industry is blossoming.

I preferred “Said Alice Not The“, by Envey Lorine.
said alice not the
nigeria
i do cats eat me to
send me
said alice not the
nigeria
said alice not the
nigeria
said alice not the
nigeria
said alice not the nigeria
i do cats eat me to
send me
in a sudden death of nigeria
general
said alice not the nigeria
said alice not the nigeria
said alice not the nigeria
said alice not the nigeria
said alice not the
nigeria
said alice not the nigeria
i do cats eat me to send me
in a sudden in a sudden death
of nigeria general
said alice not the nigeria
said alice not the
nigeria
said alice not the
nigeria
said alice not the
nigeria
said […]

because then i could make ironic product claims like “guaranteed to work”

thanks, www.sharepointspace.com […]

i got this (apparently a corrupted repository) tonight, and found that the workarounds posted on the interweb didn’t work for me - because i didn’t have a representations file to dump. (are those workarounds for an older SVN?)

but the fix was relatively simple, and i figured if it saves some other folks from messing around then why not throw the relevant factoids at the giant google brain and see if some stick on under SUBVERSION gives me a CHECKSUM MISMATCH how do i FIX THIS, HELP?

here’s how we check out a second copy of the relevant directory, and swap it in. optionally then copying over any other corrupted files etc. you may need to add salt or sugar to suit your specific situation (ie, in my example, there are no subdirectories blocked by the corrupted file)

PROBLEM: i can’t check in the file ‘lib/objects/blah.ext’ because i get the error:
svn: Checksum mismatch for ‘.svn/text-base/blah.ext’; expected: ‘f8d45250f7df5561635854165862fdd8′, actual: ‘644f85c4befa671150c5c6ec5fad9885′

first i checked in all the files that didn’t complain
cd lib/objects # go where the corrupted file is
grep url .svn/entries # get the svn path of that specific corrupted file’s parent dir
url=”svn+ssh://xris@teacup/svnpath/lib/objects”

cd /tmp # go somewhere we can play
svn co svn+ssh://xris@teacup/svnpath/lib/objects . # check out a fresh copy of that dir
cd - ; cd .. # go back to lib/objects, then up a dir
mv objects /tmp/objects.orig # move the updated files to /tmp/
mv /tmp/objects objects # move the fresh svn repos into your work dir
svn update # just to be sure it […]

slashdot is great, really.  cutting to the heart of the matter, we have:

if there’s a bird flu pandemic, billions of people will work from home
they will then surf the net on youtube
the internet will get slow
= catastrophe!

“If a pandemic were to occur, many companies and organizations would ask their staffs to work from home. The impact of millions of additional people using the Internet from home might require individuals and companies to voluntarily restrain themselves from surfing to high-bandwidth sites, such as YouTube. If people didn’t comply, the government might step in and limit Net usage. The scenario is not far-fetched: last year at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, a group of telecom and government officials conducted a pandemic exercise based on a hypothetical breakout of bird flu in central Europe. The results weren’t pretty.”
From the latter article:
“‘We assumed total absentees of 30% to 60% trying to work from home, which would have overwhelmed the Internet,’ said [one] participant. ‘We did not assume that the backbone would be gone, but that the edge of the network… would be overwhelmed… The conclusion [of imminent collapse] was not absolute, and the situation was not digitally simulated, but the idea of everyone working from home appears untenable,’ [he] said.”
Today’s article was brought to you by magic pills that fix bird flu. $9.99, call me for details. […]

we have been having web2.0 fun, but no not ajax

distributing everything across various apps and then overlocking it back together again … here’s the rough list so far :)

ssh sessions are captured by a .bash_logout that sends an email to a protected wordpress log. calls and daily job notes get sent via email using the same method.
a separate trac instance for each customer records activities per ticket - soon i will integrate email updates for this so that emails can be directed to the correct trac instance and logged on the job
trac also collates our svn checkins and we use the wiki facility to record meetings and other whatnot …
meeting dates and scheduled appointments are fed into DAV-shared icalendar files via thunderbird’s Lightning extension (on linux and windows) and iCal (on OSX).
calendars are shared in a web-accessible and password protected DAV location, and parsed with phpicalendar. this generates another RSS feed for each calendar.

ok by the end of this we have lots of RSS feeds - from trac (several, on our hosted server and on customer machines around the country) and from wordpress (which is being rudely exploited just for its email and magpie facilites in this instance) and phpicalendar (cal->RSS) … and they get bumped into an rss aggregator - lilina - and we do our end of month assessments, billing, job analysis and followups from there.

what a […]

no, ie7 isn’t out yet. microsoft have gone to sleep. meanwhile dean edwards has made an amazing feat of javascript and made internet exploder behave like a standards compliant browser (insofar as it’s possible to do so, which is more than you’d think)

check out IE7 javascript/css hackery at dean.edwards.name/IE7

dean: thanks, a lot! […]

vroom vroom!

CIMG0146.MOV […]