Archive: 2007-12
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.
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!
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.
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”’:
Dazed and Contused
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.
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!
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.
Step away from the keyboard
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.
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.
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.
