tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68630892012-01-15T19:33:25.239ZRandom thoughts and ideas from a French geek in LondonBrunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.comBlogger5481100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-15329132030411370722012-01-15T19:01:00.002Z2012-01-15T19:33:25.248Z

We all know that we should have smoke alarms fitted in our homes. Those alarms can be damaged and will need replacing every ten years or so anyway. So what do you do with the old ones? Chuck them in the bin? Well, the fact that they are the subject of a best practice guide on the National Household Hazardous Waste Forum suggests that this is probably not the right solution. And indeed, looking

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-76535919666874020742012-01-13T21:11:00.000Z2012-01-13T21:11:47.527Z

Last week-end I visited the John Lewis web site and bought a couple of Buiani folding chairs. I was advised that they would be delivered within 7 days via a standard delivery service, as opposed to the specialist delivery service you get when you buy larger items and who are very good. So when I came back home on Wednesday night, I found a very large (more on that later) cardboard box outside

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-47361714007388020762011-12-30T00:07:00.000Z2011-12-30T00:07:21.065Z

I travelled on Eurostar today and learnt something about non-exchangeable, non-refundable tickets in the process so thought I'd share in case it can be useful to someone else. Eurostar sells several types of tickets in several classes (Standard, Standard Premier and Business Premier). The higher the class and the more flexible the ticket, the greater the price. So the cheapest tickets are

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-81073556196625014322011-05-28T00:50:00.000+01:002011-05-28T00:50:45.881+01:00

Received today from a colleague: Please note that if somebody opens Build log excel in Microsoft excel 2007 and updates it while a filter put on any column, the file crashes. So please avoid updating the build log in Microsoft excel 2007. So we're talking about a fairy simple file created in Excel 2003 that crashes Excel 2007 if you try to update it while a filter is set on any column...

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-71220480710896906322011-04-21T23:27:00.003+01:002011-04-25T18:11:03.199+01:00

I am at my mum's for Easter and one of the first things she asked me to look at had to do with her computer. She had this document that she wrote using Microsoft Works aeons ago that she wanted to open again. Of course, she's now using Microsoft Word and Word has no idea how to open Works files, even though both products are produced from the same software company. What to do? The answer is

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-51658031163714602182011-02-01T23:34:00.000Z2011-02-01T23:34:34.666Z

In the meaningless error category, let me present today's effort by Microsoft Outlook:

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-51630199557102918242011-01-30T23:53:00.000Z2011-01-30T23:53:07.764Z

Most modern Linux desktop distributions now include D-Bus. It enables different applications in the same user session to communicate with each other or with system services. So I thought I'd experiment with D-Bus using Vala and starting with the published example. Example 1: Ping Loop I started with a simple ping client and server based on the example above, the main difference being that I

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-69091602449227784812011-01-30T16:42:00.000Z2011-01-30T16:42:04.840Z

A good piece of software should make boring, repetitive and error prone tasks easy. One of them that photographers face regularly is resizing a batch of images. The typical situation is the day after a party when everybody wants a copy of the photos you took, either by email or on a CD. Quite often, people don't want the full size but they'd quite like copies of all the photos. I found myself in

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-71666778108968757292010-12-06T21:22:00.000Z2010-12-06T21:22:21.683Z

BSi have just released a new British Standard, BS 8878:2010 Web accessibility – Code of practice. First things first, this is not another set of web accessibility guidelines. This document is meant to complement existing guidelines such as WCAG and provide a framework for companies to implement accessible web products. It recognises that accessibility goes well beyond HTML tags and requires the

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-19471578446136653002010-11-07T19:49:00.003Z2010-11-09T22:34:16.946Z

New Toy Yesterday, I bought myself a Sony PRS-650 Reader Touch Edition as a belated birthday present. I could have bought the new Kindle, as there are lots of adverts for it in the tube, it's cheaper and it has Wi-Fi. I went for the Sony PRS reader instead because I don't really need Wi-Fi and it has a touch screen, which means that it's not encumbered by a keyboard and is therefore a lot

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-26750822741245000362010-10-17T11:16:00.000+01:002010-10-17T11:16:05.938+01:00

Benoit Mandelbrot passed away on Thursday at the age of 85. He last talked about his work at TED2010 earlier this year. I remember being fascinated by images of the Mandelbrot set when I was a child and I did a series of articles last year on how to create them using GNU Octave so if you want to have a go yourself, feel free to grab the code and follow the examples.

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-25771345486584249392010-09-09T21:50:00.000+01:002010-09-09T21:50:50.011+01:00

Today, while discussing options for an identity federation solution, I had the following comment from one of my colleagues (I paraphrase as I don't remember the exact words): The advantage with a Microsoft product compared to an open source product is that you get a good administration interface. Note that no specific package had actually been mentioned so this was an obvious generalisation

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-52202709947558732462010-09-05T20:27:00.000+01:002010-09-05T20:27:08.212+01:00

When developing the import from F-Spot feature in Shotwell, I made sure I isolated the F-Spot specific code from the generic code so that the same feature could be easily implemented to import photographs from other photo management application. So if you want to contribute an import from Picasa feature, here's a quick guide on how to do it. Alien Database Framework Everything you need in

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-31879154798132686642010-09-05T11:18:00.001+01:002010-09-05T11:20:02.908+01:00

This morning when logging in to my newly-upgraded-to-Ubuntu-10.10 laptop, sound was not working. It appears that the solution was very simple: my user was not authorised to use audio devices. I don't know why it was disabled as it had always worked fine before but it's very easy to solve so if you have the same problem check that first. To resolve it, go to System → Administration → Users and

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-88066785878667472332010-09-04T21:23:00.000+01:002010-09-04T21:23:25.276+01:00

When developing the import from F-Spot feature in Shotwell, a user who tested the patch found out that there was a bit of a memory leak. After finding the cause, I produced a patch to fix it but I also wanted to identify what the difference was between the development trunk and the patch. So here's how I did it. Gathering Data The first step was to gather relevant memory usage data. For this I

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-19330916159441359352010-09-04T16:24:00.001+01:002010-09-04T18:47:26.890+01:00

Ubuntu released the first Maverick beta a couple of days ago. As I had some time on my hands today (including the time to re-install Lucid if it all went pear shaped), I decided the upgrade my ThinkPad T42 so, as instructed, I typed this in a terminal: update-manager -d And here's how it went. The Good The upgrade took a few hours, was extremely smooth and just worked. Everything that I've

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-31380046675646438352010-08-24T20:07:00.000+01:002010-08-24T20:07:49.728+01:00

Seen today on a web site that shall remain nameless: This web site has been optimized for use with Microsoft® Internet Explorer 4.7 and above. Get your free browser update today. I had to double-check my calendar to make sure I hadn't accidentally walked into a Tardis and been sent back to the last millennium.

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-2223520227174755522010-08-15T21:46:00.000+01:002010-08-15T21:46:26.170+01:00

Background I use open source software every day on all the computers I own. In fact, outside of work environments where Windows is still predominant, very little of the software I use is closed source these days. As a result, I've wanted to contribute back to the community that has developed such great software by fixing bugs and implementing new features. However, I've found it a lot more

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-87793018363472933612010-08-07T14:56:00.000+01:002010-08-07T14:56:54.477+01:00

Introduction The Nokia N900 is able to upgrade its operating system over the air, which is the best way to upgrade it, especially if you have a fast Internet connection. This is also very practical when you're not running Windows because the Nokia suite only exists on that platform. This is exactly what I had been doing since I bought my N900. Except that a few months ago, I declined to update

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-22860259150233221132010-08-01T17:12:00.000+01:002010-08-01T17:12:14.345+01:00

I was at GUADEC this week so here is a summary of what I took out of it. The Location GUADEC was held in The Hague this year and hosted by De Haagse Hogeschool. The Hague is a nice medium sized town where, in typical Dutch fashion, you go everywhere by bicycle or tram. Public transport is very efficient, fast and always on time. In short, the only similarity with London is that the weather was

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-38655625955292696582010-07-23T10:36:00.000+01:002010-07-23T10:36:06.356+01:00

I had a request from a customer earlier this week: they wanted a copy of all the diagrams that are present in a specification I've been writing for them. All those diagrams are in separate OpenOffice Draw (.odg) files. They don't use OpenOffice but were happy to have PDF versions. The only problem is that there are 42 of them so it would take ages to convert them manually. A quick Google later

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-38845492557639903652010-07-09T11:33:00.000+01:002010-07-09T11:33:10.091+01:00

Here's what LinkedIn had to say about my message summary today: So I have a negative number of unread messages... Does it mean I've got to unread one of them to bring the counter back to zero?

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-46721321464289450782010-05-29T16:03:00.005+01:002010-11-10T23:26:32.946Z

Background It's that time of the year again. I need to prepare all the information required by my accountant to issue my company accounts. Luckily I have most of it saved in a handy directory on my laptop, with a backup copy on the server. However, it still takes a lot of time that I'd rather be spending doing something else. Accounts are not the only process that I'd like to improve: sales,

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com29tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-81876656394912035812010-05-29T10:25:00.003+01:002010-05-29T10:43:51.293+01:00

Sometimes, you just have to do serious maintenance to a server, like install a new instance of your operating system from scratch with a new partition layout. If this server happens to be your Subversion server, you need to backup your repository and restore it once you're done with the maintenance. Or maybe you just want to move your repository from one server to another. Here's how to do it.

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-88857574772319958742010-04-29T14:17:00.000+01:002010-04-29T14:17:36.856+01:00

Introduction There is an often requested feature on Linux (or UNIX) to have the ability to create shared directories similar to what is possible in Windows, that is a directory in which every person who has been given access can read, write or modify files. However, because Linux file systems such as ext4 enforce file permissions that are stricter than any of the windows file systems such as FAT

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-81708008358282011532010-04-17T07:35:00.006+01:002010-04-17T08:40:58.348+01:00

The Problem I've had Ubuntu Netbook Remix running on my Asus EeePC 701 for some time. After upgrading my main laptop to the beta 2 of Ubuntu Lucid 10.04, I wanted to do the same to the EeePC so that I could test the new release, report bugs if I found any and generally benefit from the improvements in 10.04. The first problem I faced was that the EeePC 701 I have only has 4GB of internal

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-14358816868464040472010-03-17T01:05:00.003Z2010-04-17T08:25:23.902+01:00

The Register has an article today about the next version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, IE9. You can already download a preview and apparently it looks nice and has support for SVG and HTML5. At last! I hear you say, only 2 years after the rest of the pack. The reason why I find this very exciting is because of SVG rather than HTML5. This is the type of technology that could be very useful in

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-14627290471914689902010-03-16T21:57:00.004Z2010-10-17T11:02:03.245+01:00

After all this time writing this simple series of how to create fractals with Octave, I finally got to the end of it and published the code on GitHub so here is a nifty summary. Articles Each article has a link to the previous and following ones so you can just start with the first one and follow up to the last one. Classic Mandelbrot and Julia More on the Classic Sets Other Polynomials

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-77315089129534031402010-03-04T20:23:00.005Z2010-03-05T00:56:07.118Z

Thanks to Ed, I found this interesting post on graphs and decided to adapt it to my previous database graph. So I now have a version of that script that uses the pygraph library: Database PyGraph I like this one better, it looks a lot more organic.

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-14434332779144321332010-02-27T15:29:00.008Z2010-03-16T23:46:09.317Z

The story so far Classic Mandelbrot and Julia More on the Classic Sets Other Polynomials Trigonometric and Exponential Functions Burning Ship After another long pause, here is the sixth instalment of this series on fractals with Octave. In this article, we have a look at the complex series that started is all, the one that Gaston Julia was interested in. Once Upon A Time: The Original Fractal

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-82891324024353167332010-02-24T12:12:00.005Z2010-02-24T12:23:36.227Z

Take a complex database schema, apply a bit of python to produce an SVG graph and you can come up with weird and wonderful pictures: Database Bullseye If anybody is interested in the python code I used to create that graph, please ask. The more complicated and convoluted the database, the better the picture.

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-54172276573549423442010-02-05T22:19:00.004Z2010-02-05T23:45:17.684Z

A magic key If you look at your computer keyboard, you probably have a key labelled SysRq somewhere, either on its own or as a secondary function of another key such as PrtSc. You probably never use it but if you run Linux, it's a magic key that enables you to perform low level commands even when the computer is completely stuck. A particularly useful combination of such commands uses the

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-27364192494513485432010-01-19T21:19:00.005Z2010-01-19T22:15:40.279Z

I came across a few interesting web sites that are excellent resources if you want to improve your Linux skills: Tux Training is a generic resource on everything Linux. It's got some very good articles. I may contribute some of my own when I have the time; If you want to learn the basics of the command line and some basic bash programming, LinuxCommand.org is an excellent resource; If you are

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-82159266622714955322009-09-02T11:21:00.007+01:002009-09-02T13:33:29.642+01:00

The Case for Noise At the @media conference earlier this year, Dan Rubin presented a talk entitled Designing Virtual Realism where he explained that we should try to reproduce real life textures when designing web sites to produce the feel bit in look & feel. If you are as useless with Photoshop or GIMP as I am, it is quite a difficult feat. However, Dan also had advice for visual design

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-32610652647083616922009-08-26T12:23:00.008+01:002010-02-27T16:33:46.559Z

The story so far Classic Mandelbrot and Julia More on the Classic Sets Other Polynomials Trigonometric and Exponential Functions After a long pause, here is the fifth instalment of this series on fractals with Octave. This time I will look at a fractal called the Burning Ship because of its output that looks like a ship going up in flames. Burning Ship The fractal is a Mandelbrot set that

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-15017270383401501982009-05-27T12:08:00.011+01:002009-05-27T16:40:25.843+01:00

Following a recent Photojojo newsletter, I thought I would do some experimentation with black and white. But rather than use Photoshop or GIMP, I decided to use ImageMagick: the command line may seem like more effort at first but it gives more control and you can also put everything in a script for later re-use. Choosing a good photograph There are some photographs that come out great as black

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-50688789297026167532009-05-26T00:07:00.015+01:002009-08-26T13:10:00.501+01:00

The story so far Classic Mandelbrot and Julia More on the Classic Sets Other Polynomials In this fourth instalment of this series on fractals with Octave, I'll have a look at the Mandelbrot and Julia sets generated by non-polynomial series. Polynomials are fine but they can be a bit boring so what about introducing a sine or exponential in the mix? The original idea for this came from an

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-67517898219197917992009-05-25T22:54:00.003+01:002009-05-25T23:00:53.996+01:00

I just received an email which claims to come from Lloyds TSB. As I am not a customer of the bank, it is obviously a scam. I've been looking on the bank's web site in an attempt to report it to them but there doesn't seem to be any email address advertised where you can do so. There are a couple of telephone numbers for their customers but that's it. Surely, it would be useful to them to have

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-73728139506087788092009-05-25T22:34:00.002+01:002009-05-25T22:40:29.043+01:00

I came back from Peru a week ago and spent a good part of last week tweaking and cleaning the best of them. They are now visible on flickr. The tweaking and cleaning I do on photos is very simple and consists in: stretching the contrast if required; removing fluff and dirt mark left on the lens or the sensor; very occasionally, cropping the shot. So no heavy Photoshop (or in that instance

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-83897278123305533272009-05-07T22:34:00.003+01:002009-05-07T22:42:40.251+01:00

I'm in Peru. We just spent a couple of days around the Cañon de Colca, one of the deepest canyons in the world. The place where we stayed last night, Chivay, is at 3700 metres above sea level and on the way there we stopped at a viewpoint that was 4900 metres above sea level, higher than Mont Blanc. The area around Chivay and the canyon is lush and green and if it wasn't for the thin air, you'd

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-24927166395007064752009-05-01T20:12:00.004+01:002009-05-28T09:33:30.862+01:00

A while ago, I blogged about installing ExifTool on Ubuntu. There's actually a much simpler way to do this. ExifTool is part of the standard packages directly available from the Ubuntu repositories so it can be installed in one line using apt-get, no need for that make malarkey I mentioned last time: $ sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl Et voilà, ExifTool installed and ready to go!

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-45750846532362553662009-04-23T21:19:00.004+01:002009-04-23T21:30:18.741+01:00

Following my sound issues with Skype on Ubuntu, I did a bit more research and eventually found an excellent how-to article on PulseAudio in the Ubuntu forums. Appendix C explains how to get Skype to work properly and indeed it is a doodle and means there is no need to kill PulseAudio when using Skype! I've tested it in Intrepid and Jaunty and it works a treat. To quote the article, here's how to

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-75425724727932881112009-04-03T10:46:00.003+01:002009-04-03T10:56:01.275+01:00

Like a number of people, I was a bit dubious about Google Street View. If you want to see what a place looks like, there are enough photographs on the web for you to find, why would you want to go look at bad photographs taken by a passing car? However, where Street View does come into its own is when coupled with driving directions in Google Maps: for each intersection, you can have a picture

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-29415126002152319182009-04-02T14:35:00.003+01:002009-04-02T15:16:50.178+01:00

I've got a Lexmark X9575 all-in-one printer. Up to now, it was connected to the Mac via USB. I wanted to reconfigure it to connect it to the network instead so that I can use it with other computers. But I wanted to do so in such a way that it would get its network configuration via DHCP while keeping a fixed address and be resolvable via DNS. The first thing I did was to remove the printer

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-13029358153168691372009-03-31T22:42:00.002+01:002009-03-31T22:51:43.211+01:00

Skype is not available in the Ubuntu repositories but you can get hold of it (and a few other things) through medibuntu. However, it looks like that version of Skype has a problem with sound on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, as detailed in this bug report. The workaround suggested in the discussion that consists in killing pulseaudio before launching Skype works for me so that's good news. Even

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-88268071344306157452009-03-31T19:19:00.004+01:002009-03-31T20:57:41.769+01:00

My silent server that provides DNS, DHCP, Subversion and other services to my home network hadn't been upgraded since it was first installed and had been running Ubuntu 7.10 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) quite happily all this time. But with 7.10 reaching end of life in a few weeks, I felt it was time to upgrade and that today was the day to do so. The first port of call is the upgrade notes and in

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-2792022940989485952009-03-31T00:24:00.005+01:002009-03-31T00:54:25.794+01:00

I'm currently doing a home course on short story writing. Or should I say I attempt to as I haven't been returning my assignments very promptly. Anyway, one of the requirements is that each assignment is formatted in such a way that the footer of each page contains the page number, starting at 1 on the first page, and the letters mf for More Follows on every page except the last one. In order to

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-47153207980946865192009-03-30T13:57:00.005+01:002009-03-31T00:22:27.228+01:00

I just received the following by email: After the recent teetering-on-the-edge-of-total-economic-and-financial-meltdown couple of weeks it seems economic systems and their workings have pushed their way into the need-to-know-category. Well, we can now simplify this all by explaining 9 economic models with cows. Socialism You have 2 cows. You give one to your neighbour. Communism You have

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-27223107114900867162009-03-27T11:31:00.021Z2009-05-26T02:38:40.035+01:00

The story so far Classic Mandelbrot and Julia More on the Classic Sets In the third instalment of this series on fractals with Octave, I want to change the polynomial series used to generate the Mandelbrot and Julia sets. So far, I've used the classic series, defined by: zn+1=zn2+c In the previous articles, I showed what happened when you varied the initial values for z0 and c but why not

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-69441871318563096182009-02-17T20:44:00.010Z2009-03-27T23:01:56.144Z

The story so far Classic Mandelbrot and Julia In the second instalment of this series on fractals with Octave, I will generate more images by changing some of the parameters of the different functions presented in the first article. But before doing that, I'll briefly explain how to save the generated images and say a word on colour maps. Saving images The images that the functions described

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-27853113359874286902009-02-15T20:52:00.004Z2009-02-15T22:42:27.759Z

LaTeX offers a variety of built-in document classes. One of them is letter, which is designed for writing official letters, such as the one I just did to the (inept) agency that manages my flat. However, that standard document class is not very well liked: it's the ugly little duckling of the LaTeX document classes. But when you just have to get things done, better the devil you know than the

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-77674671532864871002009-02-14T17:47:00.006Z2009-02-14T18:03:40.385Z

Usability is an important subject in software design. Your application can be the coolest thing since sliced bread, if it's difficult to use, people will just not bother. We all know that. There are lots of books and articles on usability. However, such material often forgets about one important aspect of usability: error handling and messages. When your application encounters an error, whether

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-52322874141000317082009-02-01T13:00:00.004Z2009-02-01T13:17:36.812Z

Google have just made Gmail available offline as a lab feature. It relies on another Google technology called Gears that theoretically enables any web application to also work locally without an internet connection. This can be very useful when using a dodgy connection or not having one at all. Gmail will then synchronise automatically when it can reach the servers again. I just enabled the

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-15438479364616778592009-02-01T00:12:00.002Z2009-02-01T01:19:09.990Z

For the background to this post, see part 1, part 2 and part 3. Having had no news from Canon for nearly a month, I was about to send them another message when I received the following email from their helpdesk: Recently you placed a Support Request with Canon Support Centre. To ensure you received the best possible service we would like to confirm that your request has been handled

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-42737744467622922212009-01-26T22:46:00.003Z2009-01-26T22:53:29.042Z

Following a failed attempt by British Gas to have my meter changed, I received some paperwork from National Grid. They want to charge me £110.65 to replace the door on the meter box. I reckon it can wait. In the meantime, I'll investigate with British Gas to find out why they want to change the meter in the first place.

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-13050344907829400302009-01-15T21:03:00.003Z2009-01-15T21:46:23.729Z

A few weeks ago, I received a letter from Siemens Metering Services saying that they had been tasked by British Gas to change my gas meter and that they had provisionally booked an appointment for today, between 8:00 and 20:00. I then arranged to be working from home today and called Siemens to confirm that the date was fine and that they were welcome to come and change the meter. Unfortunately,

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-53528208844528968542009-01-13T19:23:00.007Z2010-09-30T19:48:23.797+01:00

Nowadays, with Wi-Fi broadband routers becoming the de-facto standard in the home, comes a new problem for people who live in cities: interferences between neighbouring wireless networks. This can lead to slow connections or even dropped connections. A few years ago it was not a problem, few people had Wi-Fi routers at home and if you had one your router would work great out of the box. Nowadays

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-23378428566712239502009-01-02T11:05:00.007Z2009-01-02T11:33:13.176Z

I was expecting a parcel delivered today. As usual I was quoted a delivery time of between 8am and 6pm, which meant I was stuck at home until it arrived. I was fully expecting to wait all day, make several calls to the courier company and not get the goods delivered today, as has happened several times in the past and as recounted by Toastboy and Coofer Cat. But how wrong I was: the parcel was

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-73666877585585104542009-01-02T10:36:00.003Z2009-01-02T10:51:01.930Z

For the background to this post, see part 1 and part 2. I got an answer from Canon on Tuesday: Dear Customer, Thank you for your query regarding the Firmware update for your EOS 5D. As the versions available for download are only compatible with Windows and Mac, we could produce a zipped up version of the .FIR file so that you can update your firmware on your Linux computer. Please note

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-78372444050982851392008-12-29T21:02:00.003Z2008-12-29T21:29:53.698Z

Following a push to eradicate the plastic bag from the United Kingdom (and London in particular), supermarkets have stopped giving the standard plastic carrier bags unless you ask for them. And even then, a lot of shops will now preferably give you a small plastic bag rather than a normal size one. On the face of it, this all sounds like a good idea as it consumes less plastic but it only looks

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-47909566924114422012008-12-29T19:49:00.002Z2008-12-29T19:55:27.507Z

5 days ago, I sent a complaint email to Canon about their lack of support for Linux (or any operating system other than Microsoft Windows or Apple OS-X) when it comes to upgrading the firmware of my camera. I received this standard email reply today: Dear Customer, Thank you for your recent enquiry regarding your Canon product. Your query has been sent to the appropriate group and is

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-64829338979113229632008-12-24T19:29:00.003Z2008-12-24T19:48:03.386Z

I've now been the proud owner of a Canon EOS 5D for a few years. I've never upgraded the firmware on it but tonight I thought I would investigate how complicated it was. I easily found the corresponding web page on the Canon web site. It seems easy enough: you get a .fir file that you put in the root directory of a newly formatted memory card and you then follow the upgrade procedure on the

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-40543287242855321902008-12-19T19:43:00.006Z2010-02-28T18:46:45.724Z

After reading this article in FSM, I decided to have a go at doing fractal images with Octave. In the process, I discovered quite a bit about fractals so here is the result of those experiments. First I'll build some classic Mandelbrot and Julia fractal images. Pre-Requisites All the code below was created on Ubuntu using Octave. If you don't use Ubuntu, check with your distribution or follow

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-22542325455203665222008-12-18T22:01:00.003Z2008-12-18T22:34:48.210Z

After 6 weeks with Ubuntu 8.10, aka Intrepid Ibex, the change that has most affected the way I use my laptop is the new network manager. Connecting to a wireless network is easy and just works. It is generally fast to connect, definitely faster than with 8.04 aka Hardy Heron. It will immediately recognise networks it knows about and connect automatically. In particular, it is much better than

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-2429401707306195302008-10-31T23:02:00.004Z2008-10-31T23:16:21.101Z

I was getting bored of this weblog's template. After all, I've been using it since I created it so it was time for a change. I decided to go with Blogger's standard TicTac Blue as it was designed by one of my favourite web designers, Can Cederholm of SimpleBits fame. Of course, I'll probably end up customising it.

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-45744061167479825322008-10-31T16:45:00.002Z2008-10-31T16:48:49.690Z

Seen on the Pies of the Day board at Eat today: Vegetarian: Fisherman's Pie Maybe Eat are run by French people?

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-20151368345791762002008-10-30T22:56:00.002Z2008-10-30T23:34:34.060Z

Canonical released Ubuntu 8.10, code named Intrepid Ibex today. So obviously, I felt like I had to upgrade my Hardy Heron (8.04) T42 tonight, especially considering that Canonical have advertised this release as focused on the desktop and mobile computing so should be ideal for a laptop. As usual with recent Ubuntu releases, once the 1466 files my upgrade needed were downloaded, the rest of the

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-46455587114213615442008-09-10T17:39:00.003+01:002008-09-10T18:23:29.023+01:00

Thanks to The Register for reminding us that Today is not Hadron Collider Day and cutting through the hype and FUD generated by the rest of the press today. Yes, today CERN reached a significant milestone with the Large Hadron Collider by running the first beam of protons full circle but no collisions are planned for the next few months yet. That's because to have a collision, you need two beams

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-12364121450419077562008-08-07T10:40:00.002+01:002008-08-07T10:44:21.075+01:00

One of the biggest risk to any IT project is change. The more changes you get during a project, the more difficult it is to deliver it on time and on budget. Letting change happen willy nilly is a bit like going to a bar and asking the barman for a white wine. Then when he's about to pour it, change your mind and ask for a red wine. And when he's about to pour the red wine, change your mind

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-85997660405189701832008-07-27T18:42:00.002+01:002008-07-27T18:54:44.766+01:00

So it's been nearly two months now since I started trying to get rid of my beer belly. The last time I blogged about it, I was rather frustrated by a lack of progress. But progress there is now! I just got on the scale and I am now 83.1 kg, that's 5.3 kg less than when I started. I can now tighten my belt further and indeed some of my trousers are now feeling a wee bit too large. 5.3 kg lost in

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-77029353475559891862008-07-26T21:23:00.008+01:002008-12-04T20:19:42.872Z

Anybody who's ever written software more complex than the typical Hello, World! examples knows that software without bugs doesn't exist and that it needs to be tested. Most people who have ever done testing on programs written in the Java language have come across JUnit. Now, JUnit is a very small package. In fact, when you look at the number of classes provided you'd think it doesn't do

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-32200651082874311292008-07-17T22:39:00.002+01:002008-07-17T22:56:36.590+01:00

I was in France last week and heard this story on the radio. Apparently, a woman who was appearing in court for a large number of parking offences walked out free and escaped a fine because the law doesn't actually say that you have to prominently display the parking slip given by the meter. Therefore you can't prove that she hadn't paid the parking fee.

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-67161522008071268052008-07-07T21:01:00.005+01:002008-07-07T21:59:55.936+01:00

I've been working on the web site of a charity during my spare time for the past few months. Last night, I finally got round to uploading a prototype of a few of the revamped pages. Today I got an email from them saying in essence that they liked the prototype but there were a few quirks. The penny dropped immediately: I had been developing the prototype on my Mac and testing with Firefox, they

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-69975971533014874302008-06-23T19:55:00.004+01:002008-06-23T20:08:14.197+01:00

I recently came across this small application called pixel-lapse. The basic principle sounds interesting: record a webcam image one pixel at a time. From the photo gallery on the web site, it looks like you get the most interesting results when part of the image is static and part of it moves. So I decided to give it a go and here's the first shot: Working at the computer Interesting result

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-12504159844270985212008-06-19T23:37:00.004+01:002008-06-20T00:06:20.588+01:00

Mac OS-X comes with a version the Apache web server that is configured to allow users of the system to publish their own web pages directly from the Sites directory in their home folder. This is of limited use for the average user but is just great for web developers who can test their work directly, using a real web server. However, there is a glitch: if you upgrade from OS-X Tiger (10.4) to

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-45193055802038222032008-06-13T19:45:00.005+01:002008-06-13T20:02:17.954+01:00

At the beginning of last week, I decided to follow the Montignac method to try and lose my beer belly. I lost just over 1kg in the first week but realised that, as I was buying my lunch from shops surrounding the office, I had no way to know the exact list of ingredients that went into my food and therefore no way to check that I was really following the method. So I decided to sort out my own

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-71468022348486644072008-06-02T22:51:00.003+01:002008-06-02T23:29:10.943+01:00

Since I moved to the UK, I've been steadily acquiring a beer belly. Even without my mum telling me so (which she does every time she sees me), I've wanted to lose it for some time. Now the problem is that I've never been keen on weight loss diets because most of them are just unsustainable in the long term as they require you to give up entire food groups. But lo and behold, I was recently

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-63295805821983873122008-06-02T21:33:00.003+01:002008-06-02T21:50:35.291+01:00

I received this story by email from a friend and it made me laugh out loud so I thought I had to share it. Enjoy! In the beginning God covered the earth with broccoli, cauliflower and spinach, with green, yellow and red vegetables of all kinds so Man and Woman would live long and healthy lives. Then using God's bountiful gifts, Satan created Dairy Ice Cream and Magnums. And Satan said: You

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-18182607380951056352008-03-12T21:11:00.002Z2008-03-12T22:25:49.188Z

Okay, so I'm not a business guru, I'm a geek. But setting up my own limited company to operate as a contractor has taught me a few tricks about business and how to make it profitable. So, going back to basics, how do you make a business profitable? You ensure that there is more money coming in than going out. The money going out part is easy: it's all the bills you have to pay and it's a bit

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-89316584239638718472008-03-05T20:27:00.003Z2008-03-05T20:35:13.825Z

Following Leap Day last Friday and the confusion this seemed to generate, it looks like the problem is even worse that originally thought, especially where Microsoft products are concerned. And reading the comments on that Register article, it looks like they are not the only ones. Via The Register.

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-38119064484076086032008-03-02T21:07:00.005Z2008-03-05T20:39:44.844Z

My home wireless network uses WPA for security. When I received my Asus Eee PC, it could not connect to my wireless network complaining about the shared key being too long, which I found odd because all other devices connected fine. Then when I got my Nokia E65, it couldn't connect either but wouldn't tell me why. Then, over the weekend and prompted by a friend, I decided to fiddle with the Eee

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-38558015414838029982008-03-02T03:12:00.001Z2008-03-02T03:14:52.791Z

It's illegal and it doesn't make sense: tear it down!

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-42397915853787372952008-02-29T19:59:00.002Z2008-02-29T20:04:07.027Z

Today is Leap Day, the 29th of February. Reading this article on The Register earlier and in particular the comments, it looks like the logic behind calculating whether a year is a Leap Year is still fuzzy for some. This is an essential calculation to get right in any software that deals with dates (that is, most of them), so here are all the gory details.

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-89884727978004783622008-02-19T22:30:00.003Z2008-02-29T20:04:19.981Z

I am in Chesterfield tonight, for work. I just had dinner with colleagues and came back to my hotel, picked up the key from reception and started walking back towards my room. On the way there, I met a couple who had had a few too many drinks. They were so pickled with booze that they first needed a few minutes to identify which room was theirs. Then they realised that inserting the key into the

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-46688849399513631122008-02-11T17:31:00.000Z2008-02-11T18:17:18.179Z

I posted a rant about Vodafone a few months ago and followed it up yesterday with an update. Someone called Edward Peter, who apparently works for Vodafone UK, commented on the update in a way that confuses matters further. Let's recap: I had an 18 month Vodafone contract that came with a free handset, namely a Nokia 6234. Said handset started mis-behaving 15 months into the contract. When I

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-66613471669656445582008-02-10T20:17:00.000Z2008-02-11T18:17:40.392Z

Stop press: Vodafone are not evil, it's just that some of their support staff don't have a clue. Now that's a surprise! Following my rant about Vodafone contracts and phone warranties, I did not contact the Office of Fair Trading as I said I would. However, a few weeks ago, as my Vodafone contract was about to expire, I took up a contract with 3 and made sure the phone I was getting had a

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-52064415059889849012008-02-10T17:21:00.000Z2008-02-10T19:19:24.838Z

The Cunning Plan One of the planned functionality for my new silent server was to offer a Subversion repository for code and documents that I could access via WebDAV. By doing this, I would be able to save important documents on the server and benefit from version control. Version control is essential for computer code but can also be very useful for other types of documents by allowing you to

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-9029776104453148282008-01-26T22:41:00.000Z2008-01-27T00:22:04.171Z

The Idea When I came back from holidays, I thought about creating a map of the journey in a way that I could share with friends. So I decided to try to do that using KML, the description language used by Google Earth. Google has tutorials and reference documentation about KML that got me started. In practice, what I wanted to do was very simple: lines showing the route and location pins showing

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-91248460667641082162008-01-26T17:54:00.000Z2008-01-26T18:48:54.144Z

A few months ago I set up a home server using an old box. Unfortunately that old box died shortly afterwards. Furthermore, it was quite noisy as it had been originally spec'ed as a high end workstation. So I went in search of a replacement, with a view to have a server that would be as silent and energy efficient at possible. In this quest, I came across VIA, a Taiwanese company that

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-35356323520970296892008-01-06T14:18:00.000Z2008-01-06T14:41:49.802Z

According to Wired, Sony BMG have decided to start offering their music online without DRM. This makes them the last of the major labels to do so. This is good news for everybody as it means we will start seeing more music sold online without DRM. Then again, music is not limited to major labels, there are lots of Indie labels out there that produce great music. And there are more and more

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-86926242012245826192007-12-29T20:52:00.002Z2009-05-28T09:21:14.862+01:00

When I first started with an SLR camera, some 13 years ago, all camera magazines had the same advice for beginners: to improve your pictures, write down all the settings you used, such as aperture or shutter speed, so that you can go back to this information once you have the prints and understand why they came out the way they did. As a result, a serious photographer would always have a small

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-70541836866649484172007-12-21T14:50:00.000Z2007-12-21T15:42:40.689Z

I am currently experimenting with the Zend Framework, using XAMPP on a Windows laptop and following Rob Allen's excellent tutorial. With a default installation of XAMPP, you get a nasty Error 500 whenever you test your system. This is because XAMPP doesn't enable the Apache mod_rewrite extension by default. So here's how to do it. Find the Apache configuration file, called httpd.conf, which on

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-5714646747079770352007-12-15T14:15:00.000Z2007-12-29T22:15:36.145Z

Why is it that being at the wheel of a car transforms most reasonable people in arrogant aggressive maniacs? I was just walking down the road when I saw this guy change lane, cutting off the driver behind in the process. Of course, the guy behind sounded his horn briefly to tell him he wasn't too happy about that manoeuvre. And what did the guy in front do as a result? Show him the finger. Well

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-6957877127342961002007-11-30T20:49:00.000Z2007-11-30T20:55:14.953Z

If you're in need of an addictive time waster, try Desktop Tower Defence. Don't be surprised if you end up spending a few hours and missing dinner blasting creepy things. Via The Register

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-67085023514668208662007-11-30T20:35:00.000Z2007-11-30T20:47:53.492Z

It all started with The Hunger Site and it seems there are more and more of those sites where you just have to click to help end world hunger or do some other good deed. FreeRice is another one of those but it adds an interesting twist: your clicks are based on a vocabulary game and they only count if you get the meaning of the words right. For every 3 correct answers, your vocab level goes up

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-33747627340373363772007-11-30T20:08:00.000Z2007-11-30T20:35:34.678Z

Computer viruses can cost you time and money, that's obvious: if your computer gets infected by a nasty virus, it can take ages to clean it, sometimes even requiring you to completely re-install your operating system from scratch. But there are other hidden costs to viruses and they can even cost you when your computer doesn't get infected. I have been discovering one of those costs on my new

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-26472164289284304492007-11-22T22:11:00.000Z2007-11-22T22:23:38.162Z

Gmail used to have the best spam filter ever: I would never get spam in my inbox. In fact, until a few weeks ago I would have been unable to say when was the last time I had pressed the Report Spam button. Unfortunately, over the past few weeks, I've been clicking on that button more and more, the last time being 5 minutes ago. I only get a few a day at the moment but the worrying thing is that

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-39786650973954334792007-11-17T23:05:00.000Z2007-11-17T23:40:20.137Z

I went out to central London to do some Christmas shopping today, as for once I decided to start early. It was such a bad experience because of the masses of people that I bought nothing and decided to do everything online from now on.

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-63773303935737734012007-11-16T13:25:00.000Z2007-11-16T13:32:23.066Z

After wondering at the Labour Party's members' reading skills, I now worry about the same skills with estate agents. I just had one of them trying to open my door in order to show a flat to a customer, when in fact he wanted the flat next door. Of course his keys didn't work. Now, my door has a big letter A on it, while the next door has a big letter B. This is meant as a clue that my flat is

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6863089.post-37181113276621951712007-11-16T12:22:00.000Z2007-11-16T13:23:55.548Z

I've been going through St Pancras station every week for 2 months or so. But when I came back to London yesterday, it no longer was St Pancras, it was St Pancras International, now that the Eurostar trains leave from there rather than Waterloo. I have to say the new station is large and impressive, of course full of shops in case you want to do a bit of shopping before getting on the train. It

Brunohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600375579955596177noreply@blogger.com0