Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
12 2008
...and Rachael has just had the first, really proper, painful one. Looks like we might have a small child either really late in 2008, or first thing in the new year.
Speaking of children, I would like to highly recommend My Godawful Life, a tragic story of one child's battle to grow up in a world that not so much doesn't care, but is actively out to make his life a misery. Thanks to my Sister for finding such an appropriate Christmas gift for me :-)
posted at: 18:09 | path: | permanent link to this entry
I've already ranted (slightly) about the crock of ill-advised turd that eflow.ie have the audacity to claim is a usable website. It seems that the problems run far deeper than just being able to create and run a website. In the last few days, I've received my first fine (despite having a toll tag, and paying all tolls racked up prior to getting it) of €43 for non-payment. One phonecall to their 'help-line' later, and their helpless representative informed me that he could indeed see a matching payment on the system and would query the fine. Two days later, I received a letter of apology for issuing a fine in error.
Is this happening to other people? Are the eflow systems really that broken and incompetent? Is it too much to ask that the people manning the phones are given the authority to cancel fines rather than just 'query' them, particularly when they appear to have enough visibilty to see clear mistakes with their system? We're paying dearly for the 'convenience' of using the M50 (which is largely a 60kph zone at the moment, as they rebuild large chunks of it) so I'm beginning to wonder if this rip-off service, delivered in a less than competent fashion at the moment, is going to be the last of the great rip-off-Ireland services. (Given the state of the Irish economy at the moment, the irish populace are beginning to realise that they cannot sustain being ripped off indefinitely, that credit is not infinite, and that real value for money is worth fighting for.) At least the government have not (yet) imposed a toll on the M1 heading north towards Northern Ireland, where huge quanitities of Irish shoppers are enjoying bargain prices (compared to Dublin, and indeed the rest of the Republic of Ireland.)
So in summary, dear eflow people, please fix your service and your website. You have an effectively captive user-base, so please make life easier for those honest users who are just trying to get from a to b and pay whatever toll is required. TIA.
posted at: 13:50 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Over the past few weeks, I've been migrating my blog for a .co.uk domain to .ie, but as with all things more complicated than a toaster, I've seen a few unanticipated side effects. One of these has been that some planet / RSS aggregators didn't correctly follow the redirects for feeds, so no longer saw my updates. This made all three of my readers sad... so I've fixed it ;-)
My future blog ramblings shall once more be represented on the ILUG Planet and on the Nonado planet, as well as in those aggregators which did correctly follow redirects such as Google's fine RSS Reader.
Apologies to my many readers who thought I had simply ceased to exist. I shall buy all three of you pints when I next meet you ;-)
posted at: 22:46 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
I've been having a few problems with my MacBook Pro - but today has been a most productive day in resolving at least some of those issues.
The first issue, and certainly the most frustrating was the repeated electric shocks that the laptop would deliver into my wrists. I must confess I actually stopped using the MacBook for a period of a couple of weeks after an evening of being shocked every 5 to 10 minutes. The internet seems to suggest that this is a common problem with the MacBook and Pro lines, with the added bonus that the metal case on the Pro line means you don't have to even touch a screw to get a painful and irritating jolt of electricity delivered into your lower wrists. I noted, as did some other Mac users, that using the computer without the power plugged in reduced the frequency of the shocks immensely, if not curing the problem altogether. Thanks to phaxx, I took a closer look at the power cables supplied, and it appears that the long power cable supplied actually has an earth connection. The direct clip-on 3-pin plug does not. This appears to be an oversight by Apple, and I've been using the laptop for a couple of hours now without being electrocuted, since swapping for the long power cable with the earthed connection.
Secondly, I have been one of the many users frustrated by the almost arbitrary functionality of the backspace key when using Terminal.App to connect to remote servers. I use screen, SSH and vim, and require backspace to work sanely in all three. Again, google and some experimentation uncovered a blog entry from 2006, by fredericiana, which detailed that there were a number of things I had to do. In summary, setting 'Delete sends Ctrl-H', mapping the 'Forward Delete key to \033[3~' (it's set to that by default on my machine), adding 'stty erase ^H' to my ~/.profile (create the file if you don't have one already) and adding '"\e[3~": delete-char' to my ~/.inputrc file (again, creating it if it doesn't already exist) and then executing source ~/.profile && bind -f ~/.inputrc seems to make all three modes of operation work (on the limited number of servers I tested on! YMMV!)
And that entire blog entry written without being electrocuted once. Awesome! :)
posted at: 02:09 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Yet another friend of mine ties the knot! I can't be over in Reading today, and will miss the celebrations, but here's hoping that Joe and Rachael will have a wonderful wedding day and many, many years of wedded bliss ahead of them.
posted at: 09:47 | path: | permanent link to this entry
...has been visiting Skynet, and more specifically Dave's Kitchen. Awesum!!!111eleventy
posted at: 20:19 | path: | permanent link to this entry
...don't mix too well. See, subversion doesn't respect the timestamps on files, and blosxom requires files to have their original timestamps to put them in chronological order. Fortunately, subversion thought of this, and allows setting of svn property 'use-commit-times' to allow the very behaviour that Blosxom relies on, kind of, a bit. Unfortunately, I'm trying to version control a blog with hundreds of entries over the last almost 4 years - and commit them all at the same time. That means that subversion thinks I wrote all my blog entries today. Flattering, but not really true.
For now I've written a tiny scipt that stores and restores the timestamps of all my various .txt files - but perhaps tomorrow I'll contemplate a more elegant way of making things work...
posted at: 00:09 | path: | permanent link to this entry
In a completely unterrifying 'terrorist action' the microsoft.ie webpage was cracked and replaced with a vanity page. No details of how they exploited the server, and Microsoft had the page removed in short order.
posted at: 12:40 | path: | permanent link to this entry
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