July 2004
Australia is adjusting its immigration requirements in response
to changes in population. The BBC has to report this by (a) claiming
Australia is harder to get in to than Wimbleton Centre Court, which I
doubt, and (b) running some crap comedian who proceded to air every
bewhiskered stereotype about Australians the British have devised, and
in the most offensive terms possible. Fuck off, says I. If you want
to have a humour piece about Australian immigration politics, at
least hire an Australian comedian. They're good at it.
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I already mentioned Ausflag and their mission to persuade the
powers that be that retaining the British Union flag in the Australian
flag is a little out of date given that Australia has been an
independent nation since 1986. They ran a competition for a
replacement flag with results announced in 2000. I have
added my version of Franck Gentil's competition winner to my SVG-based
flag collection. This is it in PNG format:
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I'm awake at 05:00 unable to sleep and instead working on migrating the
working copy of my web site to my laptop so that I can eventually retire
my old desktop. One of the importunate thoughts bouncing about in my
sleep-deprived brain is something someone at work said about some
weirdos he'd heard of who actually (ab)use XML as some sort of
(standard) generalized mark-up language. This bizarre (to him)
concept involves one choosing a set of XML tags to express the structure
of the text (as if text could have structure!), which is ludicrous
because how would anyone be able to read it? One would have to use XSLT
to transform it in to HTML, so why not use HTML in the first place, eh?
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Discussions of Apple's proposed extensions to HTML made me wonder if
perhaps XML is suffering from being too complex and too strict, and
that a different generalization of HTML might make sense. Here's my
completely half-baked ideas, a language I shall call MU.
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This is a continuation of my pointless musing about a hypothetical
alternative to XML called MU.
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Apologies to people reading this via LiveJournal's syndicated feed; a
combination of my software converting every header in to an RSS item and
LiveJournal duplicating each item every time I edited the title has
created a flurry of links to essays that I expect no-one but me has any
interest in anyway.
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This is the first time I have used a Linux system with a display
manager -- that is, a program whose job it is to run X and log me in. I
have run the xserver-xfree86 configuration many times in an attempt to
persuade it that my monitor can handle a refresh rate over 70 Hz.
At 70
Hz I find the shimmering of the display uncomfortable.
Checking the file
/etc/X11/XFree86-4 it definitely appears to have changed. But how do
I restart X so that it takes notice of the
new configuration file?
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