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 ...
Recent Posts
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, ...
Why is the media obsessed with attacking Oxbridge?
Another June, another article in the Daily Mail about drunken students in Cambridge. Toffs! Idiots! Posh wasters! I'm not condoning binge drinking or loutish...
Dear Internet, any ideas for a free(ish) room booking system?
I've been tasked with finding a room booking/hiring system for St Columba's. Requirements: Booking of different spaces by different users Ability to generat...
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 ...