A commit to a version control system, such as Subversion, which has very little actual value.

Commits of this nature are typically performed to create the illusion that an individual is contributing to a project or development, and as the name suggests, on a daily or bi-daily basis.

Daily checkins may be characterised by;

Just saw an ad on TV by the Education Union criticising the Howard's government funding of schools. The ad says that government schools teach 70% of all Australian students (sounds plausible) but only receive 35% of the funding. Now this seems slightly out of whack and I was suspicious. So lets look at where they get those figures from.

A fair few of the new S60 phones, such as the Nokia N95 come with a GPS receiver built in. But what about us schmuck without GPS receivers?

So, you've just picked up your pizza from the local takeaway, and slap it down on your beautiful wooden table. After you've finished the pizza, you clean up (if you're that way inclined), and find that putting the box directly on the table was a really, really bad idea.

The oil from the pizza has seeped through the bottom of the pizza box, and the combination of that with the heat has left a sizable cloudy white stain on your (previously) beautiful wooden table.

Here's how to get it out:

Pretty much anyone you ask would agree that booking and paying for things online saves both the business and the customers time and money. Greater Union doesn't seem to think so.

Greater Union seems to think it's a great idea to charge customers who book online a "booking fee". Yep -- they charge you more, for the privilege of not using up a real person's time.

Telstra was right as far as broadband and increased productivity goes, when we're talking about developers. Anyone who's watched programmers at work will know that they're most effective while they're "in the zone". This means removing distractions. Most coders have found the best way to do this is with decent headphones, and music to drown out the distractions.

If you are using the Date.UTC() function in javascript be aware of 2 things

Every time I wait in line at Subway, I can't help but thinking how to improve their serving speed. And every time I'm at Subway, I come to the same conclusion.

Subs at Subway are currently constructed using a pipeline architecture. At busy stores, this usually involves 4 persons: a bread person, a cheese person, a salad person, and a cashier.

There are two bottlenecks in the subway pipeline: heating the meat (which comes between the cheese and salad processes), and salading.

For 5 weeks I've made up ideas. Some of them are crap, in fact most of them are, but the challenge has forced me to think and try to find out different ideas. It hasn't been easy and to be honest I'm kind of bored with it. I'll still try and post every week, but it'll be stuff I'm more interested in.