An interesting article on the ridiculousness of Britain's libel laws:
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/31/simon-singh-science
May 2009 Archives
A while ago I was bitching about fast double bass. Most of that still stands. However, now that I'm a bit fitter (from running) and have practised a lot, I can actually do the really fast double bass stuff, for short bursts anyway. 16ths at 220+ bpm and all. No Longboards were required.
It's really quite good fun. So I like it now. Go figure.
My gorgeous HP laptop shipped with Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit. For the most part, I'm pretty happy with this - VIsta 64-bit is very stable, pretty fast, and properly supported by the vendor. There is a little problem, though, and I want to share it.
THERE'S NO FUCKING FULL-SYSTEM BACKUP FEATURE ON VISTA HOME PREMIUM.
Let me run that by you again:
THERE'S ...
Ok, enough. My point, even though this is my blog that hardly anyone reads so I don't actually need a point and anyway so what, is that it is criminally stupid to ship an OS without a proper backup program. Every (NT-based) version of Windows before Vista shipped with a basic but entirely competent backup system.
Vista Business has a full-system backup, but Vista Home Premium does not. This is odd; for a business user, the chances are that (a) you have a standard OS image that someone else manages, and (b) you would be a fucking idiot to have data you need only on the laptop. [The world isn't short of idiots, of course, so that kind of data loss happens all the time.] On a home PC, you'd have none of that; further, you're unlikely to have someone competent enough to reinstall for you. It's completely the wrong way round - home users have more need for a full backup than business users.
So now I have to buy something to do a job XP could do perfectly well for itself. Let's see how that goes.
I just read this wonderful article by Andrew Rawnsley in the Guardian. It's truly tragic that our national debate is dominated by grubbiness on the part of our elected representatives. As Rawnsley says, more tragic still is the repeated, hollow cries of 'it was all within the rules'.
I do not believe for a second that our MPs, many of whom are very highly educated, believe for a second that the public's issue is whether or not they acted within a set of self-imposed, poorly-enforced rules. The issue is that what they are doing is clearly wrong.
A non-MP defrauding the taxman in this way would be jailed. MPs set their own guidelines, stretch them far beyond their spirit and to the very limits of their letter, and then complain when the taxpaying public and their other representatives, the media, take the time to notice. It's absurd, and I think that most MPs know that very well.
I'm all for MPs being paid better. We'll get better MPs that way.
Back in the old days, when I ran my own email server on qmail, I used 'hyphen' addresses to identify where spams were coming from, and to make writing filters easier. E.g. bob-facebook@domain.com would end up in bob's mailbox. That's essentially a qmail feature, and Google Apps/gmail and Postini don't support it.
Gmail and Postini do support 'plussed' addresses, bob+facebook@domain.com. That's the Sendmail way of doing things. Annoying, but hardly surprising, that Sendmail and Dan Bernstein don't do things the same way.
Trouble is, I have lots of these 'aliases' set up, and no real database of where they go. So, in order to make it work, I set up the gmail default address to go to my mailbox. That's not great, because it means that all the random shite sent by spammers to nonexistent addresses ends up in my inbox, rather than getting smacked down by Postini.
The level of nonexistent address spam has become unacceptable. I've become used to not getting any spam, so getting ten mails a day to a nonexistent address just isn't good enough. I've added (at cost!) another Apps account to which I direct the default address, so I can figure out which hyphen aliases I'm actually using. Once I've captured the important ones, I'll either change the target email address or add specific aliases in gmail, then turn off the default address feature.
This would be a lot easier to solve if gmail supported wildcard or regex searches. Sigh.
I have a really gorgeous new laptop, an HP X16-1280EA. It's very fast, and its screen is just wonderful. I was saving up my happiness for a truly, simply positive and glowing blog entry, just for a change
I've spent days trying to be a good boy, and not nuking the preinstalled Vista 64 Home Premium install. Of course, I had to make a few changes - Norton Internet Security was causing startup to take minutes longer than it should, so that's history. I have AVG Internet Security instead, which I like, but the AVG firewall is off because, despite what they say, VMware is broken with it on. The Windows firewall works fine. I've had to patch almost everything up to date, of course.
Still, I haven't reinstalled, or changed to Ubuntu, or downgraded to XP, or any of the usual stuff. I want to be able to use the fingerprint scanner to login. I want Bluetooth and the Blu Ray player to work. I want the array of touch controls above the keyboard to do what they're supposed to do. I want a laptop for dev and games, not a 'project'.
And now the fucking battery has failed. There goes the neighbourhood. Yes, HP are going to replace it - good. It may take 10-15 working days to arrive - very bad. In any case, shipping a dodgy battery on a top-end laptop is poor.
What a shame. I love the machine, I really do.
Stumbled upon this, only a week or so late: Python is moving to the Mercurial (Hg) version control system. How spiffy - another VCS tool to learn.
I'm sure it's a sign of good health that there are so many credible VC choices now, instead of everyone being stuck with either CVS, SourceSafe, PVCS or ClearCase. On the other hand, it means a whole bunch of different (but very similar) commands and options to learn, which is a pain. Oh well.
At least Hg is a properly distributed VCS. I quite like Subversion, probably because I'm used to it, but it's a nuisance to have to keep phoning home all the time. I didn't spend enough time using git to get really comfortable with it, but it made a lot more sense to me. I used svk at work for a little while, and whilst I could admire it and even be impressed with it, it never became something I actually liked using.
Next problem: As I use Eclipse more and more, every VCS has to have hooks into idezilla to become really useful to me. I hope Hg shapes up.
Publishing pages to this site is way too slow. Trying a few tweaks. If they don't work, it's complaint time.
