Tue, 28 Oct 2008

Sub of the Day

Why do Subway categorically fail to put their 'sub of the day' list on their website? Muppets! Fortunately, Yahoo! Answers was able to answer my question.

Update: It appears that subway do have information on their sub of the day, but it's in a flash animated thing (which my browser blocks) - and even when I unblocked it, their text was in a tiny font, in light yellow on a white background, rendering it almost impossible to read. *sigh* Still, apologies for the misinformation.

posted at: 13:34 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 22 Oct 2008

Ubuntu on my eeePC

I've been working on my eeePC for a while now and decided it was time for a change from the factory install of Xandros. For entertainment value, I decided Ubuntu (eeePC version) would be a good choice. I've found it very good thus far, with some minor issue with making the main speaker volume control and the built in camera work.
There also appears to be a bug with mounting SD cards, but that can be easily fixed by setting the suid bit on the mount binary:
sudo chmod +S /bin/mount

posted at: 09:37 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 01 Oct 2008

The M50 barrier-free tolling...

...is reported to be recognising somewhere in the region of 10% of toll payers incorrectly. This includes number plate recognition going wrong, e-tags not being read correctly, and human operator error failing to match e-tags and photos with the correct cars. I already know a small number of people who have been billed without using the M50 bridge, and one person who paid the toll but is now receiving penalty notices claiming she has not - with the amount shooting up, naturally enough. Phoning the complaints line appears to have no discernable effect, with the penalty notices still coming out and the helpline operators appearing alternately helpless, clueless or claiming that it'll be okay and that the penalty notices are okay to ignore: that the system will correct itself eventually.

It's not all bad news for the average punter who has to put up with this incompetence though - according to the same report, the error rate of 10% is down from the 20% errors they were seeing during the first week of operation.

posted at: 07:43 | path: | permanent link to this entry