by John - Published: September 27th, 2006
It has started again. New reports are saying that we are in an un-precedented increase in the Earth’s temperature..
A quote from the news today… “The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade for the last 30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.”
Now here is my take on this..
The minimum recorded temperature in my home town, Perth, Western Australia had, until last year, never (yes, NEVER) been recorded lower than 32F, or 0 Celcius in the 100+ years that data has been gathered. This last winter the city had it lowest ever winter morning temperature. Looks to me like that would be evidence that things are getting colder!
by John - Published: September 25th, 2006
We made it! All the way from Texas to Western Australia for the southern summer. Now that we are here, the weather needs to warm up.
The journey was as long as ever, but with some smart selection of flight times, and a couple of stopovers en-route, we arrived not too worn out, and hardly any jet-lag. Thanks to American Airlines and Qantas. Now to catch up on some work.
by John - Published: September 8th, 2006
Our summer here in Texas is coming rapidly to its end. We pack up and leave out in just under two weeks. I will be busy shutting down a few systems in development, and making backups onto CDs (some I airmail back to myself, some I carry with me), Zipping up some source code (which I post to an FTP site I have), and this year I will be copying a bunch of development source and tools onto some new external drives I have.
My new external drives come in two flavours, and both are USB connected. The first is a 300Gig internal 3.5″ ATA drive which uses a Sabrent connection kit I learned of on Dave Harm’s blog. I have the bare hard drive fitted into a small metal case adapted for my needs. Works great and the power supply is 110 and 240 volt!
My second one is a small 2.5″ FireLite Smartdisk with 80Gigs. This one is powered from the USB connector and would fit neatly into a shirt pocket.
We spend about three days travelling with overnight stopovers in Los Angeles and Sydney (and just a short 14.75 hours non-stop flight between the two!). Without at least one stopover, the journey is too long.
by John - Published: September 8th, 2006
A few months ago I read some colleagues recommending a tool for building program Help systems. They were talking about a product called “Dr Explain”. At the time, I was deeply involved in building some software, but did stop and do some investigation of Dr Explain. I did not give it much time then and continued on with my project.
Now my project is close to finished, I need to build some specific help system for my clients. I would like to go on-site and deliver some training sessions, but they are thousands of miles away.
Something reminded me of Dr Explain, so I researched it again.
This time I put some more effort into seeing what it was all about.
This time I was very impressed and and found that it was at Version 2 and had a heap of new features.
I am now using it with much success. It saves me significant time over the antiquated professional “help” development software that I have been using for about 7 years.
If you are charged with the task of building documentation for software, then you owe it to yourself to take a peek here.
Download a free working copy here. The free download is suitable for building small help systems. You can then purchase and register your working copy for larger projects. Tell ‘em I sent you!
