theducks.org

I wrote a Perl script to merge /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files from two hosts In the words of Elizabeth “Now you have two problems?” See below. Sadly wordpress doesn’t do.. well.. any job of indenting. And in case you’re wondering, I’ve munged the passwd hash in the file :P #!/usr/bin/perl open PASSWD, “</etc/passwd” or die [...]

Dear Prime Minister Gillard, To begin, I congratulate you on your commencement as new Prime Minister of Australia. My wife and I are Australian Citizens currently living overseas in Canada and working as IT consultants and watched the change unfold with great interest. I write to you in agreement with the Australian Government’s continued efforts [...]

Came across an interesting problem today. I resized a VMDK of a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine today, then ran gparted, and when I rebooted.. it was no good. In Windows’ defence, I made some mistakes. I told gparted to align to cylinder boundaries, which the original partition wasn’t, and I didn’t let the [...]

Our Prius Originally uploaded by theducks Is it not shiny? :)

A simple question asked by an online acquaintance of Elizabeth. The answer is: it depends on what you think makes a good picture.

Photography as an art is about making an image of a scene in such a way that it evokes an strong emotional response from the viewer. There are many ways to achieve this, and a point and shoot camera need not stop you from being able to do so.

Some of you may not have seen this on Facebook/twitter, but after much discussion and thinking about moving, etc, we bought a car – a 2005 Toyota Prius – in white. We’ve done 400kms since thursday on it. The novelty of having a car is still new. It’s got 4.9L/100KM (48mpg) so far, so my [...]

Barenaked Ladies Originally uploaded by theducks Went to end of semester party at UBC. Barenaked Ladies and Hey Ocean playing. What a country. More photos here – http://www.flickr.com/photos/theducks/sets/72157623742687475/

I love this guy’s writing style: This is why, when you’re heartbroken, you should never listen to people who try to console you with the maxim ‘there are plenty of fish in the sea.’ While this is technically true, you should also be aware that Deep Sea Anglerfish (and, for that matter, barracudas and deadly [...]

We bought a Blu-ray player a few weeks ago, and it had been working fine until we did a firmware upgrade / plugged it into the network.. when it became unresponsive. Did some digging and found it behaves terribly when it’s connected via HDMI to a non-Samsung TV with CEC-Link (aka vieralink, anynet, etc). Turned [...]

Onslow 2010 Originally uploaded by theducks We’re up in Onslow, visiting Elizabeth’s parents. It’s HOT and humid, as opposed to Perth, which is just hot. But it’s very pretty out these ways. Follow this photo through to the rest of the set if you want to see more.