A simple matter of…

Just like [http://carfax.org.uk/node/38 Hugo] I’ve received some spam from Eclipse: … We’ve noticed that you’ve opted to not receive further communication from Eclipse and so may be unaware of our latest improvements. … They then continue with the spam (oh, and an unsubscribe link not that will achieve anything with that policy). To all companies [...]

Also known as: * our program starts too slowly * advertising our product makes our customers happy * we’ll cover up part of the screen so you can’t work whilst our bloated product loads I’ll admit that last one doesn’t apply so much to Windows users, but definitely _does_ apply (hello there openoffice) on Linux. [...]

Dear HMRC, Thank you so much for including an envelope for me to reply to you with. I understand that I have to affix a stamp and that it’s not prepaid. That’s fine. However I thought you might like to know that in the country you server (in fact, across the entire continent of Europe) [...]

For many, many months now my favicons have been corrupted – incorrect favicons stored against various bookmarks. And they keep changing. So first off all I wrote some sed to remove this from bookmarks.html: sed -i ‘s/ ICON=”[^"]*”//’ bookmarks.html I started firefox and … the icons are still there! So now I find that they [...]

After reading [http://goodgearguide.com.au/index.php/id;1786016474 this] article, I’m inclined to agree with the idea that “someone will buy Sun”. However I don’t agree with the author about who will buy them. Fujitsu and Sun work together on the hardware side (SPARC chips), but I don’t quite see why Fujitsu bothers TBH – as far as I’m concerned, [...]

Well it’s a long weekend and so after I’ve finished doing fun stuff (visiting friends, riding the bike) it’s only fair that I do some chores. One such chore was writing a letter to the Inland Revenue going through mistakes (or bad assumptions) made in my 2006-2007 tax calculation. To make my life easier I [...]

Each time I cook, I wonder about a few things. Firstly, the oven – it’s a fan assisted oven and air is also blown through the front of the over to keep it cool (in case there are kids in the house). Why isn’t it just done in a similar way to Thermos flasks – [...]

You have managed through sheer stupidity and bloody mindedness to overtake even Gnome as my most hated Linux project. I do _not_ like being [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pages/experimentalAddons mollycoddled]. The [http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/03/25/firefox-3-security-madness/ SSL fiasco] is still ongoing and whilst it’s now slightly easier to bypass, it’s still not good enough. How many of your users do you think are [...]

“The quartet smashed the previous world mark of 37.40…by a huge margin to set a new benchmark of 37.10.” [http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympics/athletics/7576737.stm BBC] “smash Michael Johnson’s mark of 19.32….” (with 19.30) [http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympics/athletics/7572131.stm BBC] Dear BBC, please educate your journalists – 0.8% faster and 0.1% faster are not worthy of those statements. By comparison the [http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympics/athletics/7565203.stm 100m] report [...]

Yesterday a disk dropped out of my RAID array at home: ata3.00: exception Emask 0×10 SAct 0×0 SErr 0×4050000 action 0xe frozen ata3.00: irq_stat 0×00000040, connection status changed ata3: SError: { PHYRdyChg CommWake DevExch } ata3.00: cmd ea/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 res 40/00:04:14:d6:42/00:00:25:00:00/40 Emask 0×10 (ATA bus error) ata3.00: status: { DRDY } ata3: hard resetting [...]