Ooh, how exciting: it seems that my little utility ‘colordiff’ is Debian Package Of The Day. The contributor gives it a very good summary and it looks like the comments are providing additional tips that even I didn’t know about. I believe that the deb-a-day feed gets quite a high readership, so this will hugely… (read more)

OK, so I’ve failed to write anything at all in December. Quick summary: CCNA: not made much progress with this. I haven’t really had time and I’ve had a slight confidence crisis on whether I’ll have the time to learn all the material properly. I’m looking into formal training courses for it, but unfortunately nothing… (read more)

I noticed that the Bletchley Park museum web site’s online shop does not use SSL to protect the transactions. So I sent them a serious (but slightly tongue-in-cheek) email: I’m wondering why an organisation with a great track record of cracking codes does not deem it necessary to protect online transactions? What I mean is:… (read more)

What a monumental cock-up. Two CDs containing names, addresses, bank details and other personal information, have gone missing in transit between HM Revenue/Customs and the National Audit Office. My information is on one of those CDs and so is data belonging to many people reading this. The Questions That Must Be Asked: Why was the… (read more)

I’ve just uploaded the latest release of colordiff: colordiff 1.0.7 – you can get it at the colordiff web site. New features: support for ‘wdiff’ per-word colourising and for diffs generated by p4/perforce. That makes two releases this year, which is almost a record.

Perusing the pages of ThinkGeek, as you do, we found this: an email and wi-fi enabled photo frame. It can display photos. It can talk TCP/IP. It can connect to the internet via wireless and download the photos to display. You can email photos to it. You can point it to RSS feeds. So, here… (read more)

This week I have been mostly doing the following: Reading my CCNA books. They cover a sod of a lot of material. I’ve nearly finished reading the first (“easiest”) of the two. A lot of the first half was unfamiliar material and I was beginning to think I might not be able to see it… (read more)

I’ve been thinking for a while about studying for a CCNA. It’s slightly tangential to my normal work and also to my hobby-time computing, but I think that’s part of the appeal. I feel that the more fundamental aspects of computer networking are things that I should know about. I now have the study books… (read more)

About 10 years ago I contributed some Pet Shop Boys ‘cover versions’ to a project called “Attribute” (a play on words for “a tribute”) which was an attempt to create a PSB tribute CD and get it released. It never really happened, but the tracks I made are still floating around on the ‘net somewhere…. (read more)

Maintaining this site, keeping the software up-to-date against security vulnerabilities and so on, is tricky. You generally need to back up your database, back up your install directory, keep track of any customisations you’ve made… Then you download the new files, copy across some of them if you haven’t made personal changes to the previous… (read more)