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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Samurai Teen?
Today, the BBC News reported on a 'Samurai teen out for revenge'. It's not at all clear who added the quotes and why, but the young teenager, from Newcastle, Northern Ireland, luxuriating in the ancient samurai name of "Rocco Burns", took his 'Samurai Sword' out to wreak revenge on several people who allegedly assaulted him. […]
Marvell Technology 88SE6121 SATA II Controller
When I returned from the Christmas holidays to work, I found my computer there was showing signs of impeding disk failure, and shortly thereafter I could no longer boot it due to massive corruption of the disk sectors where the C library resides. I decided we better get a SATA disk (noting there were SATA […]
ASUS P5KC Memory / PSU Problems
Ok, I spoke to soon. I thought video was my only problem. On Tuesday I planned to work at home, to get a lot of code written for OPUS and found my computer locked. I kept restarting it, kept getting kernel panics. The temperature was fine, there was no abnormal load, I tried a new […]