Archive: 2007

  • Linux liposuction, or: Xubuntu in under a gig on the Eee PC

    If you upgrade to kernel 2.6.29, your compressed partition won’t work. Read Squashing /usr and the 2.6.29 kernel for a guide to upgrading.

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  • Yes! We’re Number One again!

    2007 may have been another bad year for British sporting prowess (surely an oxymoron), but that’s not to say that we never win anything. We’re world leaders in lardiness and teenage pregnancy, for example. And now, here comes another shiny, CCTV-festooned trophy to add to our groaning national mantelpiece: the award for the lowest privacy ranking in the EU!

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  • Drinking to excess

    After falling off my bike and getting concussed the other day, I was recommended to avoid alcohol for six weeks. Since I want to give my brain cells a chance, I’m following that advice scrupulously.

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  • Britain has become a ballroom dancing country

    Two headlines caught my attention as I listened to the radio this morning. The first was a report in the Daily Telegraph, no doubt timed to coincide with yesterday’s announcement that warmongering hypocrite Tony Blair has been accepted into the Roman Catholic church, saying that ‘Britain has become a “Catholic country”’:

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  • Dazed and Contused

    I fell off my bike while cycling to work yesterday, and spent the day in hospital. Bugger.

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  • Seven o’clock

    Seven o’clock is the absolute worst time to arrive home. I’ve just missed the half-hour comedy slot on Radio 4; to add insult to injury, the following programme is the everyday story of farming folk, patronising yokel accents, ham-fistedly obvious attempts at shoehorning in every conceivable demographic group, and godawful acting that is The Archers. It’s a soap opera that metastasised out of postwar farming propaganda, and now it’s unstoppable. Getting rid of it would probably raise a greater outcry than Disestablishment or republican revolution. It would probably even get people out to vote in numbers that parliamentary elections could never attain.

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  • How to make your Rails application suck less

    Ruby on Rails is all about ActiveRecord, and ActiveRecord is all about making your database look like Ruby objects. Sometimes, that’s great. The barrier to entry is low; it’s a lot easier to read than a convoluted SQL query; it’s easier to test. But it also makes it very easy to write horrifically inefficient code. I don’t just mean N+1: I’m talking about NM+1 or worse!

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  • Oh no, not again!

    Another week, another government data loss. Only three million people are affected this time, though, which is practically nothing by the regular standards of incompetence that prevail wherever government agencies have access to people’s information.

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  • Step away from the keyboard

    How do you know when you’ve lost touch with reality? When you find yourself writing stuff like this:

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  • Someone should definitely do something about it

    Well, that was a waste of time. 10,000 people flew to Bali to demonstrate their deep grasp of irony—er, I mean, discuss ways to mitigate anthropogenic climate change.

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  • How the Financial Times persuaded me of the case for socialism

    There was a glossy full colour pull-out from the Financial Times sitting on the kitchen table at work today, and I was leafing through it as I ate my lunch. It was beyond parody.

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  • Biometrics, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Man

    I’m really opposed to having to give my physical details to state organisations. I don’t want to have my iris scanned, my fingerprints taken, or my nakedness exposed via back-scatter X-ray. I’m not sure if my objections are rational or just intuitive.

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  • Government + computers = disaster waiting to happen

    Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs—you know, those nice people who collect taxes and disburse stipends—have managed to ‘lose’ CDs containing the personal details of every family in the country with children under sixteen. That’s twenty-five million people in total. According to Chancellor Alistair Darling:

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  • Friday in Budapest

    Two things I’d never done before Friday: eat a medlar, and visit a synagogue.

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  • Castle Hill on a wet Thursday in November

    The nearest Metro station to Castle Hill is Moskva tér, which turned out to be the least salubrious part of the city I’d seen so far. A piece of rutted tarmac interwoven by tram tacks, some of them disused, its lack of charm is only enhanced by the ugly structures set up within it, and by the hawkers selling random stuff—umbrellas, lace, lottery tickets.

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  • Stranger in Magyarország

    My first feeling on arriving in a place where I know none of the language is usually one of terror. I’m so used to knowing enough to get by that to be completely unable to understand anything is a strange and unsettling experience.

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  • Euruko 2007

    I haven’t written anything about this year’s Euruko (European Ruby Conference) yet, have I? I enjoyed it. It was nice to visit somewhere apart from Munich this time. Much as I like Munich, after three years in a row there, it was good to have a change.

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  • Bratislava to Budapest

    In Bratislava’s main station, there’s a mural depicting the achievements of Socialism. You know, all the normal things like the oppressed breaking their chains, scientific endeavour symbolised by Sputnik, and pleasingly multi-ethnic groupings getting on together.

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  • Scared in Bratislava

    I spent most of yesterday wandering around Vienna, then took a train to Bratislava, so I had little idea about what was going on in the outside world. In the evening, I was eating dinner in a restaurant when I saw something that made my blood run cold.

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  • Tea leaves

    I parked my bike in the cycle stands in the middle of High Holborn this morning at 08:45. I came back an hour later, and …

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  • Sauce for the gander

    Shock! Horror! One of our MPs has been forced to endure the indignity of forty minutes of close scrutiny by airport security officials.

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  • Xanimal: Easy XML parsing in Ruby

    I was playing around with some XML parsing the other day, and allowed myself to become sidetracked. This is what resulted: a really easy way to extract data from an XML document. It’s called Xanimal for no better reason than that it contains X, M and L in that order.

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  • Royal Mail is rubbish

    My colleague James brought to my attention this morning an article saying that online retailers are growing concerned about the impact of Royal Mail’s absolute uselessness on their businesses.

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  • Freeview channel icons

    I wanted to have some up-to-date channel icons for my MythTV interface, so I scraped the Freeview website last night. Each icon has had any surrounding white border removed, and they’ve all been composited onto a solid white background. They are also all square, to limit distortion. The sizes vary depending on the original, but most of them are 50 to 80 pixels on a side.

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  • MythTV vs BBC Radio multiplex changes

    The BBC have rejigged their DVB-T configuration, with the result that, as of Wednesday, Radios 1 through 4 stopped working. They did broadcast warnings in advance, explaining how to rescan channels to continue to receive those stations. As is often the case, doing things with MythTV turned out to be a little more complicated than with bog-standard consumer receivers. I can’t be the only person to have been affected, and I hope that this solution will help.

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  • Creative Zen Stone Plus first impressions

    I bought a 2 GB Zen Stone Plus (awful promo site) at the weekend. I’ve got a hulking great 3rd generation 40 GB iPod that I use to play music at home, but I wanted something a little smaller and easier to use for most of my use cases. I’d been thinking about getting a fancier mobile phone that could also play MP3s, but, in the end, this was a better, cheaper solution.

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  • The Holy Hand Grenade

    My colleague James just wrote about the idea of a special object that could be passed as a method parameter in a test to indicate that the parameter is irrelevant within the context of that particular test. He called it a Holy Hand Grenade:

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  • Buying my opinion

    I just received an email from Amazon inviting me to provide feedback on their Web Services:

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  • Asymmetry

    During the Northern Rock non-crisis last week, I was struck by the realisation that the banking system doesn’t really help the little man. This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone: the law has always favoured powerful interests.

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  • RailsConf Europe 2007

    I went to Berlin with a couple of colleagues earlier this week to attend RailsConf Europe.

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  • Killing comment spam with Bayes

    I’m not a fan of comment moderation, nor of CAPTCHAs, registration requirements, or anything else that makes it hard to leave a comment. I don’t use them on this website, and I get a lot of comment spam as a direct result. I needed a solution.

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  • Dangerous words

    There are no dangerous words, only dangerous ideas. And if the words attributed to him are accurate, Franco Frattini is an idiot. An idiot with dangerous ideas.

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  • Attention Outlook users

    That message recall function? It doesn’t work.

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  • I call shenanigans on Sainsbury’s battery recycling

    I’ve been trying to find a way to recycle my old batteries. Unlike in Germany or Belgium where you can just dump them in bins at electrical retailers, no one wants to take them here. My useless local council—Southwark, whose recycling offering is so limited that they won’t even take brown paper—has one place that takes them, but it’s inconveniently located at the other end of the borough, out of my way.

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  • Normalising and beautifying Rails templates

    I spent a bit of time yesterday and today rationalising and cleaning up some of the HTML templates on the new reevoo.com site. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t have any immediately obvious value to the business, or even produce any apparent effect from a visitor’s point of view, but it’s absolutely necessary in ensuring the quality and maintainability of our code. Of course, I didn’t do it completely at random: it was a response to pain that I’d experienced whilst updating some of the pages.

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  • This projection technology is crap, let’s slash the seats

    I just watched the Simpson’s Movie, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Now I know what ‘spiderpig’ means!

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  • Why I have little respect for the law

    I mentioned before in passing the fact that the Home Office (I’m not sure whether it’s now the responsibility of minijust or not) spends a lot of money on adverts telling us, in so many words, that crime is all the victim’s fault. I see the adverts everywhere: on lamposts; at bus stops; in tube stations and in the trains themselves.

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  • Fixer-upper

    After several months of work obtaining and assembling the parts, I finished putting together my fixed wheel (aka fixed gear) bicycle a couple of weeks ago, and it’s every bit as fun as I’d hoped. It’s drawn many comments from my colleagues, ranging from ‘you must be mad to ride that’ through to appreciation of its minimalism. I’m really proud of it.

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  • Bamboozled by Facebook

    I’ve been dragged into Facebook via work, and it’s quite a wrenching experience. I feel a bit like an illiterate neolithic hunter-gatherer confronted with writing for the first time. Everybody seems to be making good use of it, but I’m finding myself a bit stuck. It really is quite different from what I’m used to. The application itself seems a bit convoluted, but I’m struggling more with the question ‘what is it for?’

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  • Another rotten Apple

    I haven’t had the best of luck with Apple hardware.

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  • Electronic voting officially a waste of time and money

    The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.—Joseph Stalin

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  • Imprisonment without charges

    Not content with seven, fourteen, or even twenty-eight days, the British government wants to extend imprisonment without charges to fifty-six days.

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  • Caught in the act

    Ah, scrotes. Can’t live with them, can’t (legally) thermo-depolymerise them into oil.

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  • Knowledge workers of the world, unite!

    After reading an article about developer pay that Ben linked to this morning, I started wondering who is served by the taboo on salaries in this country.

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  • Watch your neighbour

    Remember the Orwellian Transport for London CCTV poster from 2002? There’s a new poster on the Underground, inviting us to report our suspicions of fellow citizens to the nearest authority. I actually think that it’s a great piece of artwork, but there’s something unsettling about the tone and the overall impression.

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  • Pathetic tokenism

    Many cities have taken to organising a car-free day once a year. They close the streets to private traffic, leaving the city free for public transport, cyclists, and pedestrians.

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  • Non-alcoholic mint and lime cocktail

    Here’s a nice non-alcoholic beverage I came up with the other day. I made it out of what I had to hand, and it turned out very well. I don’t know whether it’s really original or not, but it has a refreshing, delicate flavour.

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  • My weekend at Hack Day

    I’ve spent the weekend at the Yahoo!/BBC-organised Hack Day at Alexandra Palace in London. It was interesting, fun, tiring, and occasionally frustrating, but generally good. I’ve no idea what other people actually did, because I fell asleep out of exhaustion during the presentations on Sunday afternoon!

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  • Holiday in County Galway

    I spent the week before last in County Galway in the west of Ireland. I rented a car and spent five days in Connemara and its surounding areas, staying in B&Bs and exploring a very beautiful and peaceful part of the world on my own.

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  • Cactus flower

    When my grandmother died about two and a half years ago, I inherited a few small cacti that she had had around her flat. Yesterday, one of them flowered for the first time.

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  • Spooky action at a distance in Ruby

    I spent some time on Friday trying to get to the bottom of a particularly strange effect in Ruby. Changing completely unrelated lines of code elsewhere in the project would change the behaviour of YAML and cause a test to fail.

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  • Free the Windsors!

    There’s something inherently absurd about the idea of hereditary rulers, but in a world where millions of people still believe in flying zombies it’s certainly not the most peculiar of the beliefs out there.

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  • Hack Day, June 2007

    I’ve just got my confirmation for Hack Day in London on 16th and 17th June.

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  • Camellia and Ruby on Mac OS X

    Camellia is ‘an open source Image Processing & Computer Vision library’ that can do some interesting stuff directly from Ruby.

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  • Bleeding-edge ffmpeg on Ubuntu Feisty

    On Hardy? Go here.

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  • Want to feel old?

    Read this chat with the 14-year-old responsible for TeenWag:

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  • Another social networking site for me to ignore

    I’ve been getting a lot of emails like this lately, sent on behalf of friends and acquaintances:

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  • Disposable tables for Rails tests

    It turns out that it’s really easy to create tables and models dynamically within a Rails unit test. It’s a useful technique for reducing dependencies when testing.

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  • RubyGems eats babies

    I’ve been responsible for enough technocentric, user-hostile interfaces in my time to know one when I see one, and RubyGems’s gem utility is a classic of the genre: it’s influenced by implementation details rather than end-user usage patterns, and it manages to frustrate me every time I have to deal with it. Here’s a real-life transcript that demonstrates some of the issues:

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  • Olympian waste

    I’ve been listening to this year’s BBC Reith Lectures given by Jeffrey Sachs. It’s interesting and thought-provoking stuff, even if I don’t agree with everything he says, and it’s good to hear someone talk about Africa’s problems without blaming everything on government corruption.

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  • Zero niner foxtrot niner

    Six colours they want to ban.

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  • Kent earthquake

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, every news bulletin I’ve heard today has led with the Kent earthquake. Just to put things into perspective, though, here’s a map of quakes in the last week in Japan, taken from the USGS site.

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  • Want to work with Ruby in London?

    We’ve just moved into our swank new office this week. Up until now, we were renting an office in a serviced office building, but with the funding and growth plans, we’d outgrown their biggest space. In fact, for the last few weeks, we were renting two offices there. Now, we’re rattling around a bit with about twenty people in a space that’s big enough for fifty.

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  • Why St George’s day is nothing to celebrate

    Quite apart from the fact that he’s wasn’t English, never visited the country, and obviously didn’t kill any dragons, St George’s Day is still something that polite society has more or less nothing to do with.

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  • Gruesome local news

    Yesterday morning, my usual route to work around the docks was cordoned off with ‘POLICE DO NOT CROSS’ tape. A neighbour told me that she thought someone had been murdered, but I didn’t know any more.

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  • Teaching union wants to teach kids to walk

    I’m not making this up. The general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers thinks that his members should be teaching children to walk:

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  • Shellfish and slavery

    The end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the British Empire is being commemorated this weekend, two hundred years after King George III granted royal assent to the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. That slavery was (and remains) morally repugnant, and that its abolition was a good thing, is generally considered to be an incontestable truth.

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  • Tokai Love Rock

    I was idly wandering around the guitar shops in and around Denmark Street last weekend, looking for a new guitar. (I’m on holiday this week, and since I wasn’t actually travelling anywhere, I felt justified in splashing out). I wanted something with two humbuckers and a fixed bridge, something that could handle some blues and jazz and that didn’t look totally metal. (Pointy guitars aren’t my style.) I tried a couple of archtops, a Yamaha and an Ibanez, in the £250-£300 price range, but they failed to inspire me.

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  • Speeding up a random query

    (Warning: this post contains extensive discussion of SQL. Persons of a nervous disposition should exercise caution.)

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  • HTMLEntities 4.0.0

    I’ve finally tied up all the loose ends and released a significantly updated version of my HTMLEntities library that deals with named (X)HTML entities in Ruby.

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  • Microsoft’s HD Photo JPEG challenger

    Microsoft apparently want everyone to start using their HD Photo image format as a replacement for JPEG. They have pledged not to assert patents over it and are going to submit it to an as-yet unnamed standards body.

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  • So long, unpasteurised Camembert

    After arriving home from work, I like to tide myself over until dinner with a snack. As I was eating some excellent Camembert—appellation d’origine controllée, unpasteurised and a stranger to refrigeration since I bought it last week—with a glass of red wine this evening, I recalled a story I heard on the radio last weekend.

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  • Zoom G2 first impressions

    Having upgraded my guitar, my thoughts turned to upgrading my effects. I’ve had my faithful Zoom 505 for about a decade. It was an affordable multi-effect device at the time, and I was pleased with its versatility despite its shortcomings. The biggest flaw was probably the inconvenience of changing the settings with only six buttons: once I had set up some patches I liked, I mostly left them alone.

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  • Humbucker

    My favourite guitar is a Pignose travel guitar which I bought when I lived in Japan. Although the body is diminutive, the neck is full-sized and it plays very well—better than many normal electrics I’ve tried. Unfortunately, its single-coil pickup also picked up a loud electrical hum in my current flat. Hum by itself is annoying; overdriven, it becomes obnoxious.

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  • Great job, chaps!

    One of the roads on my route to work was dug up recently for some cable- or pipe-laying. Whatever they were up to, they’ve finished now, patched up the holes, and moved on.

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  • GHC in MacPorts

    MacPorts, formerly known as DarwinPorts, is a mixed blessing. Sometimes, it performs: it compiles and builds the software requested, and it just works. At other times, one or more of the packages is broken. It literally changes day-to-day: stuff that used to work may not work any more when you want to install it.

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  • E-voting in Estonia

    Most of the coverage of Estonia’s election I’ve read has been positive, spinning their online electronic voting as a world first and example of the forward march of technology.

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  • London: city of yesterday

    The BBC reports on work to replace hundreds of miles of leaky old water pipes in London.

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  • Boot an old Compaq PC without a keyboard

    Old Compaq corporate PCs can be picked up very cheaply (I got a Pentium III/1 GHz/512 MB RAM machine for a project for £59 the other day). They are well-constructed, slim, and it’s easy to access the innards. Unfortunately, their utility as headless devices is hobbled by one frustrating annoyance: they won’t boot without a PS/2 keyboard attached.

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  • The eating of the moon

    The lunar eclipse tonight was particularly good from where I was: despite rain earlier in the day, the sky was clear, and the moon is one of the handful of celestial objects bright enough to be visible over London’s absurd light pollution.

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  • Pub quiz: official languages

    Question 1: In how many countries is Japanese an official language?

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  • Full to the brim

    The Thames was particularly high this afternoon:

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  • Oi, bigots!

    The level of discourse around foreign immigrants can be bad in the UK, but it’s worse in Japan. There’s a lot of casual racism: one example that always used to annoy me was the poster in one station on the Osaka subway warning passengers to beware of pickpockets—illustrated with a blond-haired, big-nosed caricature of a stereotypical gaijin (foreigner). To be fair, though, most of it is driven by ignorance.

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