random musings
Fred Carroll (1945 - 2015)

A picture of my father, Fred Carroll, a zoologist by education, an archaeologist by career, who died this week. I unfortunately only met him once as an adult but was very glad for that, and that we corresponded subsequently. I sent him a number of pictures of Aimee and Matilda which delighted him. He was […]

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martial arts
Grading in the Martial Arts

Last week Donal and I got involved in answering some questions about grading from folks in our aikido club. I thought I would put some of my thoughts here. Other people's thoughts will vary and I'd welcome other perspectives in the comments. These are perspectives on grading in Japanese martial arts, but particularly aikido. They […]

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Free Software
Boot problems with systemd? Check /etc/fstab

My (actually this) Debian server failed to boot after a power failure last week, it turns out the graphics card failed too, probably because of the cold and the thermal shock, but replacing the card did not allow the computer to boot. With systemd, if something happens in the boot process, despite some obviously specific […]

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Free Software
Manually completing a botched django migration

I wrote a lot of code for my Workload Allocation system on Friday, and had been developing it on the machine with django's built in lightweight web server, and a (default) sqlite database backend. In production I decided to use a MySQL backend in case sqlite was, well, too lite. One of the things that […]

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