SJ Cuthbertson » happenings

Miscellany

admin — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 12:49:56 +0000

Hi folks. As you may have noticed this blog has gathered rather a lot of dust recently. My last post was back in September ’09, not entirely coincidentally just before I moved home and began a new job. Things have been consistently busy for me since then – I’ve taken up scuba diving, plus a few other personal projects that might yet form posts of their own some day. I’m still trying to size up whether blogging is something I can realistically keep on my plate these days; I have plenty of things I’d love to write about, but the time to sit down and do the ideas justice just isn’t there.

In the meantime, I’ve jumped back on the Twitter bandwagon for the second time (the first time being a while before it caught on outside the geekosphere) and you can follow me there as @philosophicles. I’ve also just uploaded a little bit of new material to this website: nothing too special, just a bunch of old revision documents from my student years that might, possibly, be of use to somebody else.

If you’re still following me either via the website or on RSS, thank you. Do stick around, and who knows, I might start writing more at some point.

Python for Pinocchio

Stuart — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:32:08 +0000

So I discovered Dave’s Web Of Lies a while ago, and was at about the same time looking for random things I could code in Python to improve my skills…

Having now finished my job at the ADC, I’ve had time to put it together. I present my python Lie Generator. It’s not much, but it was fun to make. It honed my regex skills rather a lot (DWOL doesn’t include any kind of API), and is also able to deal gracefully with internet-connectivity problems. It works with Python 3 only (due to changes to their urllib library) and must be called from the command line. I might someday work it into the website in some fashion.

I should probably reiterate what’s stated in the help text: copyright for all lies remains as stated on DWOL.

The 3100 is dead…

Stuart — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:40:03 +0000

…long live the 2600!

Nokias, that is. I’ve had a 3100 for a little more than seven years, and it’s just kept on going. Sadly, after taking many beatings and the numbers all wearing off the buttons, the power button eventually broke, leaving it dead and lifeless. If I had more spare time, I’d photoshop a picture of it in a little coffin, but this would be stretching the analogy a little too far methinks…

Anyhoo, because I’ve been with Virgin mobile for all that time and more, I got hold of a 2600 from them for all of £7.49. Woo! I don’t rate it’s chance of lasting more than a couple of years, but it is an improvement in some ways. The only thing that really annoys me so far is that the buttons have no tactile feedback – I text a lot more than I talk. Ah well… this is it for now until I think the touchscreen market has stabilised a bit more!

Paracetamol

Stuart — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:19:56 +0000

If you’re a 20-something bloke purchasing a 16p box of painkillers in Boots, and the lady at the checkout tries to explain (in detail) how to safely take said painkillers, should you:
a) Be offended – she looked at you and assumed you weren’t able to read the words on the packet.
b) Be pleased – you clearly look so healthy that you’d never have needed painkillers before.
c) Be plain puzzled.

Do tell. If it happens to me a second time I’d like to know how to react…

Still here

Stuart — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:00:40 +0000

So, yay, summer. It’s only been rainy about 50% of the time, which is a significant improvement over last summer. I’ve just been hanging around in Cambridge – I failed to find work in any of the bars/pubs I looked at, and ended up signing up with a couple of temping agencies. Consequently, I’ve been spending long hours the last few weeks slaving away as a kitchen porter at the Hilton Doubletree hotel (behind Peterhouse), with a random day last Sunday at Bar Hill Tesco. I’ve decided that I don’t like temping much at all, which is fine as I don’t have to do it any more now. The feeling of turning up somewhere new, not knowing what I’m required to do (and there being nobody else that really does either), and just knowing it’s not worth spending too long figuring it out because I’m only there for 8 hours and then never back again… it’s weird. Quite aside from that, being a KP is mind-numbingly dull, dirty work for crap pay. Bah.

But I did my last shift at the Doubletree yesterday – home today to pack, and then off on a bit of a holiday to see Georgie’s parents, my parents, celebrate some birthdays, and then a wedding in Germany! When I get back I have a week to kill, then start at the ADC, which should keep me busy for a while

I should probably mention for continuity’s sake that yes, I got my II.1 degree (and even scraped a first in my research project, which matters to me a lot more than the written papers) and had a fantastic May Week et cetera. It just seems so long ago… since my PDA broke I’ve been using this crazy old-fashioned method of calendar management, which I think people used to call a ‘pocket diary’. It only started in July so I really can’t tell you much of what happened before that! I will probably get a decent smartphone (and a new laptop) once I’m settled at the Theatre.

Scoop! CU employs Doctor Who for computer support!

Stuart — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:32:22 +0000

Whilst sorting out my computer’s system time after a weird BIOS crash that reset it, I found this page. From right at the bottom:

Please address queries about NTP within the University to timelord@ucs.cam.ac.uk

This just serves to remind us all, once again, of how old the University of Cambridge really is…

Plot developments

Stuart — Sat, 31 May 2008 15:55:39 +0000

The last few days have been pretty busy. I had my last exam yesterday, and am now, free, free as a bird… well, sorta. Free apart from all the things I’ve promised to do in the next couple of weeks. Meh.

Managed to fall off my bike this morning due to a random failure in the pedalling department: whether due to me or the bike, I’m not sure. Net result: painful ankle, small hole in left hand, and my Sony Clie has a ~25 degree bend about two-thirds of the way down. So that’s scrap metal… luckily I’d just synced it that morning, so I’ve not lost any data.

This afternoon, Georgie, Greg and Chris and I signed a contract for a house! So we now have somewhere to live next year, which is a big Win. I’ll be doing some kind of “here are my updated details” email in the nearish future, but if you want to know where, ask me

So yeah, all change really. I’ve got to find something to keep me busy in Cambridge during the summer, and ideally pay the rent, before starting work in September. Trying to choose between certain small bars in the Peterhouse area, which will be slightly further to travel to from the house, or a pub/bar somewhere near to where I’ll be living, or one of the N Starbucks/Costas in the town centre…

No such thing as a free lunch…

Stuart — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:49:31 +0000

I don’t normally post things like this. You are under no obligation to read or act on this – obviously. But if you’re feeling bored and generous, click through on this link. It’s to a site called “Greasy Palm”, which gives me money if you sign up via that link. You’re welcome to sign up yourself, of course, and persuade other people to follow your referral link. Or you can just use a temporary email account and then forget about it

Handy bash script

Stuart — Sun, 18 May 2008 12:55:35 +0000

You’ve installed something from package repositories, and, on invoking, it tells you to actually run a certain script first. The script fails because you’re behind a proxy server, but you don’t know where Aptitude put the script in order to edit it. You know it’s in your $PATH, but that’s a lot of directories…

Solution (assuming you use bash):
for inMyPath in `echo $PATH | sed -e 's/:/\\t/g'`; do find $inMyPath -name MISSING_FILE; done

MISSING_FILE is the name of the script (or whatever) that you’re after. This is fairly trivial, I admit, but it took me a while to work out how to do it right (mainly sedding PATH correctly). I’m about to put it into a script of its own for future use.

Back up and running!

Stuart — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 16:18:45 +0000

So, this site was down for a couple of weeks, due to an unspecified security flaw in WordPress 2.3, which had compromised a number of the WordPress installations on this server. Not mine – my archives are all still intact – but the sysadmins took the sensible precaution of disabling all wordpress installations on the system. I’ve now reinstalled with the recently-released WordPress 2.5, which apparently fixes the flaw. For anyone else on the SRCF who was affected by this: I’d suggest you speak to the sysadmins before doing anything, as they haven’t sent an official email yet. Obviously, don’t for any reason copy files from the disabled directory into the new one, and check through your DB tables manually for any oddities.

That all said: WordPress 2.5 is FIT. They’ve made plenty of back-end changes: the entire dashboard/admin section looks totally different. It took a few moments to find my way around, but I think on balance that it is a real improvement. It should all look the same from the main page, though. An oddity is that, having installed 2.5 completely from scratch, it somehow remembered my widget settings for the sidebar. I don’t think that should be possible, so let me know if you know why it happened!