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Banks: the problem with ‘too big to fail’
We hear it time and again. Such-and-such bank is too big to fail. To me, that simply means too big. A bank failing needs to be like a ripple in a pond not like a tsunami crashing all before it and...
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Putting CM6 (Android 2.2 Froyo) on a UK Vodafone HTC Magic
I’ve got an HTC Magic by Vodafone in the UK. It’s a very nice phone. Unfortunately, it is also abandonware. It is now virtually out of contract. And before I rooted it and put CM6 on it, it was stuck...
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MyIET – not another networking silo, please
The IET, or Institution of Engineering and Technology, is introducing ‘MyIET’, which is a member’s personal portal on the IET website. However, it’s also got status updates like twitter, a discussions...
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Call Centre PIN Codes
With the recent snowy weather in December, my roof sustained a fair amount of damage. Enough damage, in fact, to require a claim on the insurance. All well and good. In fact the insurance company have...
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The facebook problem
When a for-profit company gives you something for free, with little chance of ever charging, you have to ask, “who is the customer and what is the product?” Facebook has (reputedly) 500 million users,...
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Rant: Just because something is hard …
<rant>I’m doing a beginner’s French course at the Open University. It’s great. It’s also hard work and takes lots of time. However, the forums seem to attract many posts about how it is “suitable...
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So Microsoft is buying Skype …
Yesterday (10 May 2011), news broke that Microsoft is paying $8.5B for Skype (or roughly £5.2B in English). Skype is a rather good, if proprietary, telephony/conferencing app that is multi-platform....
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Ubuntu 10.04 LTS – experimenting with overcommit
I currently running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as my desktop. Neither Unity nor GNOME Shell (in GNOME 3) really interest me, but that’s for another post! This one is about the exasperation I feel when Linux...
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Exploring Python @decorators
Today I’ve been using Python decorators to factor out common functionality in test cases. I ran into the slightly (!) interesting problem of how to define a @decorator(like_this). That is, a decorator...
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Linting coffee-script in Emacs
I’ve been doing a lot of node.js recently, and I started editing coffee-script in my favourite editor which is Emacs. Now one thing I use regularly in Emacs is flymake-mode which essentially provides a...
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