Dave Holland's home page

The random album meme
11:04am, Wednesday 4 March 2009

I don't usually "do" memes but this is more fun than most.

1. Go to "wikipedia." Hit "random" or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to "Random quotations" or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to flickr and click on "explore the last seven days" or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Or cut out the faff and click here!

Gnome and floatbg, feeling dirty
5:19pm, Thursday 26 February 2009

I don't know what the best way is to get floatbg to play nicely with Gnome. But I have a feeling that this:

sprintf(cmd,"gconftool --type string --set
  /desktop/gnome/background/primary_color \"#%04x%04x%04x\"",
  red, green, blue);
system(cmd);

which I uploaded yesterday can only be described as "suboptimal"...

Chocolate mug cake
2:56pm, Friday 13 February 2009

(from here...)

5-MINUTE CHOCOLATE MUG CAKE

4 tbs plain flour
4 tbs sugar
2 tbs cocoa
1 egg
3 tbs milk
3 tbs oil
3 tbs chocolate chips (optional)
some nuts (optional)
Small splash of vanilla

Add dry ingredients to a large coffee mug, and mix well. Add the egg and mix thoroughly. Pour in the milk and oil and mix well.

Add the chocolate chips and nuts (if using) and vanilla, and mix again.

Put your mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes on high. The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don't be alarmed! Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired.

When it says "mix well" it means it. Also works quite well with soya milk.

Killer iPhone app
1:19pm, Thursday 12 February 2009

Use your iPhone as a rotary-dial telephone. Neat. Completely impractical, but amusing.

I still have a rotary 'phone, and even use it occasionally.

Quote of the day
11:07am, Thursday 5 February 2009

I see no motivation not to view the world as a vast ocean of Unicode codepoints and then go sailing those Seven Seas.

-- Jay Carlson, in the Risks Digest

I find that particularly (un)amusing given the general lack of support for Unicode/UTF-8 in ABC software.