Author: Vic Cross

As the "downtime" story implied, I was in Canberra again last week -- not a month after having posted that I was done in Canberra!  (I did say "for now", at least...)I was asked to cover for a friend of mine who was unable to do a piece of work because he was going to be … Continue reading Back in Canberra… and back from Canberra

We experienced some downtime here at Crossed Wires on Thursday and Friday, due to "backhoe attenuation".  Grrr!We moved house (as I'm sure I blogged previously, despite my apalling reputation for keeping up-to-date blog entries), and there is (was) a vacant block next door.  Construction started recently, with the digging of trenches for installation of drainage and electrical.  Well, … Continue reading Crossed Wires downtime

My work in our nation's capital is done -- for now, anyway...I've had an entertaining couple of months travelling to Canberra every week to work at one of the government departments there (obviously can't say which one!).  As is usually the case with govenment projects though (apparently) the money stopped on June 30, so it's all … Continue reading Farewell, Canberra

Just to show that some things really don't ever change, we've maintained our incredibly high standard for blog-updating here at Crossed Wires.In the last three months there's been work changes, house changes, Nicholas has started walking, and probably any number of less-important things to write about.  None of them made it to the blog, unfortunately!  Talk about … Continue reading Long time between updates… What else is new?

Nicholas turns one today!So far today he's had cake at day care, and taken delivery of his birthday present -- the Fisher Price Laugh&Learn Learning Home (which only took Daddy half an hour to assemble, but it is really cool). Party is on Saturday, and we're all looking forward to that!

When does Shareware become crippleware?  When a critical function is removed from the free distribution of a program, and only activated when you purchase it.  I just wasted half an hour on a program called Audio Edit by mp3towav.org -- nowhere in the documentation does it say that you can't save anything unless you register!NO, mp3towav.org, I … Continue reading Crippleware BEGONE!

While debugging a problem with some C code, I came across this laugh-out-loud funny (in a very geeky way) explanation of one of the evils of the short-circuit evaluation of logical expressions.Stick with it, it's really quite funny. Mom (thinks in VB-ish): If kid.CleanTheDishes() And kid.DoHomework() Then     we.GoToMovie you.PickMovie() End If Child (thinks in C-ish) … Continue reading She just doesn’t understand!

For all the regular readers of Crossed Wires, you should both be able to pick up normal RSS feeds now (at least my Cisco phone doesn't barf on it anymore).I have altered my previous practice of using multiple paragraphs in the first body section.  Polarblog's RSS feed generator uses that field as the "description" field for … Continue reading RSS feeds fixed

I'm softening a little on MythTV.  Last night I recorded a program and it looked quite good.  I got a frontend working on the Mac, and was very impressed with image and sound quality -- although the two machines are connected via gigabit Ethernet, so bandwidth should not have been a problem!I still have lots of trouble … Continue reading Experiences with MythTV – part 2