My fantasy Lord of the Rings cast
It just struck me that Alan Rickman would have played Denethor much better than whoever it was in the Peter Jackson movie. That idea has opened the floodgates… Read the rest of this entry »
Imbolc’s supposed to be the first day of Spring
It certainly doesn’t look like Spring out there tonight. I was going to cycle to work tomorrow, not sure if I’ll make it now.
The Latest News from the World of Cats
Miaow! Miaow! Mew mew mew. Miu miu. Mrrrrww rrrrwwwwrrrww…. Mrrrwww.
Miaow!
Rrrrrwww mmmm…. rrrrwwww mmmm… mmmrrrrwww….
Proot!
Double-Glazing Film
I’ve just added double-glazing film to the windows in our hall, landing and living-room. It’s fantastic!
The windows in our house are the original single-glazed wood frames. We’ve kept them for three reasons - we like them, they’re in good condition, and all the advice suggests that new double glazed windows are bad for the environment, and not cost-effective.
The glazing film is really cheap though. It looks virtually invisible and it has made a huge difference to how warm our house feels. It’s fun to put up too - you stick the film around the window and then stretch it flat by heating it with a hair-dryer.
So, double-glazing film for the win!
Let’s boycott UK ISP censors.
Wordpress Multi-Widget
I’ve decided that I hate Wordpress’ multi-widget “API”, so I’ve written a cleaner interface for it: class MultiWidget
Monkeysphere
The Monkeysphere project looks interesting. It basically integrates ssh authentication with the OpenPGP web-of-trust. So a server admin can create an account for a new user with only his OpenPGP identity - basically just an e-mail address. There’s no need to have a separate ssh public-key - the PGP public-key is used instead.
Why is this interesting? Well, it sounds like it might become a single-sign-on arrangement that’s actually useful. Microsoft’s Active Directory is widely used in business, and offers administrators an easy life that’s hard to reproduce in the Unix world. That’s partly for technical reasons (open source LDAP servers are hard to set-up) but also partly due to a different focus: AD requires a central authentication server, an idea that doesn’t fit well with the distributed nature of many open-source projects. While AD is top-down hierarchical, Monkeysphere seems to be much more freewheeling and democratic.
Secondly, it’ll encourage people to actually start using the OpenPGP web-of-trust infrastructure. It’s been possible to send and receive encrypted e-mails for well over a decade, yet encryption remains a backwater. I’d love to be able to discard all unsigned mail - that would eliminate my Spam problem overnight.
I can dream, can’t I…
Remove Textile from a Wordpress blog
Here’s a Python script to remove Textile mark-up from a Wordpress blog.
Download the script here: untextile.py
Oracle’s ‘proc’ program leaks temporary files
proc is a program that ‘compiles’ Pro*C into C or C++. It’s shocking that a big company like Oracle could produce something so shoddy. Read the rest of this entry »