Free Software
Debian's navel gazing

Debian is my favourite distribution of GNU/Linux. It's a well respected and well known brand, although I was almost stunned while on business in London last Friday to meet someone who knew about Suse, and Red Hat but wasn't even aware of the existence of Debian. I like Debian's astonishing infrastructure, and its community led […]

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Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah

Ok. I dislike the X-Factor. I think Ben Elton's book Chart Throb pretty much says it all. I managed to watch very little of it this year (harder than it sounds given the exposure you get from other people) but did manage to be totally oblivious to the outcome. I remain so, with pride. However, […]

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STEM
Crashing Cars

Consider two identical cars, each travelling at a constant velocity v towards each other. Suppose that they crash, and to simplify things, let's not consider any rebound. Then the energy of each is kinetic in nature and so the energy of the crash is given by Ok. That's a nice way to show the energy […]

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Free Software
Dear LazyWeb, Icedove/Thunderbird is annoying because...

I use Icedove for mail mainly (the Debian variant of Thunderbird - a long and not very interesting story). I generally like it. I've used pine and mutt, but generally get too much stuff to view to make a text mode editor much fun. I've used evolution, but it was for a long time very […]

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STEM
Einstein and Eddington

On Saturday night, quite by accident, I sat down to watch "Einstein and Eddington" on the BBC. Einstein has been an inspiration to me from an early age, and I'd known a lot about his life and work, and for many years a picture of him has adorned my room or office, though not at […]

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BBC Logical Paradox

I was just reading the BBC's article about the leaked details of BNP members.. It's an interesting story, although of course here in Northern Ireland we have our own unique brand of prejudiced politics. (This reminds me of Frankie Boyle joking about Al Qaeda trying to bring religious intolerance to Scotland, that they were centuries […]

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Windows "anti-virus"

Today I was asked to look at a computer that was claiming to be infested by viruses following clicking on a link from facebook. This was of course a Windows situation, so I was unsure how much help I could be given how long it's been since I had to use Windows. Anyway, I booted […]

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hardware
More on Debian on the Toshiba R500

Previously, I wrote about installing Debian GNU/Linux on the Toshiba Portege R500. Most of the information is still current, but I'm writing a follow up to address other things I got working and questions people have posed me. Bluetooth Support I still need to patch the kernel to get bluetooth support working. At the moment […]

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Free Software
Guided LVM in Debian

I recently reinstalled one of the boxes here, Lorien, from scratch. It was a brand new SATA disk and I used the Debian Lenny beta 2 installer. I'd never tried LVM before, I'd always used "normal" partitioning, but for some reason I figured I'd give this a shot. It all worked ok, but it left […]

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STEM
In 2008, you might still need to lie about your OS

Today my sister-in-law, Siobhan, asked me to help her debug her brand new Sky ADSL set-up. She told me her PC, with a wireless adapter, was connecting OK, but she couldn't get onto the internet at large. I was relieved I had decided to throw my laptop in my bag when I came down to […]

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