A few months ago I started training Wing Chun kung-fu after a 3 year hiatus from it and I have to say: it’s good to be training again. I have been training with Sifu Mark Lamkin who was taught by Grandmaster Victor Kan, who in turn was taught by Yip Man himself (the instructor who taught Bruce Lee and a few other well-known practitioners of Wing Chun).
While Wing Chun might not be for everyone, I highly enjoy it and Sifu Mark is an excellent teacher. He won’t let you progress onto anything new until you’ve proven you’ve learned what you were taught prior, which means you actually get an understanding of the martial art and learn it properly. Nothing is rushed, you move along at your own pace until you’ve got a particular move down-pat and then you move on. Heads up though, the training stance will make your legs hurt for the first few lessons, but you will be surprised how quickly you get used to it.
In most parts of the world, some more developed than others, cyclists are afforded the kind of protections and freedoms you would expect they are. Much like motorists have to abide by certain laws, so do cyclists.
This isn’t a hate on cyclists post, but I am calling out those of you who do frequently ride and are guilty of one of the following.
Choosing to either ride on the road or footpath at your convenience Riding through red lights Not stopping at stop signs Riding on the road, reaching a red light and then riding across a pedestrian crossing Riding 4 or more abreast (4 or more riders riding side-by-side), blocking entire lanes and causing a traffic hazard Resting your hands on the front of a motorists vehicle so you don’t have to put your feet down Failing to adequately indicate when turning a corner, when stopping or merging Not having proper lighting, making it harder for motorists and pedestrians to see you when it gets dark The sad reality is there are probably only a handful of cyclists out there not doing these things. Motorists are no better. in-fact I would agree with you if you said motorists are worse than cyclists. The explanation for this is of course, there are more motorists on the road than cyclists, so that means the statistics can’t really be compared.
When it comes to CSS and front-end frameworks in general, I used to avoid them. I used to favour my own custom solutions because I understood them better and I could include what I needed and not include what I don’t.
It wasn’t until recently when I started a new job where they favoured and had built an application using Bootstrap, did I learn to stop hating it. In-fact, after understanding what Bootstrap is and isn’t, I’ve grown to actually enjoy using it. I see the value in Bootstrap and other frameworks like Foundation.
I have recently switched over from command line GIT to Atlassian Sourcetree because I like to see what is going on, makes things like branching and selective commits a whole lot nicer as well.
One issue I encountered was files set to be ignored in my .gitignore file were still showing up in the working copy when modified even though when looking via the command line, you see they’re being ignored.
I absolutely love beef jerky, however the price is something I do not love. Why is it such a delicious snack is so expensive to buy when you can make it at home yourself?
So recently I was determined to set out and make my own beef jerky. Even though I own a food dehydrator, I realise not many people do, and to make proper beef jerky without getting food poisoning, you need quite a decent dehydrator which can cost a bit of money.
Recently I bought this extremely cheap Tongtel brand pressure cooker from Sams Warehouse here in Australia. I’d been meaning to buy a pressure cooker for some time now and at the price of $49, it seemed like a steal.
It didn’t come in a box, all it came with is a lead, measuring cups and that’s it. No instruction manual.
Being new to the idea of electric pressure cookers, I searched high and low for an instruction book on how to start this thing to no avail. After plenty of trial and error, I worked it out.
The 2014 Australian budget and first for LNP party has caused quite the controversy. There are cuts everywhere, unviersities can set their own fees, HECS debt threshold reduced and the big one: people will have to pay $7 to see a GP.
The $7 GP fee which most will have to pay when seeing a doctor who bulk-bills (80% of all current doctor visits) is to be paid by everyone. Those who don’t see doctors that bulk bill will have to pay an extra $5 on top of the consultation fee thanks to a reduction in the medicare rebate.
Believe it or not in all of my career as a developer, I’ve never had to take a Photoshop character tracking value and convert it to a letter-spacing value in CSS until recently.
My first instinct is to usually Google my problems instead of sorting them out for myself (because, why reinvent the wheel), but this time I worked it out for myself and then Googled.
The formula is:
Photoshop value / 1000 = em value
Chances are if you’ve been using Git as your source control weapon of choice, you’ve encountered the detached head issue at some point. I’ve seen even long time users of Git get stumped on this issue.
So onto the solution, how the heck do you get everything back to normal? We are going to dive into the terminal for this one, I am not sure if there are any Git GUI’s out there like GitKraken or Sourcetree that can handle these scenarios.
Hacker News, Reddit and Stack Exchange all share a similar trait with one another: voting. You can either up-vote or down-vote depending on restrictions the site has in place. Social voting systems are inherently flawed and subject to manipulation.
Just a little food for thought:
Limit the number of up-votes a user has per day. If up-voting is more scarce, people will selectively be more careful with how they spend their votes. Limit the number of votes a user can perform in a 10 minute period. Imposing limits on the speed of voting means a user will be even more selective with how they up-vote content. If a particular piece of content makes it to the homepage (for example on Reddit or Hacker News) a user should be awarded X amount of up-votes to their quota which they can spend. This award value would be capped to prevent hoarding. Voting history is public. All votes a user has performed should be public: both up and down-votes. This will mean a users voting activity is public and thus will help reduce spam/gaming of the site. Possibly difficult: but a problem with a lot of voting systems, especially for social link sites is that people up and down-vote based on titles without clicking through to the content. Either checking if the user visited the link or imposing a timer before a user can vote would also help. Down-voting costs karma/points. Stackexchange already do this on all of their Q&A websites, other sites should adopt this approach. If you disagree with a submission, maybe leaving a comment is a better idea than down or up-voting it. The more selective a user is with votes, the weight their vote has. If a user has voted a lot, their votes should less weight than that of someone who votes more carefully.