Ubuntu Hardy has an old version of Erlang. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a problem, but it turns out that R12B (the current release) added a few libraries that I use in my Project Euler solutions. Upgrading to Intrepid isn't really something I want to do at the moment (for reasons that I'll happily discuss over a beer) and language interpreters don't ( Read more... )

The last month has been interesting, mostly in a good way ( Read more... )

Last night I attended the most recent Cape Town GeekDinner, Karmic Kava. The venue was Adesso, who really went all out to make it a fantastic evening. The food was great, even though none of the choices on the menu were really to my taste.

I was the slideshow karaoke victim presenter this time around, and Vhata provided me with a presentation he ( Read more... )

Some of you good people may have noticed that I haven't been quite myself these last two weeks. This post serves as an explanation.

WARNING: Some of what follows is pretty personal. If I wasn't OK with it being public it wouldn't be here, but if you're uncomfortable with that kind of thing (or perhaps just don't know me well enough to care) you ( Read more... )

I have long watched that National Novel Writing Month (affectionately dubbed NaNoWriMo) with interest. Every year I have a mild urge to participate, mostly out of the knowledge that I don't write nearly enough. This year I shall be participating, although not in the traditional way ( Read more... )

As mentioned in my post entitled A note to Audible about DRM, I wrote to Audible about the DRM in their audiobooks. I have since received a reply:

Dear Jeremy ( Read more... )

Recently, there has been a spate of people taking the Political Compass test. Much of this has been spawned by the Political Compass graph generated by Michael Gorven.

More recently, Jonathan mentioned that while the scores are interesting (note particularly the leftist libertarian clustering of most of CLUG) it would be far more interesting to ( Read more... )

A while ago, I signed up for a subscription with Audible, the internet's leading retailer of audio fiction. Due to DRM issues and my inability to actually listen to their books except under very limited circumstances, I canceled my subscription shortly thereafter. Since then, they have periodically sent me emails with special offers in them to ( Read more... )

... but not necessarily for the reason you think.

Go read this article on IOL entitled "Big Bang experiment marred by suicide" and consider what the most obvious worrying thing in it is.

Done? Good. To me, the following quote did it: "Large Hadron Collider (LHV)" (emphasis mine). Sure, the factual errors and minor dissemination of FUD in the ( Read more... )

It has come to my attention that it has been far too long since I last wrote in here. Sorry guys, been far too busy living life to write about it ( Read more... )