Posts

I have migrated to a new Open PGP key please read my transition statement.

Every so often I find myself recommending LaTeX to people that are either starting a PhD or are struggling with writing their thesis up in Microsoft Word. Over the years I found myself rewriting and improving the same email explaining what LaTeX is and why you should use it. I’ve decided to just publish it and email people a link instead.

There are only four types of film! For a while I (and possibly others) have been able to categorise all films into four different types. I can’t imagine coming up with such an idea. Perhaps I read it somewhere, or read it in relation stories and writing in general. However no one I have spoken to has heard of it and I’ve not been able to find out much about it. The classic example is the original Star Wars trilogy, A New Hope is “into and out of hole”, Empire is “into hole” and Jedi is “out of hole”.

I have no name!

Wikipedia cookies are now good for 180 days instead of 30!

I recently found out about the Bechdel Test, I was interested in how many of my Essential Films passed the test. So I used the Bechdel Test Movie List to cross-reference. I did some horrible HTML dumps and scripting to do this; after I finished I found out that they provide an API that can search based on IMDb ID. I currently have 79 films in my list; 64 have ratings listed, or 81% of them.

Look at Debian Buzz running on bochs:

Ever used a laptop with a wireless and a copper network interface? Practically every laptop has both, so chances are you have. Have you ever wondered what happens if you plug in with copper, turn wireless on and have both interfaces configured with an IP address? I decided to do this and have a quick look at the routing table to see what goes on.

While waiting to be connected to my new ISP I was forced to use a 3G dongle for my main Internet connection. Yikes you say! Well it’s not entirely crap, I get about 2M and ssh is mostly usable. It’s like having a cable modem in 2000. As a side note giffgaff make this sort of thing really quite easy (and cheap). Anyway while browsing I noticed the usual crap low res images that appear when surfing on mobile phones, so I decided to do some investigation into what was going on. It turns out to just be fairly straightforward, all web traffic is just transparently proxied. So all that happens is a simple JavaScript injection.

So you have a mobile broadband dongle and you want to use it on Linux, one option is to just plug it in and from Gnome 3 it just works and can be set-up instantly with NetworkManager. However I require something more permanent, something that will start at boot, be less interactive and stay up. There is a lot of misinformation out there about how to do this with various programs and scripts to copy and paste. Lots of wvdial configurations and lots of poking about in /etc/ppp creating and modifying files etc.

TL;DR - Buy Super Unleaded petrol! (or don’t)

imdbgraphdot.py imdbgraph.movies.p imdbgraph.png imdbgraph.ps imdbgraph.py imdbgraph.results.p imdbgraph.svg

What has Gnome 3 done to my g’s:

This is a panoramic I took from the top of our apartment in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt:

birthday.html

Whenever I buy coffee I usually get a small or a medium. Up to now I’ve always seemed to enjoy the small ones more. I’ve always assumed it was because a medium was too much of a good thing, which has led me to hardly ever get a large.

The BBC Big Read Top 100 Book list

I use nagios to monitor servers. It’s great. I just thought I would share a quick snippet that I just put in my vimrc. It sorts the servers listed in host_name lines so they are in alphabetical order. Put the following in your vimrc, move your cursor over a host_name line and hit F2 and it will sort the server list.