grahambinns.com

Another link to another petition for you, this time via BoingBoing (link) and the Open Rights Group:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to abandon plans to create the Information Sharing Index, a national database of all children aged between birth and eighteen.

You can find the petion at petitions.pm.gov.uk as usual.

Right, that's it for petitions and political statements this week. Promise.

[Edited to add]

By the way, I'm largely cynical about these petitions. I don't honestly believe that a government, particularly our government, particularly at the moment, is going to give any of these results more than a passing glance without dismissing the petitioners as uninformed.

Nevertheless, I'm also of the opinion that not putting my name to these things, whether or not I believe they're going to have any notice taken of them, would be tantamount to giving my consent to the very things against which the petitions stand. It's the same reason that I turn out and vote: I may be all but certain that my chosen candidate isn't going to get in but not voting is just another way of saying that I don't really care, when in fact I care very much. To put it another way, as the old saying goes, "Them as don't ask don't get." 

RAID5 is quite reliable as disk arrays go. So I can understand why having two disks in a five-disk array fail on Thursday morning took my hosts, Servelocity, somewhat by surprise. Which is the quick way of saying exactly what happened to the site over the last four-and-a-bit days.

There, that was painless, wasn't it?

Elsewhere, I appear to be stuffing my hours full of more minutes than they can feasibly cope with, or at least that's how it feels. For one thing, work-wise, we're mid-release cycle, and though there's a bit of a lull for me at the moment for logistical reasons I know it'll pick up to insanely busy levels towards the end of the week (perversely, I'm rather looking forward to it).

Writing-wise... Well, let's gloss over that by simply saying that I haven't done any of it for about three weeks. In fact the last time I did any writing that wasn't an email or a blog post or a hastily scribbled plot note for novel-the-second was in the Starbucks on Horseferry Road. I wrote a few paragraphs of a short story called, tentatively, Branches and rather enjoyed it and then I got tied up with work and haven't really had time to go back to it. And once again I find myself thinking that I should get back to writing but more specifically that I should get on with writing novel-the-second before it turns into the novel-I-meant-to-write that all wannabe writers have tucked away at the back of their minds. That thought terrifies me, frankly; it's too good a story to waste (though I'm not yet sure that I can do it justice). Trouble is, Branches is pretty good so far, too, especially since it's my first foray into hard(er) core Science Fiction.

Massive server outage over the weekend, will explain later. At the moment I'm just glad to see that nothing important is borked.

The news just came through that Dell have officially unveiled two systems available in Europe (including the UK) with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) installed on them. This is very cool, and represents another step along the road to fixing bug #1. From the press release (ubuntu.com):

Dell today unveiled two consumer PCs in Europe – the Inspiron 6400n and the Inspiron 530n – with the Ubuntu 7.04 Linux operating system factory installed. Available now in the United Kingdom, Germany and France, the systems are Dell’s first steps to meet the needs of the Linux enthusiast community outside of the United States.

Information about the systems can be found in the following locations:

• General information: www.ubuntu.com/dell
• In France (from August 8th): www.dell.fr/ubuntu
• In Germany (from August 8th): www.dell.de/ubuntu
• In the United Kingdom (from August 8th): www.dell.co.uk/ubuntu

[The Disclosure Bit]

I am an employee of Canonical, the company that supports and backs Ubuntu. Yes, Canonical is the really-cool-company I've mentioned. I work as part of the Launchpad development team. So now you know.

It looks like it's that time again, the time when the British weather starts playing silly buggers. For everyone else in the country that means flooding and being washed out of house and home. For me, it seems, it just means losing intertube connectivity, which I'll admit is plain annoying, but at least I don't have to clean a street's worth of sewage off my living room carpet.

So, my connection speed is down to circa 80Kbps again, where earlier today it was closer to 3Mbps. Now comes the whole song and dance of talking to my ISP (whose tech support is fantastic) and then (and this is the bit that takes forever) waiting for BT to rectify the problem, whilst all the time they threaten me with being handed a huge bill should I happen to be wrong about the cause of the problem.

Tomorrow, I shall buy microfilters and run every diagnostic I can think of. Then the fun can begin.