Today I am 21. Well, in hexidecimal, anyway … Nice little present was a key-ring hand-held Space Invaders game … will have to find time to play with that. Also, I should point out that Episode 8 of LUG-Radio is out – thanks to Sparkes for giving my birthday a mention, too 🙂

Server ‘uptime’ refers to the length of time a server has been running since its last restart or reboot. Generally, people like to brag about “long uptimes” for their systems. Yesterday, I saw an article about ‘uptime’ and decided to check the uptime on some of our servers here … This is normally considered Tempting… (read more)

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)