Recent Posts

Don’t deal with the XKCD store

Just a quick note to say, don't ever even think of buying anything from the XKCD store. My experience: 16 July: placed order on behalf of myself and several ...

Radio and ‘progress’

My 2005-era travel radio Bad news. I woke up this morning to a nasty crackling sound instead of Jack FM. And from this we must conclude that my much-lov...

Health, wealth and happiness

A couple of weeks ago, on Monday 13 August, most of the UK was either at work or on a deck chair out back, looking forward to the Olympic closing ceremony. A...

Backups

Back in January, we had a break-in at St Columba's. Some ill-mannered individual smashed their way in and trashed quite a lot of cupboard doors. Ultimately, ...

Progress!

Fully ten years after I painstakingly typed out track titles and artist names when ripping old LPs onto CDs, to populate an arcane feature called CD-Text, st...

The port 0 trick

The port 0 trick came in handy when writing eximunit, and it's something surprisingly few developers know about, so I thought it worth recounting here: The p...

Housekeeping

I've decided to give up on maintaining my own SVN server - Mercurial is my version control of choice these days, and for the scale of the open source stuff I...

Introducing eximunit

For a few years now, I've run a hosting co-operative with a few friends. Although the cost savings versus all renting VMs individually are probably marginal ...