When I went through high school we had three segments for our maths and physics exams: we had the basic knowledge part that tested if we new a given fact and could apply it to a straight forward problem, we had the understanding part that tested if we could understand a fact and apply it to a slightly more complex problem and we had a complex reasoning section of the exam which tested a combination of the items we knew and took a large number of steps to get to the final answer. Today I’m hunting around to look for file system permissions and I’ve read something that makes me wonder if there should be that distinction.

Read more

I was sitting in Joomla! Bug Squad today chatting about browsers. Firefox 3.5 is almost ready (I’m typing on a release candidate with it, I’ve been using it since beta, I used 3.0 when it was still ‘Minefield’) and Safari 4 has been recently released (another one that I used throughout beta). Each offer improvements in speed over their predecessor which got me thinking about the progression of different browsers.

Read more

It strikes me as annoying that some how prepaid phone users get treated as second class citizens. They historically don’t have access to half of the features that are offered to those on plans just because you own your phone outright. In addition Australia has locking of phone devices to networks as well and then have the hide to charge you $30 whilst someone presses a few buttons for a minute and hands you your phone back. This situation has thankfully steadily improved over the years and with the introduction of Vodafone in Australia it seems things are slowly getting better but not quite there. Read more