Roadshow Films v iiNet
A very significant court decision was handed down today by the Australian Federal Court. It is a closely-observed case both in Australia and overseas, as it is probably the first legal ruling by a higher court about the obligations of an internet service provider to protect copyright owners against infringement by its customers. The complainants in this case are several large movie and television studios and producers, represented by Roadshow Films Pty Ltd., and the respondent is Australia’s third-largest ISP, iiNet. Read more of this post
Java Concurrency and Matrices
A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away… well, just at this link, actually, a challenge was posed to create the fastest possible program to multiply two 1000×1000 matrices. Click on the link and read the challenge specs for yourself. Read more of this post
The Haiti Earthquake Disaster
Many readers would know about the recent earthquake disaster in Haiti. Relief aid is urgently needed. If you can donate funds, please do! What goes around, comes around, and all that… 
International Committee of the Red Cross
How to Build Chrome
Most people these days are familiar with the Chrome web browser from Google. Unfortunately, while Chrome is officially available on Windows, there are no stable versions for Linux or Mac. Read more of this post
User Experience: KDE 4.3 and Windows 7
A recent thread at ubuntuforums.org got me thinking about the usability aspects of the current KDE release (4.3) and the newest version of Windows. The question posed was whether KDE 4.x will provide a superior user experience than Windows 7. Read more of this post
Script for Font DPI Calculation
Today, I had someone ask what dpi their fonts should be set to. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, some operating systems or desktop environments allow the user to specify the dots per inch (dpi) setting for displaying fonts. It controls the size and accuracy with which fonts are rendered on screen. The correct answer to the question is that the dpi should be calculated in relation to the screen resolution and screen size. Read more of this post
Comparing Floating-point Numbers
A common error has cropped up again during my regular trawl of ubuntuforums.org: attempts at comparing floating point numbers using logical operators. This is a very common error, so I’ll reiterate my reply to the thread here. Read more of this post
NVIDIA Drivers in Debian Using the NVIDIA Installer
Another kernel image upgrade, another NVidia driver re-install… well, that is if you installed NVidia drivers using NVidia’s installation script. Using the NVidia installer to install their drivers can be a little daunting to new-comers, but it need not be so. Read more of this post
Compiz and Emerald on Debian 5
Lately, I’ve been trying to add some eye-candy to my Debian Lenny installation by using Compiz-Fusion and Emerald. On my old Ubuntu setup, this was not a problem, as the Ubuntu repositories contain both Compiz and Emerald packages. Unfortunately, Debian repositories have only Compiz. If one wants to use Emerald, it needs to be installed from source. Read more of this post
