Our local MP, Dr Evan Harris came round last night, basically canvassing for the forthcoming local council elections. Given that the Liberal Democrats are about the only political party who have talked any sense on the National ID cards issue, I decided to have a chat. I mentioned that “we had been discussing National ID… (read more)
Seem to have had a long week, despite having a day off mid-week. Major pain was the tape backup drive at work, which decided to stop working on Tuesday. Managed to get a replacement installed by Thursday, and the AMANDA installation backed-up everything to disk in the meantime, but it was all rather annoying. Have… (read more)
I am the author of various bits of software including the colordiff program, which is used to provide colour-highlighting to ‘diff’ output, from ‘diff’ directly or from either of the popular revision control applications: CVS and Subversion. Occasionally people email me about the program or send me patches to the code to add extra features… (read more)
Spotted on the BBC today the news that 25 years ago the 1979 General Election took place. Margaret Thatcher became the first (and, to date, the only) female British Prime Minister. The BBC Parliament TV channel was re-running the BBC1 programming from that day. Although I only saw about half an hour of this, it… (read more)
To wrap up the end of month I’m going to include another ‘things people have typed into Google to find my web site’ thing. Here are some of the more interesting ones. First, someone is obviously looking for a lot of stuff about ‘sungate’ – I believe it’s a company in the US: ‘sungate dvd’;… (read more)
Lot of fuss about National ID cards for the UK at the moment. Basically, as currently discussed, I’m not convinced this is a good idea at all. There are a huge number of unanswered questions. Not least, what is/are the underlying reason(s) for the introduction of the cards in the first place? What data will… (read more)
“Summarize your computing experience in a single sentence …” Debian, KDE, Mozilla, Mutt, Fetchmail, Procmail, GPG, SpamAssassin, Clam Anti-Virus, Vim, Psi, Xmms, GIMP, LaTeX …
My current set of headphones, that I use at work, gave up the ghost and so I went off to purchase a pair of new ones … I ended up getting a pair of Sennheiser HD497 headphones. They look like this: They seem rather nice – the sound from them seemed to be rather top-heavy… (read more)
This quiz/survey/thing seems to be doing the rounds at the moment: 1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says: “The FAA ordered the skies cleared. Within two and a half hours, all 4500 planes were on the ground.” (Bruce Schneier’s ‘Beyond Fear’) 2: Stretch… (read more)
If someone asked you to email them your username and password, you’d think it was rather strange, yes? So, imagine my surprise when our corporate intranet web page announced: “If you are a [special service] user and you wish to use your account over the Easter holidays, please e-mail [Tech Support] with your username and… (read more)
