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About Me

Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

-33.831416, 151.222526

MrCell+61.417.212181

Work:

1 Epping Road

North Ryde, NSW 2113

Australia

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NSW HSC">State of Software Design in NSW HSC

Liam suc­cess­fully com­pleted his HSC in 2009, with one of his sub­jects being Soft­ware Design
Look­ing over his res­ults cer­ti­fic­ate, it seems that 1726 stu­dents sat the HSC Exam from 1759 enrol­ments. In other words, 2.5% of the NSW HSC pop­u­la­tion took this course.
The cur­riculum for this sub­ject area is repor­ted to be weak.
Maybe it is time […]

Facial Update

It has been a long 3–4 weeks.
From Doctor’s vis­its and other experts, this is most likely merely a viral infec­tion in the facial nerves. You can only take anti-virals within the first 36–72 hours – a time long, long ago. So its has been “just live with it”. Research has shown me that re-occurance of the […]

Why the Quietness?

It is rather strange for me to be quiet. Espe­cially online and on this blog spe­cific­ally.
Twit­ter is partly to blame: it is where my cre­at­ive mind finds an out­let.
Another is a little more sin­is­ter. And I use the word sin­is­ter also mean­ing left-hand-side
In April 2007 I talked on my exper­i­ence of Bell’s Palsy.
Over the last […]

Random Neil Finn Lyric Server

All Lyr­ics are Copy­right their respect­ive Copy­right hold­ers.
MySpace users: copy and paste this Image URL http://www.nickhodge.com/finnwords.jpg — images will appear.
Recently I had a brain­wave whilst driv­ing to work. I don’t know where it came from, but here’s the res­ult of some late night coding.I think that Neil Finn is the world’s best singer/songwriter — and […]

Moore’s Law and Compounding Interest

In deploy­ing the small Ruby on Rails applic­a­tion on an old Dell 8200 run­ning Debian-sarge, I decided to see how the applic­a­tion would per­form under load.
Apache comes with a great little applic­a­tion meekly called ab. ab is a small command-line tool that slash­dots your web applic­a­tion, and gives you a nice meas­ure (in pages per second, […]

Frankinstall Tweaking Ruby Mongrels

What a fun few days! I repor­ted earlier I was in the midst of Ruby on Rails. The small pro­ject is com­ing along fine. Even though I could quickly build in Python or PHP, its time to learn and immerse myself in a new lan­guage — and more import­antly, a new plat­form.
This plat­form is more […]

Parallels Idleness

Post cup nood­ling around doing not much at all and decided to down­load the trial ver­sion of Par­al­lels Work­sta­tion for Debian Linux. After some aptitude fix­ing pack­ages that were not installed; finally man­aged to get Par­al­lels boot­ing.
Next step: attempt to get the X11 appear­ing from the cli­ent applic­a­tion (installed on the Debian server) to […]

Melbourne Cup 2006

Go Delta Blues. Up $237.00

Intel Mac: Acrobat 8 Distiller Performance

A com­ment from Dan on Dis­til­ler 7 vs. 8 Per­form­ance over on Accel­er­ate your Mac! To sum­mar­ise: a 463Mb .ps file Dis­tills in a third of the time.

Flags of Our Fathers

Liam and I returned from the new Clint East­wood dir­ec­ted movie, Flags of Our Fath­ers.
It is less phys­ic­ally intense than Sav­ing Private Ryan, as it tells the stor­ies of the men sur­round­ing the rais­ing of the US Flag over Mount Suriba­chi on Iwo Jima in Feb­ru­ary 1945.
The movie cap­ably tells this story; and to a lesser […]