martial arts
Interview with Alan Ruddock and Henry Kono

I spent a pleasant weekend last week in Dublin at Fiona's Dojo. It was good to see lots of people, including Aureli, who has started up a new dojo in the north west. The course was being given by Alan Ruddock and Henry Kono, and Alan heads the Aiki No Michi, the organisation to which […]

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programming
Geany and other Development Tools

I've tried lots of programming editors and ides over the years, obviously in Unix and Linux this is a Holy War, particularly between the advocates of vi and emacs. It is common for both groups to suggest that the other editor is hopelessly over-complex or clumsy. I think there's some truth in that, because essentially, […]

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STEM
Battlestar Galactica near Earth

I have to say, I've enjoyed the "re-imagining" of Battlestar Galactica immensely so far. When it first aired, I thought it was a pretty corny idea, and didn't watch it, but I watched an odd episode here and there, and I began to realise that this was probably the most slick, dramatic, special effects laden […]

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STEM
Wheeler goes through the last event horizon

This week, John Archibald Wheeler died, from pneumonia at the age of 96. Wheeler was a spectacular physicist, who worked in the areas of General Relativity among other areas, he is the guy who popularised the words "black hole" and "wormhole", and worked with Einstein in his last years. I hadn't known that he had […]

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php
Fixing truncated printing with Firefox

A while ago, I discovered that my current main development project OPUS had an odd problem when printing out of a gecko based browser. It would print the first page, whether in portrait or landscape, and if there was more content, it would be abruptly truncated and the second page would contain merely the footer […]

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Free Software
Tux droid isn't free

Ok, so I should have checked an odd message I saw when I installed the 32 bit debs, but now I know that tux droid is not entirely free. As some of you will know I've had some spectacular bad luck with failing hardware both at home and at work recently. A few weeks ago […]

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martial arts
Sword ban comes into force

It seems that on the 6th April the long awaited ban on Japanese swords came into effect in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I don't know what the situation is in Scotland. Remarkably, even in the jurisdictions that enforce the new ban, there is considerable confusion about its extent. UTV have reported, totally erroneously, that […]

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