Niall's Weblog

I’ve always been under the impression that there was an important distinction between the “natural flavours” and “artificial flavours” listed on food ingredients. After having read this food science article (adapted from Fast Food Nation) Why McDonald’s Fries Taste So Good, I realise the difference is essentially meaningless: Natural flavors and artificial flavors sometimes contain [...]

I often use Windows as a terminal to my various UNIX systems. Sometimes its helpful to run proprietary software – and I don’t have time/inclination to mess around with half-baked emulators/ports/binary blobs/whatevers under Linux. I either run a completely open system like OpenBSD or I run Windows. Anyway, I never use Windows to do any [...]

A few weeks ago I needed a designer to produce some HTML/CSS and Photoshop templates for a web project I’m working on. While I have good working knowledge of HTML and CSS, I am not very interested nor efficient at working with it. And even worse, I’m quite poor at coming up with graphic designs. [...]

I saw a lot of this lift at the CrossFit NorCal Qualifier over the weekend. One of the workouts was: For time: Row 500m 30 Burpees 10 Shoulder-to-Overhead (Men: 165#, Women: 95#) It’s up to you to decide on the technique to employ for the shoulder-to-overhead movement (shoulder press, push press, push jerk, etc.). Efficient [...]

My C BitTorrent implementation, Unworkable, used to be hosted on an anonymous CVS repository I had running on my server at home. This was fine, until I reinstalled the machine from scratch and didn’t feel like setting up the whole anonymous CVS access again. Its a pretty painful process, unfortunately, although there is this guide [...]