I find that nothing encourages me to shower more quickly than a refreshingly chilled stream of water descending from the shower head. Yes, enjoying the health benefits of a nice cool shower in the morning I find I’m showering in record time these days. Beautiful Thailand… 
Monthly Archive for May, 2007
Today I’m leaving Rena’s kind hospitality and heading back to stay in an apartment devoid of internet access. Back to the daily commute to and from the cyber universe. Alas, this game must begin again. But only for another three weeks or so…
It took me a while to figure this out, but I couldn’t change the default language for documents in OpenOffice. There are various options, but none of them would stick. I did a little searching on the wonderful FedoraForum.org and I found this thread.
Although the thread mentions FC4, the long and the short of it is this, the default system language is set in /etc/sysconfig/i18n and that is probably set to US. I switched to en_GB, rebooted, and bingo, it works. Beautiful!
This morning I woke up to find an email in my inbox telling me that my volunteer services are no longer required by CouchSurfing.
Apparently I have “fundamental differences in ideology and communication styles”. I’ve asked for clarification on that, fundamentally different from whom. I’m not holding my breath for an answer!
One thing was stated clearly in the email, CouchSurfing is not going open source. Not now, not any time soon. So at last the OpenCouchSurfing campaign has received one answer. That’s real progress I think.
Interesting times…
At least three volunteer developers have resigned from the CouchSurfing Tech Team on account of the new NDA that all volunteers will be required to sign.
The new NDA includes a non-compete clause preventing volunteers from working with any other travel or social networks. It also requires that volunteers transfer their Intellectual Property rights to CouchSurfing International Inc.
I heard that somebody describe it perfectly, they said “it’s not volunteering, it’s slavery”.
I’ve been checking out a bunch of portable and / or wearable input devices. It seems the best one in production right now is the Alpha Grip AG-5 (picture to the right).
I also found a few other interesting products. The Twiddler2 is a wearable mouse and keyboard. The EkaPad can apparently be hand held, but I couldn’t find any decent photos. The DataEgg looks cool as hell, and sounds easy to use, but I couldn’t figure out where all the keys were from the photos.
Then I came across John W. McKown’s designs for a Yet Another One-handed Keyboard. I like John’s open licence for prototyping, that’s very open-source style, I’m tempted to download the instructions and see about making one.
Thanks to the glorious Ultimate Tags Warrior plugin I’ve gone absolutely tagtastic! Not just my own blog either, I’ve taggified the OpenCouchSurfing.org Blog as well. It’s been a day of taggification I tell you!
It’s all part of my blog upgrades after the discovery of K2. The other little addition that I copied from the most excellent MediaWiki (the software that most famously powers Wikipedia) is the new little icons next to all links that open in a new window. So no longer shall I be issuing the new window warnings, now it’s all automatically taken care of thanks to the wonders of CSS3.
For those interested in the technical aspect, the code is thus:
div#current-content a[target ="_blank"] {
background: url(external.png) center right no-repeat;
padding-right: 13px;
}
This also requires the image external.png to be in the same directory as the stylesheet. You can get the image from Wikipedia here.
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