News and Blog

Getting very warm
11:46am CEST, 1 Jul 2009 (permalink)

Thanks to all who came to the party on Saturday. It all seemed to go well and for the most part the weather held off enough for a large amount of char grilled meat to be consumed.

I most pleased with the relatively small pile of washing up left on Sunday afternoon (after the final guests had gone home). This was mainly due to the diligent efforts of guests to do a stint (unprompted!) of washing up at various points of the day.

The weather has been slowly getting warmer and warmer and has now reached the point that it's too hot for me. Fliss being used to warmer climes thinks the evenings are getting cold enough for us to close the bedroom window at night. Needless to say I couldn't face working in my office yesterday and spent most of the day in the comparative coolness of downstairs with the netbook. Unfortunately Fedora has broken the spell checking functionally of my emacs with a switch to hunspell which took a little time to track down so I wasn't as productive as I hoped.

Today I shall be heading into the big smoke around lunchtime to join Fliss for a few more birthday drinks. I think her birthday will be well celebrated by the end of the week :-)

Floods of biblical proportions
10:55am CEST, 26 Jun 2009 (permalink)

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 Fliss' birthday yesterday so we headed down to Le Gros Frank last night for a meal with Fliss' Mum, partner and sister. Despite a slightly shakey start from a lovely but nervous waitress (warm champagne, the horror!) the meal was lovely. We did however forgo desert and instead supped our coffees and desert wines back at the ranch.

The serving of such food was slightly hampered by the every expanding micro-fracture in the master pipework coming into the house. As a result 3 days after reporting the leak to the rental agency we currently have a rather leathal kitchen floor and ad-hoc towel based dam. In theory the plumber should be with us in the next half hour and then we can continue preparing for the BBQ on Saturday.

The forcast for the weekend is looking less than ideal but then I stopped believing the forcasts around here a long time ago. We shall have to see what happens on the day, at least it's currently drier than Glasto ;-)

Cryptographic Hashes
09:12am CEST, 26 Jun 2009 (permalink)

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
10:31am CEST, 24 Jun 2009 (permalink)

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 off becomes harder to do. Countries have to balance economic interests with their desire for political control.

Assuming there will always be some connectivity it makes sense to support projects like Tor and Freenet that allow users to bypass state imposed censorship. We should be very wary if our governments start mandating what we should and shouldn't run on our machines. We should always protect freedom 0.

Visiting the North
03:35pm CEST, 22 Jun 2009 (permalink)

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 the rest...). Fliss had climbed before whereas this was my first time giving it a go. All in all it was quite enjoyable although I slightly lost my nerve on the one of the flatter walls. It seems even experienced climbers try not to look down too much!

For Thursday I was on my own as Fliss was working so I headed down to Knutsford to join Mufi for a working lunch discussing various business approaches and other trials and tribulations of being a coder for hire. I left him in good spirits in the evening, I have no idea of what happened between that and when TJ arrived home ;-)

Friday started with a lunch with Sue, Al and Rosie with a swift visit from Anne. After a suitable pause for digestion (and a light evening repast) we headed down to Lee's for his birthday burnination event. Things seemed to go well, wood was burnt, beer consumed and apparently so were some marshmallows. I think we ended up staying later than intended as I have memories of manoeuvring Chris home followed by very quickly falling asleep in bed.

I had a comparative lie in on Saturday as the rest of the household headed to various work like activities. However once the sun made it's presence felt through the Manchester clouds I got my stuff together and headed into town. I'd booked the English Lounge for the combined birthday/engagement bash. Having a dedicated room for the celebrations certainly made things a lot easier and it was good for the growing number of families to be able to attend. It was really cool to catch up with everyone at the party, I hope I didn't miss anyone while walking around. Thanks for all the good wishes for the up-coming married life experience:-) After we were finally kicked out we made our slightly roundabout returns to Radcliffe

Sunday didn't see us achieve much apart from slowly extracting ourselves from Chris and Paula's sofa to drive home. I spent the evening doing a little weeding in an attempt to hold back the tide of invaders to our growing garden. We feasted on our first harvest after cutting the Savoy cabbage back to prevent them smothering each other. It made a lovely soup. Some ripe (but eaten) strawberries were spotted during my sweep so it may be time to start putting some netting around the more tempting of our fruit and veg.

Lovely if a little tiring (extended) weekend.