The “Mosquito” anti-loitering system apparently still exists (shows how much I visit shopping centres), and somehow is still up for discussion in the House of Commons. I don’t believe I’ve publicly vented my spleen on this subject before, so here goes. I’ve said before that society isn’t broken, but if you’re looking for an example …
From Tory plans for communities to create their own schools to Guardian hacks begging for alternative currencies, ex-Soviet strategies for social collapse to alarmist talk of counter-insurgency on American soil, there has been a lot of talk lately about the advantages of small, self-sufficient communities over the single one-size-fits-all approach of the nation state. Half …
Despite its sponsorship by a twice-disgraced and unelected politician, despite the fact that it was transparently lobbied for by companies representing the record labels, despite it carrying disproportionate punishments for file-sharers, despite it seeking to undermine the work of content creators, despite a promise to oppose it from the Lib Dems, still the Digital Economy …
At a loss for other, more pleasant subjects to blog about, I will instead write about my nemesis, that being that has brought naught but pain to my life. I speak, of course, of Microsoft Sharepoint. To upgrade one’s version of Windows — Vista to 7, say — is by and large a pretty painless …
In his essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, Eric S. Raymond coins the phrase “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” — meaning that with enough testers and enough programmers, it is possible to diagnose and fix any software bug. So why can’t my computer suspend and resume properly? The concept of ‘suspend’ — or …
So, I got home today to discover a nice polite letter put under our flat door. This enlightened us to the fact that representatives of the energy company E-on had tried to visit today “to discuss any problems [I] may have paying”, and that I should contact them as soon as possible, otherwise they would …
Yesterday, I had a simple if statement. It looked like this: if ((Frames.FramesLdPtr>Frames.FramesUlPtr) && (InterPFlags.RequestInitialisation==0)) { doSomeStuff(); // with function and variable names that might be classified =S } This should not trigger under normal circumstances, but for some reason it triggered repeatedly, every second or so. Breakpointing inside the if block, FramesLdPtr and FramesUlPtr …
Beware, techie ranting ahead. I have learned one important lesson over the last three weeks: Never, ever work with hardware. We have this board – I shan’t say exactly what it does for obvious reasons, but suffice to say that it generates signals and sends them, and sometimes receives signals and processes them. And, three …
This is a thought exercise around the idea of an idealised democracy. I do not pretend that it is likely to be achieved at any point, nor do intend to actively campaign for it. Your thoughts and comments are welcome. On the whole my country, the United Kingdom, does Democracy pretty well. One only has …
Code monkey, wannabe novelist, net-junkie, gamer and all-round geek.
