A scathing attack on the relationship between Tony Blair and George Bush: that’s what “I’m with Stupid”, the new single from the Pet Shop Boys is about: You grin I pose It’s not about sincerity Everybody knows And the second track on the CD (“The Resurrectionist”) is a great little dance track. Sounds very retro,… (read more)
As resiak wrote a while ago, the new identity checks (associated with the new biometric passports and identity cards) are going to be rolling out soon, so I decided to renew my passport early. See Renew For Freedom for some more details. Fancy being fingerprinted and interviewed in person when you want to renew your… (read more)
A while ago I wondered about putting up the occasional brainteaser or puzzle on this site, and this is the first one. Depending on how it goes down, it may also be the last. You Be The Judge. First, let’s define a “self-representing number”. The easiest way is by example: 1210 is a four-digit self-representing… (read more)
Bird flu, all over the news at the moment as a result of a dead swan in Scotland. This morning, on BBC Breakfast News they interviewed three different people about “Bird Flu”. Don’t know the exact wording of what they were asked, but all three of them said (more or less), “Well, I eat organic… (read more)
Just read this news article which states that, regarding a compromise on the National ID card issue, “Anyone who renews a passport will have their details put on a national ID database – but now they will not have to have an ID card until 2010.“. This is a compromise? Having a (pretty-insignificant) delay of… (read more)
Recently I’ve been reading the sort of book that I wouldn’t normally read: the book is called Time Management for System Administrators and is written by the same bloke (Thomas A. Limoncelli) who wrote the canonical The Practice of System and Network Administration. Having already read the latter and found it to be superb, I… (read more)
It is officially Spring. Despite meteorological evidence to the contrary, my criteria for Start Of Spring have been met. Actually, there’s only a single condition: “Can I get all the way home from work on my bike at the usual time without needing my lights?” This condition was met on Friday 17 March. This has… (read more)
Been a while since I wrote anything here: I’ve been busy and also deliberately relaxing after the Samba thing at work. Stuff to mention: have modified my PC here and am now running Software RAID-1. This will protect against data loss if one of my hard disks fails. Read speeds are a little faster too…. (read more)
Finally today, after many weeks of advance preparation and many days of intensive work, we put our Samba server live. Our clunky old Netware servers are being sent to Silicon Heaven. Perhaps Silicon Hell is a more appropriate destination, actually, given the trouble we’ve had with them recently, but… Generally speaking, it has been a… (read more)
Two parliamentary votes in the last 24 hours: one good, one bad, I think. Today, there was a vote in favour of effectively a total ban on smoking in all public places, like pubs, restaurants, offices etc. This is good. Smoking is evil as far as I’m concerned and pretty-much nothing anyone else can say… (read more)
