Rants from Vas

Well, John Gruber is at it again. This time, he’s calling MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan a jackass over this article about the iPhone’s battery performance. It all stems from this fragment in the iPhone specs: A properly maintained iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity after 400 full charge and […]

As you probably didn’t notice, I’ve moved this site from a data center in the US to a data centre in Brisbane. To my surprise, the operation was completely painless. I had everything back up in a couple of minutes. The Internet really is becoming simpler and more accessible to non-technical users. I guess it’s […]

Localising a software product is a painful, time-consuming process. After much thought, I think there is just no simple way. If you ever plan to tackle the process, be prepared to sink a lot of time and effort into it. Then when you’re coming up to the next release, be prepared to go through it […]

So Imus has been sacked by CBS for referring to some women of African descent as “nappy-headed hos” on air. Now I’m not a fan of shock jocks, and I don’t make a habit of listening to them, but this strikes me as ridiculous. Hello! What’s a shock jock suppose to do? Say things that […]

I’ll be honest. When I first heard good things about the movie Ten Canoes, I was sceptical. I wondered if it really was good, or it was just politically correct to give it good reviews. I didn’t see it at the cinema, but I did watch the DVD yesterday (a legitimate, hired copy — not […]

The other day, I felt like playing Ghouls’n Ghosts (also known as 大魔界村). Now I have warm, fuzzy memories of this game. When I was much younger, the was one of them at the Rockdale bus stop. I didn’t know that the protagonist’s name was Arthur, so I called him “Silly Billy”, because you’d have […]

With all the talk that goes on about how and why Macs are or aren’t as secure as any other computers, I thought I’d weigh in. Now I’m not a professional security expert. I’m just a regular software developer, although I do put on the “white hat” regularly and try to find exploits in the […]

I’ve gone and got myself a new MacBook. Not a MacBook Pro, just the plain old white MacBook. I’ve been using it for long enough to form some opinions, and overall I’m satisfied with it. But it definitely isn’t the perfect notebook computer.

Lately I’ve been doing some programming in my spare time, and working on putting the proverbial polish on some applications. Among other things, I’ve been using Shark to profile applications and look for hot spots to optimise. Now before I say anything else, I just have to say that if you develop for OS X and […]

This kind of thing really annoys me. Not the whole strip – just the last panel. To suggest that there’s such a thing as “normal-sized” girls is ridiculous. Girls come in all sizes, and the real problem is that shops only carry clothes for “normal-sized” girls.