Archives

Categories

I’m an Aspie

I’ve recently been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (AS) [1]. Among other things this means that I am genetically predisposed to have an interest in solving technical problems and give lectures about how I solved them, but that I tend not to be a “people-person”.

AS is generally regarded as an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but […]

New Play Machine

Update: Thanks to Sven Joachim and Andrew Pollock for informing me about /etc/init.d/mountoverflowtmp which exists to mount a tmpfs named overflow if /tmp is full at boot time. It appears that the system was not compromised. But regular reinstalls are always a good thing.

On the 24th of August this year I noticed the following […]

WordPress Plugins

I’ve just added the WordPress Minify [1] plugin to my blog. It’s purpose is to combine CSS and Javascript files and to optimise them for size and it’s based on the Minify project [2]. On my documents blog this takes the main page from 313KB uncompressed, 169KB compressed, and a total of 23 HTTP transfers […]

Virtual Hosting Features

I’ve just been setting up new virtual servers at Linode [1] and Slicehost [2]. I have previously written a review of both those services [3], based on that review (and some other discussions) one of my clients now has a policy of setting up pairs of virtual servers for various projects, one server at Linode […]

Mobile Phones Are Computers

One thing I noticed when I got my new LG U990 Viewty [1] mobile phone is the way the core telephony functionality has suffered while features for web browsing etc have been added. It seems that the core phone functionality (making and receiving calls and maintaining a list of names and phone numbers) has generally […]

TPG Lies

Shortly before 9AM this morning I discovered that the IP address for my mail server was not being routed, according to my logs the problem started shortly after midnight. It’s on a TPG ADSL connection, there is one IP address for the PPPOE link and 6 addresses in a /29 routed to it – one […]

New Servers – a non-virtual Cloud

NewServers.com [1] provides an interesting service. They have a cloud computing system that is roughly comparable to Amazon EC2, but for which all servers are physical machines (blade servers with real disks). This means that you get the option of changing between servers and starting more servers at will, but they are all physical systems […]

Gnash and use of Free Software

There is currently a discussion on a private mailing list about whether some money from a community organisation should be used to assist the development of Gnash (the free software Flash player) [1]. The main reason for this is that there are apparently some schools that depend on flash web sites to such a degree […]

Bad but Appealing Copyright Arguments

Some people seem to believe that the problem with copyright law is the inability of people on the free culture side of the debate to compete with the large amounts of money that are being spent but the RIAA et al.

I think that a significant part of the problem is that many intelligent and […]

Free Books and T-Shirt Sales

Cory Doctorow has written an interesting column for the Locus Magazine about his experience in giving away free copies of his books [1]. Mainly he rants about some of the criticism he has received, initially it was people claiming that giving away books for free only worked because he was not a well known author, […]