Mise-en-abîme
25 Jan 2011 9:54pm GMT Mise-en-abîme ("placing into infinity or "placing into the abyss", see Wikipedia) has always fascinated me. I suppose it started with the Quaker Oats man (who I'm sure I've mentioned here before): (from http://www.scripophily.com/) Though I remember this image more vividly, and with reds, and I think from my childhood. Notice how he's holding a box with another Quaker Oats man just like him on it, and he's holding a box, ad infinitum. The laughing cow is another food-related one (see...
Rationalisation
5 Nov 2010 4:52pm GMT I'm working my way down to a single hosting company (currently I have a Dreamhost account and a Site5 account; I'm getting rid of the Dreamhost account, not because it's worse, but because I've got this blog on Site5 and it's more complicated to move). I'm also expiring some of my domains (flickrlilli.org.uk among them), closing down various svn front-ends I had setup (I just use github or gitorious in future), and pointing all my DNS entries to one place with one set of contact details. And...
Writing the Clutter cookbook
1 Sep 2010 10:32pm GMT I'm almost exclusively working on the Clutter cookbook at the moment, and I keep meaning to write about what it's like to spend your time writing. I'm not sure what's driving this need to explain myself. I think it's partly because I feel a bit unproductive at times, despite working pretty hard, and I feel like I need to understand why. Perhaps if I explain the pattern of my work week. It goes something like this: Start the week thinking about which part of the Clutter API to write about....
Why upgrading to Fedora 13 was a pain in the backside
15 Jun 2010 9:23am GMT I resist upgrading my work machine as much as possible, as whenever I do, everything I rely on stops working properly. A few notes on my particular pains this time round as I upgraded to Fedora Core (FC) 13: SELinux is an utter pain. And for some reason it's difficult to turn off in FC 13 as the SELinux graphical config tool isn't installed by default. The package you need is policycoreutils-gui, which will enable you to disable SELinux easily. Josh's suggestion is simpler: "edit...
Using wget to mirror a website
12 May 2010 9:29am GMT Occasionally you need to mirror a website (or a directory inside one). If you've only got HTTP access, there are tools like httrack which are pretty good (albeit pretty ugly) at doing this. However, as far as I can tell, you can't use httrack on a password-protected website. curl can probably do this too, and supports authentication, but it wasn't obvious. So I ended up using wget, as it supports mirroring and credentials. But the issue here is that wget plays nice and respects robots.txt;...