I was just putting the last batch of washing on the drying rack at about 0:13 this morning, and all of a sudden the lights went out. I thought maybe something had blown a fuse, or maybe tripped a circuit breaker for our flat, so I took a quick look outside and even the street lamps had gone out! The UPS was screeching its way through the 20 minutes it can power my server for and eventually cut out, so I decided to go to bed.

When I woke up this morning, the power had returned and, incredibly enough, both my UPS and server were intelligent enough to start up again once the power had returned, which pleased me to no end since this is the first time this has ever actually happened! I quickly checked my email and found out that the power had actually gone twice during the night, the first time at around 0:13 and once again at 04:41, and both times the server had recovered. Very nice.

Now all this time I was checking my email, I could hear one of those portable generators outside. I took a look out the window and I saw a big white lorry with “Location Television” printed on it… “What the heck?” I thought, moving to the kitchen window to get a better view. “Location Television Catering Services” was the full title, which was slightly less alarming. Parked outside our house, however, was a police riot van, and the catering lorry was obviously there to feed hungry coppers… Typical police that is!

So I get myself ready for work, and eventually manage to leave the house without my bag (no headphones = no music! noooo!!), and meet a friendly neighbour just coming in through the door. What’s the cause of all this hoo-hah? “The police say it’s ‘a small fire'” she says. Strange. So I get on my bike, and just as I get on the main road I see the whole of Cemetery Junction is cordoned off and teeming with police, fire engines, and other emergency paraphernalia. There’s no speaking to the police around, but a passer-by also mentions a fire.

Is “a small fire” the cause of such a huge operation? I have my feelings that it was something much more serious than that, especially since a murder (!) never caused such a huge police presence. Something is definitely not right.

I smell a fish, and it ain’t a fresh one!

So it looks as though my promise of posting on my blog more often has really gone down the pan. Sorry folks, I’ll try harder, but I never seem to have anything to write about. I could bore you all about my new bike (it is cool after all), but that’s just showing off. I could bore you about how I think Linux has made leaps and bounds in terms of usability in the past few years and still manages to be just as crap, but nobody cares about this except me. I was even asked to write about search engines, but I must admit I don’t have a care in the world about them, other than Google actually being useful compared to others (don’t get me started).

I suppose I’ll go on about the masses of really stupid and boring geeky April Fools’ jokes that got posted on Slashdot a couple of days ago. I’m not so much bothered about April Fools’ in itself, it can really be a bit of fun sometimes, if you’re into practical jokes and, especially, you have a good sense of humour. Now I know geeks are not well known for their comic gift (ha ha), but other geeks (myself included) do understand why IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service actually manages to be funny (especially when someone tries it out), but this year I must admit simply being completely unamused, even bored by the sheer quantity of extremely poor gags.

I’m not so much disappointed with the gags this year, I know most of them are usually this poor quality. What I am disappointed by is that Slashdot, which several years ago was a great place to go to get some geek news (it is after “News for nerds, stuff that matters”), is simply going down the pan. The comments system has been overrun by trolls, the quality of the writing is deplorable, and probably the most annoying thing is how articles are repeated from one week to the next because the editors forgot they posted them. How do they manage to do that?!

So anyway, judging by April 1^st‘s archive, it must either have been a really slow news day or the editors are just amused by such childish jokes as photographic proof of water on Mars and so on…

It would all be fine if it didn’t take itself so seriously…

The current MGM vs. Grokster case is rocking the Internet and I wouldn’t be far wrong if I said thousands of people were blogging about this. Basically, the music industry is battling against technologies that enable “sharing” of any sort on grounds that it makes it easy to violate copyright, thus harming their business. Now I’m not going to argue about how devastating it would be if they won, just how absurd their argument is and how useless DRM actually is (and thus how it will harm their sales).

MGM, and the whole music and film industries, would like to make illegal any piece of equipment or software that doesn’t “make a reasonable effort” to prevent people from copying copyrighted materials. Now have a think about the implications of this: your friendly video recorder will be illegal. What about your printer? Your office or school photocopier? Your very own computer? Those, unfortunately, are some of the smaller things that we would be deprived of. The Internet as we know it would become illegal and would have to be completely reworked to build in the restrictions of DRM.
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More little nuggets of information:

• The Register has a great article about Apple iTunes and DRM in general. Apple de-socializes iTunes.

• I am working on a very small (not tiny) variant of Debian to run on Piccolo. So far I have it down to a 24MB root filesystem and an 8MB boot partition. More details to follow once I try it out this evening!

• My visiting tutor from Hudds is…er…visiting today, but I haven’t filled in my diaries! Fortunately they don’t count for much, but it’s still not good. I wish I could count stuff I’m doing at home too, since it all sounds more impressive than what I’m doing at work (even though what I’m doing at work is fun, interesting, and not easy).

We went up for Huddersfield this weekend to do some house-hunting for next year. To be brutally honest we really didn’t have much luck but, thanks to Andy’s fiancée Sarah we now have somewhere to live—the house he was in last year. Good choice methinks.

As part of our stay we, of course, had to visit the new Students’ Union building and try out all its new sections: the bar (called The Venue), the café (The Lounge), and the shop (er… The Shop). Now I must admit the shop is the most impressive thing in the new building: it’s much bigger, much better stocked, has more tills, and is generally more aimed towards students (let’s say it sells booze at long last).
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To copy another site, I’m going to start writing these Tidbits posts when I have several small items to comment about, but aren’t worth a whole entry in themselves.

• Today’s front page on the Daily Mirror had me in stitches: “Guess who’s had his ID stolen”. For those of you who don’t have English telly channels, a credit card company is running identity theft adverts claiming that their credit cards are magically protected from this somehow. I think you can guess what it’s all about: the actor in the ad has had his ID stolen. Do you own a Shredder?

• The British Beer and Pub Association (BPPA) is seeking to debunk the apparent myth that beer is the cause of beer bellies! Now I know they’re advertising here, but apparently beer has fewer calories per 100ml than wine, milk, or orange juice. See the El Reg story for more. And don’t you go all holier than thou and point out a pint of beer surely has more calories in it than a glass of wine…

Well, the news you were all waiting for: we came 6th out of the 12 teams present in this particular heat. Since this was our first time participating in this event, I’m really pleased with our result. Of course we got to the event slightly late, so we missed the introductions and the coffee (no caffeine!). We called ourselves “Dude, where’s my keyboard?” and, fittingly enough, a guy who called himself “Dude, where’s my compiler?” showed us around… How sad we all are!

Each team gets its own room in the rather nice IBM lab / executive playground, which appears to be a converted mansion, or at least built in that sort of style. We certainly had to drive a hell of a long way through grassland before we got anywhere. Each room was kitted out with a brand new IBM ThinkPad (yuck… but new!) with a big 19″ LCD screen, a titchy little projector, a printer (we had two actually), and the all-important USB pen drive to hand in our work. We were all given 4 problems, and four hours to solve as many as we could in.
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Last night a small group of IPs from Oracle, including myself and Jess, went out for a few pints in Reading. It was a lovely night which started off in a pub with a remarkable amount of character, right in the middle of Reading in the main pedestrian zone: the Hobgoblin. A lovely pub that is, with great beers, lots of guest ales, and a very cosy atmosphere. This is the sort of place that has a no mobile phones sticker on the door. Lovely! We then moved on to another pub, The Outback (I think), which was perfectly reasonable but nothing too special. All in all a nice night. I really need to get used to going out more often: I had a hangover after just 4 pints!

Tomorrow, Sam, Ben and I are off to IBM in Hursley (near Southampton) to take part in the first heat of the British Computer Society Programming Competition 2005. I’ve spent most of the evening brushing up on things like parsers, compilers, and various data structures and algorithms that I really should know but have forgotten about. We’re also allowed to bring in all sorts of printed matter so I’m printing out whatever I think could come in handy!

So, wish us luck! I wonder if we’ll even get through the first heat, but we can but try.

A couple of weeks ago some of my friends sent me SMS.ac (IWNL) invites, so I could join the network and send “free” SMS messages. I had joined the network a good while ago and remember making sure that I selected all the privacy options and so on and so forth, but still getting emails from them every so often. I left that account (and the email address registered with it) well behind.

These invitations don’t just get sent to you once, either, they make sure you receive 3 such invitations from each person, regardless of whether this person actually invited you to join SMS.ac. Yes, you read that correctly. When you sign up for an account they apparently ask you for your Hotmail or Yahoo! (IWNL) ID, and if you happen use the same password on your SMS.ac account as your Hotmail / Yahoo! account (who wouldn’t), they login to your email account and “invite” your whole address book.

There are plenty of other blog entries about this on the web: Boing Boing, Joi Ito’s Web, and a plethora of others (just Google it).

Like many other bloggers using the wonderful WordPress, I’m in the middle of upgrading my version from 1.2.2 to 1.5, which promises more improvements than the upgrade from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X! To this end, my blog might randomly stop working periodically. If this happens, please don’t tell me about it: I probably already know about the problem! I’m also working on switching back to my blog design as we speak, so don’t moan about me ‘changing my mind’: I haven’t. Update: 22/02 15:28 BST: 70 minutes after I started the upgrade, I’ve got everything sorted and the bugs hopefully ironed out. Can you now please let me know if anything looks wrong, or if you have any comments!