MindDump. Photos. And random ramblings.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8350660.stm
Can I just say.. bad bad bad bad bad bad bad?
That and they have no idea how much this will cost to implement. £2bn is too little imho. Technically, implementing this will not be easy, and will cost a lot
James pointed this out over twitter: http://is.gd/4MV1s
Doesn’t surprise me, it seems that the US has taken the line the ends justify the means for a while, including torture, and the (slightly) indirect causing of torture.
Just one thing, America. You really cannot complain when your troops are tortured. There is a reason everyone accepted the Geneva Conventions, but it looks like the US has decided to ignore them. (Like the UK is ignoring Human Rights in some cases now, and is trying to eat away our privacy.)
Or what happens when you have to stay up for 22 hours, because a server has suddenly decided it doesn’t like life, and would rather die, as I had to this morning.
Managed to recover it in the end, but this would be the downside of my job 
Weak, managed to strain my legs, so both were aching, but oh, did bed feel nice when I got to crawling in!
In my case, sleep deprivation results in:
I guess, that over time, you can train yourself to deal with these sort of symptoms (though for me, being silly is a bit strange 
)
I had trouble trying to think of something to blog about. So I’ll blog about this. Recently, I’ve taken to playing Eve Online, an interesting enough online MMORPG. It’s quite fun, in parts, although there are bits that get on my nerves. Firstly, the interface. It’s rubbish. The text font is too small, and you have to boost it by default.
On my machine, it and my graphics card drivers just don’t seem to get along. It crashes when anything interesting (or too busy) happens on my screen. A lot. The other week, it crashed whilst I was doing the utterly uninteresting task of mining (I set it go, and then go about doing something more interesting, like studying, whilst keeping half an eye on it to make sure I don’t get blown up), but more often it crashes whilst I’m trying to do something more interesting, like helping blow other people’s space ships up.
This game is interesting, in that you are effectively immortal, dying isn’t a problem. The only rule is, only fly what you can afford to loose.
Still fun game
I can give out 21-day free trials, if anyone wants one, let me know. (Disclaimer: If you sign up, I get 30 days free play )
Well, it’s arrived again. A little later today, I’ll be taking the Linux Professional Institue’s exam again. With any luck, I’ll pass this time (failed by 10 points last time 
) Hopefully, I’ll be able to update this post with good news. Who knows.
I hate exams, especially these, which require rote learning. Rote learning I am rubbish at. Sit me in front of a computer with a task within my abilities, the use of man and google, and fine, I can muddle my way through. But learning all the command flags of rpm? No. Hard. Gastly, indeed. I had hoped I was done with exams when I left school. Seems I was wrong
Did I mention, I hate exams?
I passed
In less depressing non-news.. Day 5 of NaBloPoMo, and I’ve yet to falter. Let’s see what happens this weekend, when I get a wonderful couple of nights of disturbed sleep, and short ‘stuff needs fixing!’ deadlines
I’ve been searching for some simple tools to monitor my internet connection for some time, and finally I’ve found a few tools that do the trick.
If you’re looking for a console application to give you a quick heads up on the transfer speeds across a network interface have a look for ifstatus (not to be confused with the ifplugd suite) .
If you’re looking for something to log and display network statistics checkout vnStat
Minor niggle: both these programs needed compiling and required additional dependencies which I recall were GD, for the graph creator of vnStat (vnstati) and curl for the console interface of ifstatus.
If you have any other suggestions, queries or points, please leave a comment!
I finished Altered Carbon, the first book by Richard Morgan, Sci-fi, a couple of days ago. It’s taken a few days for my ideas upon it to crystalise..
It’s a complex weaving book, very, very good for his first. The plot moves thick and fast, set in an ugly futuristic society. The technology of the sci-fi not that new, but its a novel implementation.. what happens when humans can be digitally stored, but set in a plot. My most stringent criticism would be that the primary character shows borderline superhero syndrome, or of being a “superhero” in a world that should have none. Mostly explained in the story well, but borderline. If I want to read a superhero story, I’ll go read a superman or batman comic
The book touches on our societies current quest for immortality, and it’s something I’ve thought of recently as well. Our society is broken, and still reeling from the changes that computers have brought upon it. We can now communicate a lot further a lot faster than ever before. It is unlikely, that had I been writing this 20 years ago, that this post would have been able to exist, let alone be able to be read by people living almost anywhere in the world. We seem fixated with our human needs; you just have to go on google, and be a little careless to bring up an example of rule 34 1 .
Believing as I do in a world beyond this, seeing everyone so fixated on their needs now, rarely thinking about others, rarely thinking about the future beyond their deaths hurts. Some humanists are changing this, and I am probably using too big a brush in some cases, but still.. worth thinking about possibly.
A couple of screenshots. Firstly, every now and then, people send us screenshots. They do this by sending them in word documents, which is bad enough. (Please, just send us an image file!) This example though, is quite fun.
Make sure you actually copy the screenshot in, instead of just linking it
My second example, is of a website trying to extort money, by making you think your computer has been infected with a virus. These are nasty sites, and I hate them with a passion. They feed off of people’s fear of computers. The interesting thing here is, this computer can’t be infected in this way… it’s running ubuntu, their silly antivirus software looks very, very out-of-place!
(See my first post this month if you’re afraid of computers.)
Click on the image for the full screenshot. It is quite large. As you can see from the timestamp, I’ve been meaning to post this one for a while
p.s. Does anyone know how to force formatting in wordpress? This post took about 10 minutes of fiddling to get the images to go some-where near where I wanted them :/ If you do, please comment! If you don’t please comment. In fact, please comment, comments make my day!
Have you ever had to talk to tech support? Ask for help, when your computer, your email account, or your internet connection isn’t working?
Ever wondered what’s going through the mind of the person answering? Quite often, it’s this: “I’m not a mind reader!”
Working at a web-host, at least once a week, I get an email that goes “My email isn’t working” or “Please setup a new virtual host for me”. Those questions, whilst they make a lot of sense to the asker, who has the context in mind, make very little to me. What is wrong with the email account? What domain name do I need to add to the server, what server do I need to setup the hosting on? Hence, I’m not a mind reader
So, if you ever need to report a problem, give us as much detail as possible. What happens when you check your email? Do you get any error messages? Describe the steps you take, so that we can replicate your problem on our machines – fixing it is a lot easier when we can see it happening.
Finally got around to upgrading to Karmic Ubuntu, and so far Its looking good. There is a few oddities in the theme, which makes using it a bit annoying, but I guess I’ll get used to it. See the screen-shot below for what I mean, the strangeness of the interface The bar at the top, the new greying out an in of active icons all help to make the best use of this screen size. You can tell the design team are doing good work
One small problem, is the lack of a clock, or logout button. For some strange reason, both didn’t make it, and hitting the power button no longer brings up the shutdown interface. I’ve been using the command ‘shutdown -h now’ in a terminal for the moment, will have to dig around, see why it isn’t there/coming up later.
