I don’t like the bike lanes that I ride on every day to work; it has
to be said that there are many worse ones around. The BBC News site
had a great set of photos of these today. It’s a pity; bikes lanes are
normally put into to fulfil government targets, but not actually to be
useful. A little more care would improve the network’s usability
enormously.
Originally published on my old blog site.
"Unlike solar, or wind power, the tides move all the time"
Interesting story on the news about the first commercial
wave power system. This is happening in Portugal, despite the technology
being developed in this country because Portugal gives preferential
treatment to energy from renewable sources.
It’s great to hear that this is happening, regardless of where it is
happening. It fits quite nicely with stories earlier in the week about
gas prices. Currently, the problem with all renewable energy supplies
is there high, up-front costs. But, energy supplies are getting less
dependable and more expensive with time, and renewable technologies
are getting cheaper as they are moving toward mass production.
The quote is from a listener to the radio. I’m not su…
Started to have a look at Darcs today. It’s one of the first
distributed version control systems that I’ve looked at in detail; I
couldn’t see how they worked myself, but it’s not that
difficult. Everything is a branch and you pass patches around;
obvious — at least, once you think of it.
Originally published on my old blog site.
Spent about an hour trying to work out why the aforementioned NAS box
was totally failing. The ftp server seemed to be working, the machine
seemed to be identifying itself.
Turned out to be the firewall. Windows can cope without a call-back
it seems. It looks rather like this was also the cause of poor
performance on small files. I’ve managed to get my network card up to
30% utilisation; saturday it was rarely more than 2%.
Originally published on my old blog site.
Finally got around to buying some garlic flakes that I saw being used
in t a resturant a short while back. Combined with a bit of chilli, as
well as being garlic flavoured, this are actually quite hot.
Cooked them with some potato, tofu, red onion and bulgar wheat. Very
nice indeed.
Originally published on my old blog site.
Finished teaching today for year; well, ignoring the research
projects, which might be a mistake. I don’t understand exactly why I
find the teaching so tiring; probably the main reason is getting on
top of so much background material. Still, it’s been a good thing;
I’ve needed to get on top of MIAME for quite a while.
The lecture actually went okay. Rather than go through the data model,
which would have been dull, I think, I did a "clustering exercise",
which I learnt at last weeks LSI meeting: everybody wrote down terms
on post-it notes; then, they get arranged on the board, into related
clusters. In the end, we got clusters which fell neatly into the six
points from the MIAME checklist. Fairly pleasing, really.
Originally published on my old blog site.
…
Finally got around to buying myself a network attached storage box. I
needed this for home backups and mass storage. I bought a Buffalo
Linkstation — I’ve had some reasonable experiences with their
Terastation while I was at Manchester.
This is much the same; simple, well put together. It would have been
nice if it had sftp or rsync servers on them (particularly the
rsync!). The only problem I have with this box is that it seems very
optimized for large files; if you are transferring lots of small
files, then the speed at which you can get stuff across the network is
very, very slow. Perhaps this is windows though, who knows?
Originally published on my old blog site.
The image of a fat man in a sauna is a bit of stereotype. This never
made a lot of sense to me. Surely, thin men are as likely to go to a
sauna? Think I finally solved this conundrum today: fat men have a
good layer of insulation around them; so, they will heat up more
slowly than otherwise; which means that they will be in the sauna for
longer. Which means that, at any one time, there will be an
over-representation of fat men.
Originally published on my old blog site.
Went out for a curry tonight, with an old friend of mine. Fortunately,
he knows lots of nice places to eat in Newcastle; this is good,
because, currently, I don’t.
I can’t remember the name of the place, but it’s near the Quayside,
and rather pink. But the food was excellent. We had a daal, a strange
pancake bread, a cabbage dish, dosa and some vedna. I’ve been a fan of
dosa for ages, since discovering them in the Punjab Tandoori in
Manchester. I’ve only had then in one other place, so it’s great to
find another resturant cooking them. I even tried making them for
myself once, using some of the wonderously named "Mr Git’s Dosa
Mix". It never worked.
As well as his dosa mix, Mr Git also makes vedna mix. I did buy some,
but never tried …
Went to Bob Trollope’s today. It’s a veggie pub, near the
quayside. Went there before, but got confused — I ended up looking at
the menu of the pub next door.
Wasn’t bad at all. Had a pretty good menu. As I’d been standing
outside in the cold for most of the day, I went for the mixed
grill. Was alright, but I think they need to make it a bit different
from the meat version — it was too dry. I couple of pots of dips (a
light chilli sauce, some brown sauce and something a little sweet,
perhaps) would have been perfect.
Still, it’s a pleasure to be in a veggie place, with lots of choice
on the menu. It’s not been that easy in Newcastle.
Originally published on my old blog site.