ascorbic.net

Iran has banned the Economist for the unforgivable crime of calling the Persian/Arabian Gulf “the Gulf” on a map in last weeks issue. Oddly they make no mention of it on their site, despite it getting wide coverage in other news outlets. According to those stories they’ve said they won’t back down over this. However, the map on their Iran country profile seems to suggest otherwise. Funny. Compare:

Just a little note for the benefit of others with the same problem searching for an answer.
When compiling on my shiny new MacBook, I got the following error:
dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/i686-apple-darwin8/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib
Referenced from: /usr/bin/gcc
Reason: image not found


The answer is to remove the DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH:
export DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH=
..which should solve it.

Tip of the hat

And quite right too. Why should they listen to bossy notices on bossy letters.

After the frustrating wait, tracking the delivery all the way from China, I now have my shiny new MacBook. The thing is fantastic, though there are a couple of niggling issues that bug me. First, while the shiny screen looks great, I already have a fingerprint on it, which seems really hard to remove. More seriously, it’s a bad idea to use the optical drive while holding the machione on your lap. I was burning a DVD, and picked the thing up off my lap. There was a worrying sound from the drive, and up popped a warning that the burn had failed. Seems the drive assembly and case are a little too bendy for comfort.

Edit: The 65° idle temperature is a little worrying too.

I bought a copy of Flash Pro a couple of days ago (or rather my company did). Our main business is based on QuickTime VR panoramas, and I decided it would be useful for us to have a Flash viewer. Beware: this gets a bit technical and boring for most people, but there is a pretty example.

Edit: I just realised that I have consecutive posts entitled “Ming” and “Flash”. Hehe. Retro joke.

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A lively young damsel named Menzies

Inquired: “Do you know what this thenzies?”

Her aunt, with a gasp,

Replied: “It’s a wasp,

And you’re holding the end where the stenzies.”

Listen »
From johnmenziesplc.com

The university lecturers’ strike has finally ended, after several months. Or rather ‘action short of a strike’: the boycott of marking, setting of exams etc. The whole sorry incident left me extremely pissed-off. I’ll leave aside the fact that the lecturers’ unions are cunts for boycotting marking rather than research and thus holding students to ransom. No, the ones I’m really pissed-off with are the Trotskyite cunts at the National Union of Students who supported the action, despite the overwhelming majority of students opposing it.
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The old ascorbic.net was starting to piss me off, primarily because Mambo (now Joomla) is one ugly lump of code. Also, the site was ugly. I’ve installed Wordpress a few times recently (for Huset and for work. I’ve needed to poke around with the code to a varying extent, and have been impressed by the quality. OK, it’s mostly procedural and has far too many global variables, but other than that it’s nicely organised.

So here it is. I’ve used a mix of templating, plugins and mod_rewrite trickery to embed the catbox archive within Wordpress. I’ve also given it a new, cleaner and less harsh design. I hope you like.