Particularly when the ceiling drops from being about 20ft high to about 6ft high.  Even worse if it happens to be in a narrow passageway…  in the dark… and the ceiling is painted black.  It would probably have still been okay except that I’m about 6'4″.

Theatre’s are dangerous places I tell you.  Particularly when the stage manager thinks that the dark, narrow passageway with the dangerous roof (and the power switch for the sound system at the end of it) is the ideal place to stuff all the props.  I now have a rather large lump on my head.

It’s been quiet around here of late because I’ve spent pretty much all my spare time at rehearsals for a new play debuting in Brisbane titled The Last Of The Red Hot Irish Lovers which is probably best described as a light hearted drama.  I’ve been put in charge of the technical side of the show – mostly focussing on sound.  If you’re near Brisbane I strongly recommend you go see it, the opening night was tonight and there are shows Friday and Saturday from 7:30 and Sunday from 2pm as well as Thursday, Friday and Saturday of next week from 7:30.  All at the MetroArts building in Adelaide street.  Tickets are available at the door or bookings can be made by contacting me (contact details are in the sidebar).  I think it’s about $15 a ticket or $10 concession.   If you need further info give me a yell.

Pretty much no-one used them.

Yeah it’s right out there in the conspiracy theory side of things but I’m pretty sure that’s the main reason Apple hasn’t been too keen to put engineering time into developing Java wrappers for the Cocoa APIs.  Lots of people thought they were a cool idea and started using them, then one by one they realized it would just be so much easier to use Objective-C since that’s what the APIs were designed for in the first place.  Jump on Apple’s java-dev list and ask whether or not you should use the Java-Cocoa bridge for an application and the advice that you’ll get is to just learn Objective-C and you’ll be much better off.

Monsieur Scoble asks:

Finally, I’m gonna ask a provocative business question of Opera (and other browser manufacturers): What’s your business again? If all the browsers have the same underlying features, and they should only add things that are standards, what differentiation are you offering your customers and investors? Are you saying Firefox’s developers can’t propose anything new that’d push the Web forward? Hey, how about some linking technologies like Greasemonkey? Is Firefox not allowed to add anything like that that the W3C didn’t propose and that the WaSP didn’t approve of?

He’s popping up in a few interesting places of late.  He’s been hired by Sun to work on the Swing team and promptly showed up on the WinLAF mailing list to talk about moving their bug fixes to the Windows L&F into the official Swing codebase for release in Mustang (accompanied by talk of how to make it easier for the WinLAF folks to contribute fixes more directly to the Swing codebase.  Then today he turned up on the Mac Java-Dev list asking questions related to making Java apps look right on OS X.  Then of course he’s behind the Flying Saucer pure Java XHTML renderer which is really quite awesome (it was very strict about standards compliance last I checked so should make even Byron happy).

There used to be a time when if a security advisory came out you should pay attention and take immediate action – it seems more and more these days most security advisories should be ignored because it’s just some brain-dead, wanna-be security company desperate for attention.  The most recent example of this is the so called “infection” is this piece of trash from Vital Security.

People, when a security dialog comes up with 3 exclamation marks you probably shouldn’t say yes.  I mean seriously, if you’re stupid enough to run untrusted code with full permissions, I just have to link to a .exe to own your machine.  Users should be allowed to use their computers, they just have to be taught not to trust unknown sources of software and not say yes to random dialogs that popup.  This is not a technological issue, it’s a problem of education.  Previously you used to have to teach people not to delete the Windows or System Folder because if they did the computer wouldn’t boot.  Now you have to teach them to not trust things by default.

Well that’s not true, there’s a lot going on in my life – I’ve been really busy, but there’s not much going on in the tech industry and the “blogosphere” that’s interested me enough to post anything.  There haven’t been all that many posts recently that I’ve really read either, mostly I’ve just been skimming everything that comes through the RSS feeds.

Oh well, at least the offline world is interesting at the moment.

If you’re having trouble with Airport reception dropping out a lot or the range doesn’t seem to extend as far as it should (in my case I could stand next to the base station and keep losing reception), it may be caused by something like Romeo sending out a lot of bluetooth traffic.  When I started using Romeo I also started getting frequent problems with connecting to the airport network and now that I’ve stopped using Romeo it’s been running smoothly again.

When importing entries from MovableType into WordPress, it doesn’t enable trackback pings on the imported entries.  Now I have about 300 old posts that don’t have trackback enabled.  Anyone know how to enable pings enmass?

Oh and yeah, that’s about the most evil thing I’ve found about WordPress so far, overall I’m very impressed but I’d hate to ruin my evil theme for the evening now…

Okay maybe not evil, just braindead in this particular area but I’ve got a theme going this afternoon.

If you have multiple form elements with the same name in a HTML form, PHP discards all but the last of them unless the element’s names end with [].  How’s idea was that?  Didn’t anyone consider the fact that you might not have control over the form element’s names?  Or that dealing with form elements with special characters in their names might just be difficult (the PHP manual has a number of useful tips on how to handle it).

Here’s a tip, if you configure IIS to use a custom 404 error page (or any type of error I imagine) and use the “URL” type, IIS will return 200 OK by default instead of the appropriate error code.  This breaks things in very unexpected and often difficult to track down ways.

You can work around it by making sure that the URL you use for the error page is a script of some kind that sets the return code to the appropriate error code again.  The default however should really have been to preserve the error code.  Sigh.  Using “File” or “Default” for the error page works correctly.

I thought I’d take another look at Skype – we used it at work for a while and eventually gave up on it as it was just too much of a hassle compared to a normal phone call even if a phone call was more expensive.

Anyway, my username is ajsutton so feel free to give me a call so I can test it out.