Author Archives: Dale Nunns

About Dale Nunns

I live in Cape Town, South Africa with my awesome wife and cute cat Domino. I'm a software developer, hardware hacker, some time cook, wannabe writer, chief bottle washer and tamer of dust bunnies.

Short fiction story online

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On and off over the last few days I’ve been reading a rather interesting piece of short fiction called Tyro by Sam Hughes. (It’s on the guys website so you can read it online.)

It’s a rather complicated short story about a company who writes software using Heuristic Algorithms, basically they write an application that re-writes its self with certain goals in mind and this?iterates?over and over checking against the goals until they’re reach and finally you have the application you want. Sort of like biological evolution happening at high speed except for computer programs.

With out giving anything away, I loved the story… although thats probably because I loved the idea behind the story of what would happen if you created a “new intelligent life form” you have no control over… a nice fun read for the computer geeks.

PS: I have learnt why people buy iPads and other tablet like devices… to read these “electronic” documents, laptops are not suited to lying in bed and reading…

How to destroy Earth

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This site lists a very long and detailed list of many ways that you can destroy Earth, Earth being the large planet we’re on and not merely the Eco system on it.

I love the way someone has actually put some thought into this and even worked out the probability of these things happening… admittedly its probably not the best reading for a gloomy, wet, cold Monday morning, that just happens to be my birthday too… but I still enjoyed it.

Yellow Dots – Follow on about the Xerox story.

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After yesterdays post about Xerox making copies of documents for the CIA during the cold war a friend sent me a link to this site (SeeingYellow).

For those of you who don’t know about this there is a conspiracy theory (which I actually think may be true) about how printer companies make their printers print mysterious yellow dots in certain places in order to allow law enforcement agencies to track down the source of the printout.

In the days of things like type writers it was actually possible to match a particular type writer to a particular page by the printing as each type writer had a slightly different wear pattern on the letters, it was even possible in the days of dot matrix printers to still do this although I’m not entirely sure how reliable this is. Of course its much harder to do this with modern printers as there is no “wear pattern” or anything that acts as a fingerprint.

I love these kinds of conspiracy theories… Like the governments have nothing better to do than track down who printed what… obviously the way to prevent them tracking you down is don’t print anything or use someone else’s printer.

WordPress 3.0 & Stuff.za.net update

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I haven’t played with WordPress 3.0 much other than running the update, what I have discovered is that I miss a lot of features of the old K2 theme so I’ll be spending the weekend tweaking the 2010 theme to make it work and look similar to the old K2 theme.

Because of the switch of themes you’ll see that “Live comment preview” is no longer working, it was part of K2 and I haven’t found a suitable replacement yet. The other thing not working is “Live Search” which was also a part of the old theme so I lost that too.

The “banner” image at the top of the page isn’t mine either (yet!) and is one of the defaults that comes with the theme, when I get home I’ll go sort through my massive collection of photos and see if I can find any I like and try put together a collection of them I can use on the site.

There is something “off” about the colours too… I’m not exactly sure what it is that I don’t like, but I think it has a lot to do with the heavy black borders and perhaps the location, colour and font of the work “Stuff.za.net” at the top of the screen, I’ll hack that bit of the theme code over the weekend.

I’m still looking for a plugin that will integrate Google Buzz comments into the normal posts, I found one that appears to do what I want called “Buzz-Comments” but it doesn’t work, or doesn’t work with 3.0. I want to try make the site a little more “socially aware” so that it links in with any other tools I might be using to tell people about my life.

Upgraded to WordPress 3.0

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Just upgraded the site to the new WordPress 3.0, as usual this has been a relatively painless upgrade bringing a few new features.

Unfortunately the theme I use on this site, a slightly tweaked version of K2 doesn’t support all the new features so I’m considering moving over to the new 2010 default theme, so don’t be afraid if the site suddenly doesn’t look the same.

Quick update: New theme is enabled but not yet customised, so the site looks slightly different now, I’ll keep tweaking it over the next few days until I get it “just right”….

Please let me know if something appears broken…

How Xerox helped in the cold war.

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I loved this story about how Xerox modified there then new photocopiers so that they would keep a copy of every document photo copied at the Russian Government so that the CIA could get them.

Now days this could be done even easier as everything is being done digitally and copies could be stored in internal memory and sent via Internet to the correct place.