Rants from Vas

Most programming languages have flow control features of some kind. Yeah, I know there are some languages that lack them, for example early programmable shader languages, some macro languages, and I think some programmable calculators just run a program straight through from beginning to end. But by and large, programming languages provide ways to jump [...]

Can someone explain to me why car magazines love the Hyundai Getz so much? Wheels gave it “Gold Star Car” in 2007; SHEdrives gave it “Best First Car” in 2007; it even got the NRMA/RACV/RACQ/AA “Best Small Car” in 2003 and 2005. I can’t for the life of me see why. Someone sideswiped my car, [...]

With the baby almost here, one of the last things to get was a car seat. These things are not cheap, and I wanted to get the best solution. Being a geek, I actually went and read last year’s NRMA/RACV/RTA assessment of child restraints, and came to the conclusion that the Safe-n-Sound Compaq Deluxe gave [...]

Today I had the opportunity to work on an LG DVD/VCD/DivX player. You see, my little nephew Eric had somehow managed to get two discs into it, and it would no longer display anything. Plugging it in would just make some motors whir. Now you’re probably thinking that this is one of those stories where [...]

If you’ve actually visited the web page, you’ll see a new link in the sidebar – To Arcade. I’ve put up a few translations of Japanese game service menus and test programs. Tell me what you think. Also, I’m open to suggestions for more candidates for translation. Incidentally, I’ve changed the look of the site [...]

Well, Mac OS X 10.5 “Tiger” has been released. As usual, it’s feature-packed, and goes faster than the previous release on the same hardware. And as usual, Apple has deprecated and dropped several legacy features. It seems with every release, there’s a little less of NeXTstep hiding under the covers. In Leopard, Input Managers are [...]

I’ve been using WordPress to power my blog ever since I started wasting time with it, and it’s been pretty good to me so far. However, there was something that bothered me: despite serving UTF-8 to the browser, the actual database table collation being used was latin1_swedish_ci. Now the way WordPress was getting away with [...]

Well, since everyone else seems to have an opinion on it, I may as well, too. First up, I wouldn’t buy one, for a number of reasons: I like having a mechanical keypad – say what you like, but you can’t use a virtual keypad without looking at it. I like being able to use [...]

Yes, I really do (yes, I’m talking about the web browser, not the movie). And yet I use it every day. There are things that I like about Firefox – plugins like Aardvark, Firebug and Web developer, for example – but as a whole, I think it’s a lousy web browser. Take its text rendering, [...]

After reading this and this about the new Apple keyboard, I got the itch to write, so here are my random musings. I think the new keyboard is just plain ugly, but that’s purely subjective. I think the PowerBook keyboard feels better than the MacBook keyboard, too, and would have preferred a desktop keyboard based [...]