The Pool Room

The Pool Room: where all the good stuff ends up

  • Quicksilver and iTunes

    I just discovered a cool feature in [Quicksilver](http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/) on the Mac. It has iTunes integration. In Quicksilver’s preferences, click on the iTunes pane. Make sure you’ve selected ‘Show Artwork’, ‘Monitor Recent Tracks’ and ‘Display Track Notifications’. Now, whenever the song changes you’ll get a popup showing you the name of the new song and the…

  • World’s Worst Code Snippet?

    Check out this [code snippet](http://www.thedailywtf.com/forums/65091/ShowPost.aspx). The programmer couldn’t figure out why the AccountId variable sometimes wasn’t set right, so he decided to read the value from the application’s debug log file! What the hell?!

  • Commonwealth Games Medal Tally

    Just in case you’re curious, here’s a handy medal tally for the Commonwealth Games:

  • My Lab Is Open (Again!)

    The lab where I work has been officially opened. Again. This is the second time it’s been opened since I started working here! Strangely, it wasn’t officially closed between the two openings. My employer, [Andrew Corporation](http://www.andrew.com), has put out a [press release](http://www.andrew.com/pressroom/pressreleases/English/Get.aspx?PID=5134) to mark the occasion. >“The members of this world-class Andrew team in Wollongong…

  • Mac 2GHz Shootout

    Bare Feats have done a [performance comparison](http://www.barefeats.com/pbcd.html) between 5 different 2GHz Macs: – Dual Core G5 Power Mac – iMac Core Duo – MacBook Pro – MacBook Solo (i.e. a Pro with one CPU disabled) – PowerBook G4 (upgraded to 2GHz by a third party) The MacBook Pro really holds itself up well, even compared…

  • Keeping Schools Off The Internet

    Here’s a really, really dumb situation. The [Copyright Agency Limited](http://www.copyright.com.au/) (CAL) charges Australian schools a per-student fee (totalling around AUD$31 million per year Australia-wide) to allow them to reproduce copyrighted works. From what I understand, the fees collected are (partly) distributed to copyright holders to compensate them for the copying. The idea is to allow…

  • Adding Heading Tag Support To CityDesk

    One of my annoyances with CityDesk is the lack of support for H1/H2/H3/etc tags. It really bugs me that I have to switch to HTML mode whenever I want to format a heading. That stuff should be provided in the WYSIWYG interface. Since Fog Creek Software never showed any interest in supporting heading tags, I…

  • Vim Assistant

    Okay, this is one for the hard-core geeks. My apologies to everyone else :-). This is an animation showing the new [Assistant for Vim](http://pix.mybll.de/vim.gif) in action. It’s not just the Office weenies that get help from animated characters now!

  • Free eBooks From Apress

    Apress is [giving away some free eBooks](http://apress.com/free/) in hopes of getting people to sign up for their newsletter. Titles include: – A Programmer’s Introduction to PHP 4.0 – Writing Perl Modules for CPAN – Google, Amazon and Beyond: Creating and Consuming Web Services – Practical Common Lisp – plus several others You don’t even need…

  • Sarah’s Tea Party Video

    A while ago, I video taped Sarah hosting a tea party for Grace and several of her dolls and teddy bears. Later, while browsing through some old audio files, I found the perfect backing track by the Animaniacs. Enjoy! [Sarah’s Tea Party](http://pool-room.com/video/Sarah-Tea-Party-web-500.mov) (4.6 MB). You may need to download the free [Quicktime 7](http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download) player to…