I can’t tell you exactly what I was doing when I heard that retro pop sensation Michael Jackson had died however I did find out on Twitter which I’m sure will make the BBC happy. However that’s all I have to say on that matter as I have been preoccupied with other things. It was [...]
Archive of entries posted on June 2009
Cryptographic Hashes
If your new to cryptographic hashes or simply want an intro that isn’t overly heavy detailed maths then I can recommend The Code Monkey’s Guide by kernel hacker Valerie Aurora.
Turning off the internet
A couple of interesting blog posts looking at the difficulties Iran is having in turning off it’s internet. While countries like Iran and China have some very sophisticated filtering solutions to limit what their own citizens can see on the internet (just like us) as the internet becomes more pervasive the option to turn it [...]
Visiting the North
Our visit to Manchester was considered a success. It was a slightly longer visit than usual as Fliss was working in the area. This gave us the opportunity to travel up on Wednesday evening. What follows is a summary of what I/we did: Wednesday saw us at the climbing wall with Chris and Paula (and [...]
Geoglyphs?
We decided to drive back to Cambridge via the Woodhead pass on Sunday as it’s a much prettier drive. However I did notice a bunch of “path” markings before the final tight turn and climb. It looked like some one had been creating Geoglyphs but looking on Google maps reveals nothing. Anyone else noticed them? [...]
longlines-mode
I use a fantastic little Firefox add-on called It’s all Text to spawn an Emacs client when editing text boxes. However up until recently I kept having problems with formatting of my posts. Even though HTML doesn’t really care about white space most blog software tends to treat them as though they mean something. This [...]
GStreamer and stdin
GStreamer is the media framework used by the Gnome Desktop. For the most part it’s working is hidden from users as media players setup up the processing pipelines required. However sometimes you just want to play something from the command line and that’s where a lot of head scratching can be involved as you try [...]
Another Manchester Visit
We are coming up to Manchester on Wednesday evening for the weekend. As Fliss will be busy making UK government better during the day on Thursday and Friday I shall be pootling around Manchester with time on my hands. If anyone wants to do lunch/visit pub during the day please ping me. And a quick [...]
Topping up the tan
My arms are starting to approach some sort of healthy* shade of brown as I’ve spent the last three days out in the sunshine and fresh air. Friday I took advantage of my current employment flexibility to join my parents for a walk in Hertfordshire. My parents had been planning on going on Wednesday but [...]
Distributed VCS
I’ve mentioned distributed version control systems a few times. It was interesting note the advice that Savannah is giving about recovering from a recent disk crash. Both Git andMercurial based projects can restore from local repositories as they contain all the revision history within them. The centralised version control systems are relying explicit backups being [...]
