Nick Kew
Discussions
Travel from UK
--Is anyone else taking the luxury[1] option of travelling UK-NL by ferry? I gave it a try last year, and was so happy with it that this year I insi...
Blog Posts
Pot - kettle
--Our foreign secretary is reported as warning Russia off starting a new cold war. Or words to that effect. Someone remind me: which two governments...
Cheese Fair
--It’s that time of year again. The Tavistock Cheese Fair at the town hall, organised by Country Cheeses. A great chance for cheese-lovers to...
SWMBO
--The term SWMBO normally signifies one to whom a chap has voluntarily given away his freedom. But have you noticed how a woman with whom you have n...
Blackberries
--Today I have, as ever in the autumn season, stung and shredded hands. For I have been out blackberrying and collected a decent crop. Now that the...
mod_sed
--I blogged about mod_sed a couple of months ago. At the time, I think I explained in outline why it’s an advance on its predecessors, includi...
Lots of family
--My brother miq and his wife Sock-Cheng are in Blighty for a visit. Since they live in Auckland (S-C being a kiwi), this is a rare event. So a fam...
Solar Energy: Handouts for the Rich
--Today’s junkmail: someone providing solar energy for the home. Oh, and the private swimming pool. With big subsidies: up to 100% on selecte...
Virtualised!
--My slice is up-and-running, and all major services appear to work, though there’ll doubtless be glitches. Yesterday I updated DNS to point t...
Wet and Wild!
--This is our second consecutive wet summer. Not least, lots of rain this past week, so the river is again high and vigorous - and fun. I’ve d...
Open Sourcing Sun’s Web stuff
--When Sun opened Solaris, they opened a new era of cross-fertilisation with other projects. Sun, like other vendors, benefits from the work of a mu...
slicehost
--Following the way DrBacchus and pctony have led, I’ve subscribed to slicehost. All being well, I’ll migrate all my online presence the...
Poaching^WHiring!
--Sun has been hiring! Now that it’s official, I can welcome my new colleagues in the WebStack team. And did I mention, one of them was former...
A hell I’d forgotten …
--I’ve been independent for so long, I’ve been able to organise myself to avoid most of the worst things people inflict on themselves. F...
Convenience
--Yay! We’ve got our public loo back in the centre of town! It’s quite an attractive building from the outside, being of old, darkish st...
Yay for Zones!
--Well, I’ve still no idea what killed my SFW build. But after further attempts to fix or work around it, I’ve gone for an alternative ap...
Gnome apes Windows
--OpenSolaris is sometimes disparagingly dubbed things like “Project Copy Linux”. The comment has some truth in it: there are elements i...
Confuzzled
--Still (evidently) not got to grips with the SFW consolidation. Having successfully executed a full build with one additional module, I thought I wa...
What’s so great about the Goog?
--As we all know, Google is the best search engine and the most useful single site on the ‘net. Not that it’s perfect, and outside of it...
The most gruelling fruit …
--What fruit is the most gruelling, while also the most satisfying and the most gorgeous? My candidate: wild blueberries. Collecting them from here ...
SFW
--Continuing my epic Adventures in OpenSolaris, I was able to burn a DVD of SXCE. I’m happy to report that since then I’ve installed SXCE...
Apache: sponsorship vs membership
--It seems Microsoft’s sponsorship of the ASF is being mis-reported as membership, for example here. That is not merely wrong: it’s impos...
Apache += Microsoft (sponsorship)
--Another OSCON announcement: Microsoft is joining Google and Yahoo as a Platinum Sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. That means an additiona...
Ban the Knife!
--Our powers-that-be, including the meeja, seem to have got into something of a frenzy over knife crime. The opposition thinks that mere posession o...
Enron Accounting
--When Enron collapsed, we heard the trouble was with off-balance-sheet liabilities that had been hidden. Today, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are reve...
Portable Computing
--I’ve had a laptop for years. The current MacBook is smaller, better made and more robust and portable than its predecessors. But it’s...
Sensationalist Humbug
--Last night, BBC radio started reporting a big security flaw in “the internet’s addressing system”. While maddeningly unspecific ...
slocate on opensolaris
--If you’re looking for how to get slocate on opensolaris working, skip to the bottom of the article for step-by-step instructions. Getting up ...
In spate!
--Our river is seriously in spate. Indeed, it’s the first time since last year’s works that it’s gone over the salmon chute. I wa...
What is £13400 a year?
--Someone called the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is reported as saying a single person needs £13400 a year to live an acceptable lifestyle, whatever t...
Lidl coming to Tavistock
--About a week ago, a circular came through the door. Not quite junkmail: this was from Lidl, who are consulting us (the people of Tavistock) about ...
Unequal Opportunities.
--’twas in 1992 I went for this job interview. I know because that’s the year my (fixed-term) research job at Sheffield ended, and I was...
Here be dragons!
--The dragon in our mythology is characterised by many things. But perhaps most interesting is that they’ll sit on a hoard of gold, jealously ...
mod_proxy_html 3.1-dev
--I’ve just started hacking a new mod_proxy_html update. The rationale is that all the internationalisation support in 3.0 should be shared by ...
Power consumption trends.
--I just looked at my latest electricity bill. EDF (the supplier) appears to have introduced a usage measure, showing my comparative consumption now...
Wrong question, right answer?
--The Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty is a serious problem for the EU. It should never have happened, on multiple levels, and for different rea...
Apache 2.2.9
--Just a heads-up to anyone who hasn’t seen it elsewhere. Apache 2.2.9 is now an official release, and should be available from the mirrors by...
Davis for Freedom!
--Shadow home secretary David Davis has resigned, and will fight a by-election. I’m not sure I agree 100% with the catalyst, which is an increm...
You know it’s summer when …
--… the gooseberries appear in one of my regular shops (mmm). So many delicious summer fruits and berries have artificially-extended seasons th...
Inflation!
--‘Absolutely horrendous’? Or absolutely predictable? The first is an economist quoted by the BBC, on the subject of today’s produ...
Disjointed thinking
--We know that the powers-that-be can’t do joined-up thinking and come up with coherent policies. The coincidence of two news items today illus...
Grrrr …
--Talk about ripoff! Yesterday I booked a weekend in Truro. At £85/night (b&b) for an “executive room”, I expected some modest measu...
Cost^H^HBenefit of not having a car
--On Saturday Evening, I’m taking part in The Dream of Gerontius, at Truro Cathedral. The Plymouth Philharmonic choir - in which I regularly s...
Where’s the larder?
--I’ve just had a pint of good English beer with my meal. As one does from time to time. It’s a premium beer with a great flavour. But ...
Wind Hazard!
--The last couple of days have been rather windy. Today it got stronger, and was accompanied by intermittent rain. That’s more like October/N...
Stand up for fatties!
--Was it not Martin Luther King who said we should judge a man “not by the colour of his skin, but by the content of his character“? Wh...
Lack of Entropy
--Much has been said about the Debian/OpenSSL bug by people closer to it than I am. An expert view comes from Ben Laurie, who lays in to the Debian...
Mind-numbing!
--So that’s how MSIE is an essential core component of Windows, and can’t possibly be removed! As with any other geek, people expect me t...
Lydford white water
--Lydford Gorge is small, but it’s about as close as you get in England (south of the Lake District) to real scenery. That is to say, the word...
Two computers, one desk
--Since the Sun box arrived, I’ve been struggling with the logistics of my workspace. Clearing the desk for the shiny new 24″ monitor was...
Sun is hiring!
--Sun’s webstack team is hiring! The web stack is strongly focussed on open source solutions, centred on the LAMP[1] stack and variants on thos...
Hyperactive akismet
--quasi (mads) just pinged me on IRC. He’d made a comment on my latest blog entry, but it hadn’t appeared. And another on May 1st, whic...
Mailer for solaris
--The new solaris box came with Thunderbird installed as a default mailer. It works for mail once I’ve disabled crap like pseudo-HTML composit...
A coronation and a kingmaker
--Have Londoners elected a joke? Or can the exuberant upper-class twit mature, like Prince Hal[1], into a great leader? My guess is that he can and ...
Solaris!
--Yay! I’ve set up the new solaris box, and I can do things like blog from it. Things are progressing! There’s still much to do, of cou...
New delivery
--My workstation from Sun has just arrived. It’s in two huge boxes: one containing the workstation itself, the other a 24″ monitor (Luxu...
sed in apache
--We have a history of general-purpose sed-like filtering in apache. In chronological order: sed-like filter for Apache 1.3. sed with mod_ext_filte...
Tavistock jobsworth
--I always thought Tavistock’s indoor market had quite a lot to recommend it. Bustling, lively, and with some (though by no means all) good st...
Clueless?
--RIP Humph. If you’re a brit, you can’t've missed the news. For others, they’ve just announced the death of Humphrey Lyttleton, c...
Those who can, do …
--… those who can neither do nor teach, run the NUT. Today I’m glad I don’t have children, as the National Union of Teachers (one o...
Getting to know the new mount
--Today I went out for the third time on my new steed. I’ve still yet to do any longer distance (like a full or even half day ride): today was...
Bare Protectionism?
--Heathrow, London’s (and Britain’s) main airport, has been a disgrace for as long as I’ve been around, and I first used it as a ch...
Drop the “10p” rate
--Right now there’s a media and political storm about dropping the so-called 10p[1] bottom rate of income tax. There is merit in the central co...
Sanitising user-contributed markup
--At ApacheCon, I once again encountered the argument sanitising markup is difficult, with an explanation of how easy it is to evade pattern-matching...
Taxing times
--A big downside to working for Sun is that it puts me onto bog-standard PAYE for all my main income. So I lose the tax-efficiencies I’ve hith...
New steed!
--I’ve just made it to my local bike shop to pick up my new steed. Unfortunately I don’t have time today for a ride, beyond the short st...
Now everybank’s a Northern Rock!
--The amount of money being paid by the taxpayertreasury to bail out the banking system as a whole is spiraling rapidly. Though it’s not targe...
Bizarre
--Occasionally I follow a wordpress tag. On my own blog, to find an old article. Or on wordpress as a whole. The latter shows a “featured bl...
Royalties and Translations!
--I arrived home today to my second royalty cheque for the book. This one, which is for the period July-December 2007, is sadly smaller than the pre...
Memorial Bench
--I guess it’s a sign of getting older, when someone I’ve known all my life is reduced to a name on a memorial bench on the seafront at H...
Putting ones money where ones mouth is …
--Two of three days of the main conference now gone. I’ve met a number of people I’ve not seen before, and seen some interesting present...
Apache 3.0
--OK, since last week was the time for mischievous fun, let’s start by making it perfectly clear that Apache 3.0 is vapourware! Roy’s key...
A glimpse of Afghanistan
--This afternoon i took an hour out to go to the Afghanistan exhibition that’s on in Amsterdam. Fascinating stuff. Though I was disappointed ...
Corporate hotel bookings
--I’ve been fuming at Amex, who deal with all Sun’s business travel, for being useless. First with my trip to California, and now Amster...
I got plenty of music
--That is to say, this afternoon. On arriving in Amsterdam, I discovered from a leaflet at the hotel that a production Porgy and Bess is in town. It...
Travel to ApacheCon
--I’m in Amsterdam for ApacheCon,+Hackathon, which starts tomorrow. Hope and expect to have an interesting week. The journey went pretty smoot...
Checklist
--Am I ready for departure to Amsterdam? Ticket - to be collected at London Liverpool Street (eticket) Passport - check Euros - check. Dammit, just...
Flexible configuration for Apache
--How best to improve Apache’s configuration syntax is a hot topic just now, with a camp wanting to bring in Lua as a solution to all problems....
New Bike
--I’ve ordered a new bike today. On Tuesday I went in to one of our Tavistock LBSs, and asked them to do a bit of work on my folding bike. I a...
i18n and filters
--mod_proxy_html 3.0 introduced charset conversion using apr_xlate (iconv). Later I decided to extract that out into its own module mod_xml2enc, rat...
Porting apache to Java platform
--The Apache webserver runs on a wide range of platforms, from the mainstream Unix-family (including Linux, Mac, etc) and Windows through to minority...
Expression parser for Apache
--Over the past few days I’ve got a long-awaited round tuit, and given Apache a general-purpose expression parser, ap_expr. That’s in tr...
ApacheCon for Brits
--Following my exceptionally pleasant journey last year, I’m once again booked to travel to Amsterdam by train+ferry for ApacheCon the week aft...
Turkish Apache!
--Thanks to a recent contribution from a handful of Turkish volunteers with roots in Linux, we have a shiny new Turkish translation of the apache web...
Let’s be clear: The Apache Software Foundation has no position on OOXML.
--Microsoft’s OOXML, and in particular the way its going about trying to create a standard of it, is one of the big controversies in IT today. ...
thinking about catching up …
--Can one, these days, get a mortgage on something like the following terms? Since I’ve lost the tax-flexibility of self-employment, I need to...
More red tape
--Sarah was round here this afternoon. Wanted me to countersign a passport renewal application. Called on me ‘cos I was in the right place at...
Sun and Apache
--A belated blog post on a subject that’s now a week old … It seems I’m not the only ASF member to have just joined Sun. Ted Leung...
Why is food like humour?
--For my last night in sunny California (and yes, it’s been sunny and fine throughout my time here), I went to the posh italian-flavoured resta...
the ‘merkin hot topic
--Since my visit to the US coincides with a somewhat interesting time in US politics, perhaps I should join half the rest of the world in commenting ...
San Francisco
--Yesterday I made it in to the big city. I left the hotel at 8 a.m. and jumped on the caltrain to San Francisco. That was a much longer journey tha...
mariani’s inn, santa clara
--I have to give this place a writeup, because I have rarely felt so positive about somewhere I’ve stayed. I’m moving out because the lo...
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