There seems to be a trend of allowing motorcycles to use bus lanes; Plymouth began shortly before I started cycling, and it seems to be...
Read More…There seems to be a trend of allowing motorcycles to use bus lanes; Plymouth began shortly before I started cycling, and it seems to be...
Read More…Over the last few years, video has become more and more commonplace on the Web, usually using Flash (other plugins, Quicktime et al., seem to...
Read More…Two things that really bug me are images that have alt text when they shouldn't (ones that are purely decorative and don't add anything to...
Read More…For most of the last 9 months, I've been working on a project called InterRisk; specifically, developing a web portal for viewing scientific data overlaid...
Read More…The USA has plenty of prominent fundamentalists in important positions, but for the most part the UK has seemed to avoid it. [Except in Northern...
Read More…Cycling home yesterday I was overtaken by a taxi in a bus lane, which was unexpected (I was one lane to the right, approaching Charles...
Read More…To anybody writing a web form that asks for my country --- or, for that matter, anybody else referring to it in any way: I...
Read More…From an ad in Computing magazine: "BT and the NHS are teaming up to improve the quality of London's community healthcare blah blah blah." What...
Read More…So I happened to visit the website of my old school, St. Aidan's RC School and Language College <http://www.sunderlandschools.org/staidans/>_. They have a nice fancy graphic...
It's that time of year again; I've got two exams coming up, plus one I've already taken. Not as many as some people, but still....
Read More…Apparently__, Muslim scientists (and clerics, of course) want to make Mecca, rather than Greenwich, the timezone around which the others are calculated. Their reasoning: Mecca...
Read More…The next website to tell me that an email address with a plus-sign is invalid is going to get an extremely nasty email with a...
Read More…Okay, usually I ignore Student Union politics, since it rarely gets anywhere useful. However, one poster in the union caught my eye---Darren Jones, Presidential candidate,...
Read More…Pursuant to this__, I would like to recommend that Dr. Williams be removed from any and all positions of authority and seek psychiatric help. A...
Read More…Okay, a few things that I've heard about recently have pissed me off. First, Bruce Schneier talks about security versus privacy__, making the point that...
So, everybody's been singing the praises of Google for using an open standard, XMPP (also known as Jabber), for its Google Talk service. Open standards...
Read More…On the OpenBSD mailing list recently, there's been an ongoing flamewar between Richard Stallman on one side, and apparently everyone else on the list on...
Read More…Read More…the browser's navigation functions and keyboard shortcuts have been > disabled for security reasons and because the internet banking service > has been designed...
I was in the Student Union earlier on, and bloody hell it's gone downhill. The Union magazine, Fly, was a reasonably well-done publication a few...
Read More…Every time I set up a new machine, before I have a chance to copy my config files from some other machine, I have to...
Read More…In a not-very-recent (March '07) edition of the UKUUG newsletter, there's an article by Clive Darke complaining about the use of external programs to do...
Read More…...thought that putting the first half a sentence of a blog post in an RSS feed, rather than the entirety of it, would be a...
Read More…Firstly, despite what Skippy says, Boris Johnson is neither a great person nor a great politician; he's a member of the Conservative Party, which all...
Read More…Why is it that using Usenet isn't merely a case of connecting to a newsserver, but of hunting down one that you can actually use?...
Read More…It really gets on my nerves when software producers (free software projects as well as proprietary developers) assume that everyone in the world has a...
Read More…Dear Fashion, Please could you start making mens' clothing in colours that do not appear in cat vomit? Much appreciated. Also, producing womens' clothing in...
Read More…Software portability isn't much of an issue nowadays; standard APIs (like Win32 and POSIX), virtual machines (Java, .NET/Mono), and interpreted languages (like Ruby, Python, Perl,...
Read More…When I reply to an email in mutt, it looks something like this: On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 07:50:01AM -0000, Skippy wrote: One line,...
I've only seen Simon Cowell on TV a few times. In that short space of time he managed to lose all my respect. How? In...
Read More…Okay, so I have nothing against long walks - I could happily spend a day (or even just an afternoon) wandering around the countryside, and...
Read More…Dear Microsoft,
Your cocking stupid excuse for a mail client is filling my server logs with shit. Please fix it now.
No love,
bma
I'm sick of people using the terms "FOSS", "FLOSS", etc, for "free/open-source software" or "free/libre and open-source software". It sounds ridiculous, especially because Free Software...
Read More…I'm growing to hate the word "blog". It's a stupid word. It's also a neologism without a point; why create a new word when existing...
Read More…And, to be fair, Berkeley make too. And, hell, POSIX make while we're at it. Why do they all have to implement a completely different...
The number of Debian developers who are orphaning packages and reducing their involvement after the recent votes didn't go their way is a little depressing....
Read More…C/C++/Perl: while(foo) { bar(foo); } Python: while foo: bar(foo) Ruby: while foo bar foo end Java: while(foo != null) { bar(foo); } Notice a pattern?...
Read More…Well, today I went to the [[university]] library to print out various bits of paperwork related to my enrollment. They've finally switched over to using...
Read More…In [Gnome][]'s nautilus file manager, when you try to rename a file it selects the entire name except for the file extension. I hate this....
[Skippy][], a few points... [Skippy]: http://skippy.org.uk/customer-out-of-focus/ > 1. The British dont really like the french I'm British, and I prefer the French to the British....
Read More…Okay. So, I was an expecting a delivery ([Lord Of The Rings Extended Edition Box Set][1], actually). I managed to wake up at 7:30am in...
Read More…I've finally gotten around to sending my application for a driving licence back to the DVLA, after they returned it in April. This time, as...
Read More…Bloody marvellous. Days before people are due to enrol for their second year, and they've gone and cocked up the resit marks. The online transcript...
Read More…From http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/: > System requirements: > Windows XP/2000 SP3+, Mac OS X 10.2+, or Red Hat Linux 8.0+ So the only versions of GNU/Linux that...
Read More…Problems I've had over the last day or so: + ghc, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, doesn't seem to work on FreeBSD/amd64 (it's certainly not in...
Read More…Received a letter the other day, addressed to "Mr Dent" (I haven't been called that in almost two years now, but never mind...). > Your...
Read More…From their registration form: "The address can contain only letters, numbers, periods (.), hyphens (-), or underscores (_)." Bullshit. They just can't be bothered to...
Read More…I hate customers.
They ask for things, then complain when we say "no, that would be stupid".
Yes, this means you Skippy.
Read More…Okay, this is just a list of things that people do in emails that really annoy me, inspired by recent threads on the TermiSoc and...
Read More…Okay, let's go over the reasons that having world-writable files is a bad thing. Say you're a UPSU society. Say you have a website, hoste...
Read More…If I see another financial advert consisting of a guy in a suit in a plain white set, I shall be forced to stab someone...
Read More…