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The Words of the Sledge
steve@einval.com

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The Model M is not dead!

It seems that the good folks at Unicomp are still making proper buckling-spring keyboards, now even with a USB connector. Phew! I was worried that I'd be forced to move away from my nice clicky Model M at some point soon, as PCs are slowly losing PS/2 ports.

20:02 :: # :: /misc :: 2 comments

Debunking World Myths?

More than just your average Powerpoint dross - an interesting way of looking at statistics by Hans Rosling (Warning: requires Flash)

14:02 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

Happy Birthday ORG!

Wow, time flies when you're not paying much attention. It seems that the Open Rights Group is two years old. I was one of the original thousand people who pledged to support ORG financially (a fiver per month), hoping that they would help us stand up for our digital rights in the UK in much the same way as the EFF do in the US. The group have done a good job so far, facing off against the big corporates and the government on key subjects like DRM, electronic voting, ID cards and data protection.

Unfortunately, it seems that there are more and more of these fights coming and they are gaining in importance as more and more of our lives are lived online. ORG are always looking for more support; please help if you can.

20:47 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

Morons and spam

It's bad enough that we have anti-social fuckwits spamming the world. It's made even worse by morons using broken-by-design challenge-response software like Active Spam Killer to push back-scatter on to the rest of us. I'm depressed that people can be so ignorant, but not exactly surprised. I just got another challenge in my inbox today. *sigh*

01:59 :: # :: /misc :: 1 comment

Am I Famous?

I've been told I now have an entry in Wikipedia. Does that make me famous, sad or both? :-)

22:28 :: # :: /misc :: 1 comment

Life...

I've been busy doing various things, so I've not had a chance to blog much lately. Time for a quick catch-up...

We've had a bit of a development panic at work, so I've been working longer hours than normal. The scary thing is (and I've noticed this in the past too), I seem to enjoy the job more when there's real pressure involved. That's not to say I want it to always be stressful, but we've had more fun with a small group of us really concentrating on a single project, working well together.

Outside of work, I've been really quite relieved to take a bit of a break from Debian stuff since Debconf has finished. Debconf (as always) was a really good way to be re-enthused about working on Debian, but it has taken me several weeks to get over it physically.

I've finally finished upgrading all of my machines at home to Etch. In most cases it was easy, but the final one left was lump, the firewall/mail/web/foo server. I'd chickened out of upgrading it for quite a while due to the sheer number of services it hosts, and also the substantial amount of local config it therefore holds. In the end, things were thankfully mostly painless. The nice thing about doing the upgrade was that finally lots of new software has suddenly become readily available. Amongst other things, I've added iodine and openvpn, and now I'm looking into playing with voice over IP (probably Asterisk). My Nokia E70 has a VOIP client and wifi, so in theory I should be able to use my regular mobile phone as a voip handset on my wireless network at home and just get cheaper outbound calls. Yay!

I visited my friend Matthew a couple of weeks ago, and also helped him upgrade/install his network of Debian machines. Unfortunately, his main workstation (dual AMD64 goodness) is still left just running Windows. BIOS/SATA RAID - just say NO! No matter what we did on that machine, we could not make it dual-boot XP and Debian without forcing him to reinstall it all from scratch. :-(

The SPI board elections have just finished. Congratulations to the new mugs^H^H^H^Hmembers of the board, and best of luck in doing a good job. And comiserations to the people who lost - I'm sure most of you would have been good, useful board members too.

We're having a final Debconf 7 wrapup meeting next weekend in York, where we're hoping to get the final conference report finished. There are a few more T-shirts to get finished and delivered to people and the sponsorship bags to go out, then it's all done for this year. It'll be good to meet up with people again anyway.

Oh, and not long now until the big BBQ at my place. I've started getting some supplies in already, and I'm looking forwards to a bunch of geeks coming round to wreck my house again. Or something... *grin*

Last but not least - I'm changing ISPs shortly. Noodles and Huggie have provided excellent service for nearly 3 years, but are exiting the business and moving on to other things. So I'll be moving my home ADSL back to UKFSN shortly. Hopefully the disruption will be minimal.

22:22 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

Photos!

Got back from Debconf and realised I'd not grabbed any of my photos from my camera since February! So, I've stuck up quite a few sets this week: FOSDEM 2007, Gabriel (Dave and Helena's new son), my day out at Duxford with Dad, Ben and Adelina's wedding, some photos of the kilts and ceilidh at Debconf and finally a visit to Stonehenge. Phew!

23:06 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

21 again!

0x21, that is.

I've had a great few days off work, taking a couple of extra vacation days off to extend the 3-day Bank Holiday weekend to a lovely 5-day weekend. Yay!

A couple of days at the Cambridge Beer Festival, followed by a friend's stag do on Saturday (he's getting married next weekend) then a BBQ and party yesterday (no, not the OMGWTFBBQ!) and finally today on my birthday Dad and I went to the Aviation museum at Duxford and got close-up with lots of aeroplanes, including a clamber through one of the original Concordes. Cool!

Back to work tomorrow... :-(

01:04 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

Apparently...

... the number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is magic somehow. Keep it safe, you never know when you might need it.

13:40 :: # :: /misc :: 1 comment

Trying to miss flights

/me giggles at jvw. Oh, hang on. He's already pointed out my own little mistake from last year. Doh! :-)

14:23 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

Weekend in Helsinki

Just spent a long weekend (Thursday night to Monday afternoon) in Finland. Hanna invited me over a while ago with a promise of sauna and ice swimming, and I'm a sucker for travelling to parties these days... *grin*.

Unfortunately, the weather in Finland (just like in the UK) at the moment is ridiculously warm for the time of year. When I visited in November for the BSP, there was some snow on the ground and temperatures were as cold as I expected. This time, there was no sign of any snow and I was worried that we might not get any ice...!

Lars was kind enough to offer me some crash space at short notice for my visit (there's nothing like last-minute organisation for this kind of jaunt!). On Friday we met up with Jesus, Jeroen, Hanna, Pixie and Dave for lunch and some wandering around in the middle of Helsinki. Then on to some bars later for some drinks and food. I could get used to this... :-)

On Saturday, we got up early, bought large amounts of food and drink to take with us, and caught the bus north-west out of Helsinki towards central Finland. 90 minutes on the bus and in a taxi, and we were dropped off at Hanna's family's cottage by the lake below:

As we got there, the temperature was dropping just enough that we could actually see the ice forming on the lake. Beautiful! In the middle of nowhere in the forest, things were incredibly quiet and peaceful. We lit the fire for the the sauna, and wandered off for a walk through the forest. Later on, beer, sauna and (almost) ice swimming. Naked geeks! I must admit that I chickened out a little - coming out of the sauna into freezing temperatures slowed me down a little. By the time I reached the bottom of the steps to the lake surface, I couldn't force myself into the lake fully. I got three toes wet, then ran back inside into the warm... :-) Dave was more resilient (in and out FIVE times!), but it looks like he maybe overdid things. He crashed out later and was acting quite oddly for a while - we worked out that he was probably dehydrated.

We carried on drinking and snacking at the cottage, then headed back into Helsinki for the bars and clubs later that night. More of the same on Sunday along with a cinema visit, and I was thoroughly exhausted and ready to head back to the UK on Monday.

Thanks very much to Hanna, Lars, Jesus and the others for making my trip so much fun. Helsinki is a lovely place to visit, although probably too expensive for me to manage it too often. I'm saving already for the next time! I've put my photos online as usual.

00:39 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

Dude, you're married!

Spent an excellent day yesterday at Noodles' and Kathy's wedding. The ceremony itself was in the centre of Norwich, then for the reception we headed North into the wilds of Norfolk to Wolterton Hall. It's an old stately home, with real character, perfect for a large gathering of family and friends.

Things went really well, and as far as I could tell everybody enjoyed themselves. Kathy's dress was lovely, as was Jonathan's strokable purple velvet jacket. *grin*

Of course, I have a small selection of photos online now.

22:03 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

Busy, busy, busy...

Time to catch up on some stuff. I've not blogged yet about a couple of BSPs, nor about the Linux Expo, nor... Well, you know the way it goes. I was off work ill today and spent most of the day in bed trying to shake off a nasty cold. I'm feeling much better now, so hopefully I'll be back to work in the morning.

21:07 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

Joss...

... you're a bastard. *grin*

21:12 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

Morons

It seems that yet again Microsoft developers are incapable of keeping time correctly. Apparently there's a bloody stupid bug in Exchange Server which means it will get the date of the end of BST (British Summer Time) wrong this year. October is only supposed to have 4 Sundays, not 5. At least, that's the assumption their high-quality software makes. This is far from the first time that I've heard of silly bugs in Windows and Microsoft apps when it comes to handling time and date information.

Still, it could be worse. At least they wouldn't try to bury this kind of insanity inside a programming language or inside an international "standard". Oh, wait...

16:30 :: # :: /misc :: 1 comment

Arse

Looks like I was less good at reading things than I hoped. *sniff* Maybe better luck next time; let's stay friends at least...

19:22 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

Film Review / Comment: An Inconvenient Truth

Just seen this at the Arts Cinema in central Cambridge this evening. It's a well-presented documentary showing Al Gore's lecture tour where he talked about the problem of global warming. He delivers a compelling message, with a fair amount of data to back up his conclusions. I only had a couple of issues with the movie:

• A sequence about his presidential election defeat in 2000; in my opinion all this added was distraction from his points.
• Some of the scary-looking graphs he showed didn't have any clear, useful labels on the Y axis; my own experience from studying science and engineering makes me always suspicious of such things. I hope that this was just a deficiency in the film, and I'll check out the accompanying book to confirm this.

In my opinion, the conclusions from the movie are quite clear:

• Global warming is a problem.
• We need to do something about it, probably a mixture of trying to reduce the causes and coping with the consequences.
• There's a moron in the White House; this is not news to many of us...

23:22 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

*bouncebouncebounce*

Today was a good day...

23:53 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

D'OH!

Memo to self: when people arrange flights for you and give you the details, actually read the DATES as well as the airport/flight number/time. It often helps...

At least I haven't missed the flight to Tenerife; I just turned up to the airport a day early for no good reason. D'oh!

17:26 :: # :: /misc :: 1 comment

Silly puzzle on the web

I'm surprised this nifty little number-based puzzle hasn't been mentioned on Planet yet. Can you get to 30?

21:19 :: # :: /misc :: 4 comments