What do you do when you’ve got a large collection of chillies in the house? Well, if you’re us, you make harissa.

Yesterday was the 2008 Doors Open Day in Edinburgh: each year, for one day only, a variety of buildings open their doors to visitors, free of charge. A large number are places that you’d never normally get the chance to visit.

Opera has what seems to be a peculiar bug in its treatment of HTML <img> elements that have align attributes. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to work around.

Nearly a year ago, Mark Jason Dominus blogged about runN, a program he’d written. I’ve stol– uh, I mean, adapted his version for my own ends, with a couple of differences. This is a rationale for my changes.

CVS might be considered an easy target for software hate, but that doesn’t stop it annoying the hell out of you. Here’s an instance I encountered today, trying to use cvs annotate.

I’ve been a fan of I Can Has Cheezburger? for a while, and I tend to find that the pictures I like most are the ones with cats doing, you know, cat things — sod the captions.

So, now that I’ve found Cute Overload, well, this seems likely to be my new favourite website.

How about a few samples? Oh, go on then.

I’ve just released version 1.00 of my Text::Match::FastAlternatives Perl module. Since I’m apparently declaring it stable, I thought it was worth writing up a description of what it does, and how it does it.

Suppose you have a large list of strings, and a set of keys, and you need to determine, for each of the strings, whether any of the keys occur in it. For example, the list of strings might be a list of user-agent headers sent to a web server, and the keys a set of strings that are good indicators of robots accessing your site; you want to calculate some server statistics, but disregard any robotic traffic.

How do you go about doing that?

Once upon a time, Microsoft set up MSN Music, a store for selling limited rights to listen to DRM-encumbered music. It turns out that Microsoft are retroactively cancelling customers’ ability to, you know, actually listen to the music they’ve already forked out money for.

SSH is great; it’s highly secure, and actually easier to use than insecure alternatives like rsh or Telnet. In fact, it’s so easy to integrate SSH with everything else you do that it’s commonplace to rely on it for all sorts of things. But oddly, that very ubiquity tends to reveal an unexpected problem when you try to use SSH for, say, accessing a revision-control system: merely connecting to the remote end and performing the handshaking necessary to set up the encrypted channel takes an appreciable amount of time.

So herewith instructions on how to eliminate that overhead.