Danns.co.uk

It's now possible to create your own account for Danns.co.uk, which will allow you to be notified when I post new content. Just click "Log In" on the left-hand menu, then click "Create new Account" at the top of the page. Once you're created your account and logged in, click on "My notification settings" at the top of your account page, and tweak as you see fit.

Update: Of course you can always subscribe to the site's RSS feeds, which will allow you to be more selective in the notifications you receive.

Continuing the story of the broken car door: we have been wondering whether it might have just been the wind that caused the window to smash, maybe in combination with a twig or something. There were strong winds around that time, and a few months back the windscreen smashed for no apparent reason when I was driving on the motorway. My poor car is getting old. Read more…

The above verse reads: "And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose." (ESV) Well, I wish that meant that nothing ever goes wrong for Christians, but unfortunately it's not that simple :) A couple of things have gone wrong so far today. Read more…

So I'm in Chicago at the moment. For those that aren't aware, I live in Birmingham, in the West Midlands of the UK, so Chicago is a pretty big leap for me. It's my first time in the USA. To be honest, I've always felt a resistance to visiting the US. Everyone goes to the US. Especially anyone that has anything to do with Computers. I'd like to see Canada though, especially Quebec, as I speak French, and I've always wanted to visit Australia. In fact, we have plans to possibly move to Australia in a few years. Read more…

For those of you that haven't heard of it before, Big Buck Bunny is the second animated short made in Blender under Creative Commons. It's furry and funny, and you have to watch it (or else):

(I assume this download button is under CC as well? Let's hope so!)

Sophie and I have both been playing with Blender recently. I'm rather pleased with my progress after a relatively short time learning how to use it. Behold my finest creation so far: Read more…

On Friday I decided to bite the bullet and install MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard). In fact, most of Friday was spent backing up all my files and settings. Parallels took 80% of the time, since I wanted to back up both Windows and Linux installations and had little space to back them up onto, which meant bzipping them. Then I discovered that SFTP (I was backing up onto another machine) isn't happy with files over 2GB, so I had to split the huge 17GB file into smaller chunks, and the uploading wasn't quick either. Anyway, Leopard is up & running now and I'm glad I didn't have to install Windows & Linux in Parallels again, so it was worth it. Read more…

If this doesn't make it all worthwhile, I don't know what does. It's an e-mail sent to the Ubuntu mailing list a few days ago:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2008-May/004196.h...

Here it is for those of you too lazy to click the link :) Read more…

I read an article about a planned redesign of GTK+ today. Every now and then I ask myself if GTK can really be all that much worse than Qt. I mean how bad can it be, right? Well, here are the three "Hello World" examples I found. See for yourself:

• GTK+: http://bo.majewski.name/bluear/gnu/GTK/plain
• wxWidgets: http://www.wxwidgets.org/docs/tutorials/hello.htm
• Qt: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.3/tutorial-t1.html

  Read more…

So this was unexpected! No snow all winter, and as soon as we enter British "Summer" Time, this happens: