Blog Posts in Space

Ivan Robert Marko Milat (born December 27, 1944 in Guildford, New South Wales) is an Australian serial killer, convicted of the murder of seven local and international hitchhikers during the 1980s and 1990s. His crimes became known as the Backpacker murders. Milat is currently serving seven life sentences in New South Wales. To this day, he still proclaims his innocence to all of the charges against him.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Milat

LISA MILAT wants to relax gun laws, and also she does not want the TV program that conflated her political hopes and her relationship with Ivan Milat to attend the Liberty and Democracy Party's campaign launch on Thursday at the Drummoyne Sports Club.

The Liberty and Democracy Party, described as droll, eccentric, quirky and wacky, has chosen Drummoyne because, in line with its personal responsibility and small government policies, including embracing guns, suicide and the privatisation of the ABC, the club allows supporters to opt in or out of smoking, gambling or drinking and provides both "healthy and unhealthy foods".

- http://www.smh.com.au/news/federal-election-2007-news/ sins-of-the-brotherinlaw/2007/11/18/1195321609256.html

Summary: Lisa Milat is married to the brother of Ivan Milat, an infamous serial killer who shot at least 7 people to death. She's running for a party whose major policy is relaxing gun laws.

Interesting.

Conspiracy theories aside, the suicide bit is wacky - I don't know what that's about. Are they merely in favour of legalised euthanasia in cases of extreme suffering, or do they just think that suicide in general is a really really good idea? ("Self-inflicted genocide, dudes! Right on!")

Privatising the ABC would be an unqualified disaster. All our commercial channels suck here; the two publicly-funded TV stations, ABC and SBS, are quite literally the only half-decent free-to-air stations around. What is it with people and selling public assets just because they can?

(Answer: They want to see the ABC die a slow horrible death because they think it's a hive of rabid left-wing extremists. They're completely wrong, of course, but that doesn't stop them.)

Predictably, the rather conservative Liberal Party (who are currently in government) have directed their preferences to the LDP.

Crazy bastards, the lot of them.

Anyways. The Australian Federal Election is tomorrow. With any luck, Lazarus's reign of terror shall be ended... wish us luck!

I like Ubuntu. I'm really getting comfortable with working in Linux; there are less shiny games to distract me (once I uninstalled the several dozen games that come with Gnome), if I have a problem I can usually hack on it until it goes away, and the development tools actually work. Gold. Every couple of days I discover something new that I like about the system.

I only have one gripe. This may sound minor and petty, but considering how easy it is to customise the rest of the system, this is starting to get on my nerves.

If you move the mouse over the task list and scroll the mouse wheel, then the windows switch. This is annoying. Every now and then I'll be scrolling something and my mouse will slip a few pixels down and WHAM where did my window go? Cue a couple of seconds disorientation while I figure out which window I was in and click on it again. Oh, and it completely fubars the task switch order, so if I want to alt-tab back to another window I have to actually pay attention to where the window is in the queue. I do this a lot; it's very common for me to use two windows, one for coding and one for compiling for example; so this really irritates me.

The mouse wheel shouldn't do anything on the task list. That whole rectangle of screen space should be a dead zone as far as the mouse wheel is concerned.

It wouldn't be so bad if it was actually a useful feature, but it's not. At least with my mouse, it's impossible to control properly. In order to get enough traction to actually make the wheel move, I usually have to pull it so far that several wheel movements register all at once, causing windows to go flickering all over the place. Utterly, completely useless.

There's a bug report from early last year for making this behaviour optional. It's listed as a "wishlist" feature, and the upstream bug is listed as an "enhancement". I'm not holding my breath.

This makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. 79% ain't bad. Heck, at the #1 Australian university, that's a Distinction grade. Even better, it's only one percentage point from a High Distinction.

I can't wait until the end of next month, when I'll have time to chip away at that remaining 21%. At the very least, I'm going to earn that extra H.

I love making games. I really do.

I'm currently using (under duress) the Sylow theorems to prove that there are only four groups of order 30. I'd much rather be discussing Sylar theorems...

In the spirit of Explore here, here's another registry hack from yours truly: Cmd here. This hack adds a "Cmd here" option to the context menu of all files. When chosen, it opens a command-line window in the same directory as that file. And it sets the title of the window to be the directory name, because I can. (And because having half a dozen console windows open and not being able to see which is which by looking at the title gets old fast.)

It even works on shortcuts: Right-click on your Firefox icon and choose Cmd here to instantly get a command-line window with the current directory set to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox (or wherever you installed it). Smooth.

To install Cmd here, simply download this .reg file and double-click it to merge the contents into your registry. It's plain-text, so if you're interested to see how it works you can open it up.

Or, you can look here. Check out this monster of a command!

cmd /S /k "for /f "delims=" %%i in ("%1") do @title %~di%~pi"

Admittedly most of it is completely unnecessary; cmd /k will do the job just fine (or even cmd if you don't mind having Microsoft's copyright notice in your face all the time), just without the window title being changed. But hey, I need to make sure my l33t batch file skilz don't go to waste somehow.

This probably only works on reasonably recent Windows versions; it's been tested on XP, and should work on NT 4.0 and 2000 as well. But if you're still using 98, give it up already. ;-)

Why did I make this? Well, I have the Open Command Window Here extension installed, and it works fine. But I kept wanting to open a command window in the same directory as my Explorer window, without having to show the Folders pane or go up a folder. Now I just need to right-click on a file instead of a folder, and away I go.

Total waste of time, since I hardly ever visit Windows anyway these days and will thus hardly ever use this... but I can't resist a spot of registry hacking.