[This was my attempt at a TheDailyMash style article – I did send it to them, but didn’t hear back so either they don’t accept submissions or it’s not funny. For the news background to this piece, see the Lighter Later campaign. UPDATE Oct 2010: The other excellent UK satirical news site, TheOracleSpeaks, published it […]

Just a quick place to post this reply from my MP (Kerry McCarthy) on 17th March about my concerns about DEB being rushed through. I hope she doesn’t mind me posting it here. As you will be aware, the Bill was introduced in the House of Lords, and has gone through all stages there, being […]

UPDATE: The Norwegian Newspaper VG (Verdens Gang – roughly translated as The Way of the World and apparently not usually the most cerebral of papers) has included a photo from Bristol in its coverage of the 10:23 events. I passed the link on to a Norwegian very close to me, and she said: “I reckon […]

This is a comment I received from Thomas Britton of thetrainline.com, which I thought was worth publishing in its own post. Nice that he’s noticed and taken the time to write, and I’m happy my frustrations with their support people has been noted. The original post this refers to is at http://www.hairysocialistsforcatlovers.com/2009/07/14/thetrainlinecom-screws-up/ Hi Oliver, My […]

thetrainline.com – what a horrible mess. If you want to compare two journeys, you might think it’s OK to look for Journey A, open a new window to look for Journey B, then return to the Journey A window and continue to book it. Oh no… if you do that, Journey B’s data is the […]

Well, everyone’s writing about it I’m sure. But what other purpose does this blog serve? It’s slow. It’s really slow. Horribly slow. Can type several words in a text message, URL, etc, before any words appear on the screen slow. Not all the time, mind. Maybe about a quarter of the time. Often enough to […]

This has been written about elsewhere, but thought it worth sharing since I’ve not posted much recently, and I find it both hilarious and very annoying. The Cisco ASDM – Adaptive Security Device Manager – is  a Java client (which, utilising all that is best about Java, only runs on Windows) that gives you a […]

The O2 store down at the Horsefair end of Broadmead had some in stock the other day, so I went and waited in a line of 3 people for over half an hour: the purchasing procedure has been made a lot more complicated since the original iPhone came out. Still, I passed the time chatting […]

Incremental backups on unix systems are annoying. For a start, you have to do a “full snapshot” fairly regularly, otherwise it takes rather a lot of time/effort/disk-usage to restore to, say, yesterday (which is the most likely place you want to restore to). You can’t delete older backups willy nilly. You also can’t compress older […]

A quick piece of advice for anyone thinking of purchasing a Netgear GS748T – don’t even think about it until they’ve brought out newer firmware than 1.0.3_10. We’ve been using Netgears as our access and distribution layer switches for years now, and never had a problem with them. Reliable, easy to use (especially the old-style […]