Monday, July 30, 2012

#PayPal #fail


I wonder why PayPal write this in a refund email.
And then have this on their web site

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Happy Birthday Robert John Godfrey #Enidi


After a cracking 'family' lunch the Enidi ponder the meaning of life before the gig!

Thursday, July 19, 2012

When I said home was that way, 2.5 miles from home...

Rain and hail plummeted down and were really hurting!  My only waterproofing, a bright yellow helmet cover...

I got wetter than a wet thing and cycled through several puddles more than a few inches deep.  Some b•••••d car drivers didn't help.

My shoes are still drying out!

Before the storm, cygnets counted and still 6!


Tuesday, July 17, 2012

#H2G2 well, I've parked my car…

but I don't think that means I have  a brain the size of a planet...

Sunday, July 15, 2012

#RaspberryJam Cambridge - the starting point of something quite special?

Today was a really great day at RaspberryJam; a well managed and timed series of short sharp presentations on what people thought of the Pi, had done with the Pi, had done *to* the Pi (addons etc), and would like to do to the Pi!

Sitting in the crowd the image I took below struck me as reminiscent of something
My friend, @JerryDHarper who was photographing the event for the organisers took this one [coming soon!], which much better illustrates my thinking.


The image that stuck in my mind?  This one

The Home Brew Club Home Brew Club  in 1979.


With the hindsight of three decades, we can see that this club helped start many careers and business (see the Wikipedia link above for more details) - if you want to read more about that era and what came from it, I recommend reading Stephen Levy's book Hackers which I (quite oddly) found on sale in the second hand section of a hotel in Pico in the Azores some years ago.  You can currently buy it second hand from Amazon and Abebooks

More links here:
http://opencollector.org/history/homebrew/index.html
and
http://www.bambi.net/bob/homebrew.html

So, will we look back in 5 or 15 years (things move faster now!) and see an organisation and product that has become folklore in our industry and the source from which many good things sprang?

Comments invited!

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Meet my friends…

At the beginning of the year when (after about 30 years off the bike) I started training for the Help For Heroes Big Battlefield Bike Ride my early runs barely left the house and left me knackered!
As a sharp winter evolved into a wet, cold, breezy, spring my training runs extended and I took in a stretch of country road (1 car wide, no road paint, poor surface) alongside a stretch of river. Within a few weeks I spotted a couple of swan who had setup a nest and were caring for 7 eggs.






Although most times I would whizz (well, whizz-ish) by on a few occasions I would stop and take a few pictures - more interesting as the nest appeared to be mobile and was to be found anywhere in a 2-300 yard stretch of the river.



A couple of months later and just before the bike ride I returned to that part of the world (my routes had taken me further afield) to find that the eggs had hatched, and seven string cygnets were heading for the water to swim with ma & pa; however their necks were still too short to bottom feed - so they would nibble on the bank's grass before setting off.



A month or so, 350 miles, 10,000 feet of elevation and £3,000 of fund raising later…
I was passing the river again stretching my legs after an fortnight off the bike to commence my preparations for the H4H Ride to Recovery at Colchester in September. I was pleased to see the family about and all able to bottom feed. Perhaps not surprisingly the cygnet count was down by 1 - I guess that's probably a success against average attrition rate.



I look forward to a few more sighting over the coming months until they move off to pastures new…

Reflecting on RISC OS at #RaspberryJam

With one of my favourite beers...

Interesting approach to public wifi! #RaspberryJam



#RaspberryJam #Cambridge about to start, with @keithshering and @jerrydharper


Thursday, July 05, 2012

#Microsoft, your .NET patching is really beginning to annoy


You know the score, you install or update something within the .NET framework and that friendly mscorsvw.exe kicks off recompiling assemblies for you (a good thing) and takes up nearly all your CPU.
But when you have an occasionally used machine, it might be nice if it did not do it for each of 10-20 patches for the framework.  And not in turn for each one.  It’s bloody annoying, especially when that machine has been turned on especially for an unplanned piece of work.
Is there a good reason it cannot be run once, after the last patch is applied?  Or is that just too sensible…

(added later)
Yes I know you can park the jobs, or run them later, or drop the priority.  But the whole point of the patching is to be done under the covers, and just done seamlessly and easily.  Not to intrude so much!

London 2012 - a decent app, but wasting valuable screen space for this...


Strewth, what a bad idea. I have the app,why prompt me to get it?