A wee rave about Hardy
I shouldn't be writing this now; I should be packing for Edinburgh, where I'm going to be going for the weekend. But I felt that it was my duty as a Canonical employee and moreover as an Ubuntu user to state the following: Hardy rocks! Now, okay, it's still in beta, which by necessity means [...]
Hardy har har
I'm – to use an American expression – jonesing to install Ubuntu 8.04 (The Hardy Heron) Beta, which has just been released (massive props to the distro team for their typically herculean effort). And this time it's going to be a full install, not an upgrade. See, when I upgraded to Gutsy during its Beta [...]
Ubuntu: storming your brain
As has by now been announced more-or-less left, right, center, top, bottom and everywhere else in the universe, Ubuntu Brainstorm went live today. The idea behind Brainstorm is pretty simple and yet immensely powerful. It offers a place for Ubuntu users to post their ideas about how Ubuntu can be improved: new features, tweaks… just [...]
Can someone please send me some carrier pigeons?
January, friends. When resolutions are held (for a while at least), healthy food is eaten, chocolate lays about the place unbought and unwanted and when, naturally, our DSL connection degrades in a manner that can only be described as slovenly and untidy. High winds wreak havoc on our connection speeds. I don't know yet if [...]
‘Twas the night before
It's almost ominously quiet in my office right now. Normally there'd be the low, rattling hum of my PC filling the room, masking all the little creaks and burps that the hot water tank, which sits, fenced off in a cupboard in the corner of this fairly tiny work space, makes all through the day [...]
Another petition for you
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 [...]
Servermachine bilong Graham gone buggerup
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? [...]
Oh look, a website!
Massive server outage over the weekend, will explain later. At the moment I'm just glad to see that nothing important is borked.
Dell and Ubuntu, sitting in a tree, etc.
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 [...]
Oh, nackers
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 [...]
Just a note
#!/usr/bin/pythonfrom base64 import b64decodeprint b64decode('MDkgRjkgMTEgMDIgOUQgNzQgRTMgNUIgRDggNDEgNTYgQzUgNjMgNTYgODggQzA=') That'll be all.
But sir, ’tis a connection nonetheless
I pay for (upto) 8Mbps broadband. I usually get circa 4.5 – 5Mbps download, 512Kbps – 1Mbps upload. Since we’ve been reconnected (yay!) I’ve had upload speeds of 400-odd Kbps, which is okay, and download speeds of 120Kbps, which is most definitely not. If we assume that in this context 1Kb = 1 kibibyte (i.e. [...]
Living on the Edgy
I’ve just done upgrading my system to Ubuntu 6.10 (The Edgy Eft). So far, so good. None of which has any bearing on anything, but I thought I’d tell you all the same.
A masterful job of muckup
The best laid plans get a spanner in the works. I had meant to do some editing this afternoon, along with a bunch of other bits and pieces. We got back from town at about three, and I figured that I had time to sort out the something that’s been nagging me for a while [...]
The Glue
15 / 333 (4.5%) Someone has poured glue into my head. Whoever they are, I wish they hadn’t, but it’s here to stay for a while and it does not, let me tell you, make life any easier. Editing is out for the time being. I managed to get through two pages of Muse before [...]
T -9 Minutes and Holding
Well, the muse seems to have deserted me today, so it’s back to editing the Muse manuscript instead. I got through a chapter of edits last night – the dramatic bits were okay; it was the bits in between that needed refining – and I’m now at 77 out of 333 pages edited. You can [...]
Just so you know, I might catch fire at some point in the next twenty days
So Dell are recalling about 4 million laptop batteries BBC News. Turns out that my laptop battery is one of the ones that might spontaneously combust, taking me, or at least what are so far as I see it important parts of me, with it. What fun. Apparently I should allow up to twenty days [...]
Not The 9 O’Clock News: Macs are safer than PCs
According to BBC News, experts are advising people to switch to Macs in order to avoid nasty things like viruses and malware. No mention of Linux, of course, which is to be expected; it can be a beast to install and offers even more of a culture shock than a Windows to OSX switch would [...]
Grr
It seems like I lose my website at least once every weekend these days. At first the whole thing goes, then Apache comes back up but MySQL stays down. I might switch webhosts, I think. The renewal on the hosting is coming up in July anyway. I quite fancy the Wesh shared hosting packages. Anyone [...]
Lecturing by Podcast
Podcast lectures for uni students A lecturer at a West Yorkshire university has abolished traditional lectures in favour of podcasts. Dr Bill Ashraf, a senior lecturer in microbiology at Bradford University, says the move will free up time for more small group teaching. I think this is an incredibly good idea. When I was at [...]
Pieces of Eight
I’m a natural hoarder. It’s a trait that comes from my mother and from my mother’s family. The attic at home used to be chock-full of bits and pieces in cardboard boxes that, for one reason or another, most of which were lost in the mists of time, Mum had put to one side with [...]
Bad Blocks
Looks like the great hard disk problem of ’06 is due to some bad blocks that my hard drive, not having been fscked in a while, didn’t know about and so couldn’t avoid. I’m running e2fsck -c now to update the list. Once that’s done I should have a healthy partition again (I might also [...]
The best laid plans
Well I was going to go to Caffe Nero and write, but as always life has a habit of jumping in to spoil the best laid plans, so instead I’m going to be considering my options with regard to hard disks after my / partition got mounted read only because of errors and fscking it [...]
Well-read
Have I really read all the books in Amazon’s catalogue? Well of course not, nor am I ever likely to, but Amazon’s front page seems to give the impression that I have because all it’s listing as things I might be interested in are… books that I’ve already bought. From them. They also seem to [...]
