Just to say that I will no longer be updating this journal. Any new content will be posted at:

http://leynos.dreamwidth.org/

Nothing will be mirrored here.

Thanks.

In January 2010, four reporters from America's National Public Radio bought a share in one of the mortgage backed securities that came to be known as a toxic asset. They did this to give their listeners a greater understanding of the causes of the credit crunch ( Read more... )

Today I've been trying to get my head around CouchDB. And yes, when you finally understand it, it is alarmingly simple.

CouchDB is one of those newfangled NoSQL databases. Specifically, it's a document store. This initially left me scratching my head, since it has no tables and no schemas. Records in CouchDB are a collection of arbitrary key ( Read more... )

Seven years ago, Irem released a 3D platform adventure on the PS2 named Disaster Report (I'll call it Disaster Report, its US name, since that's the version I played but you may know it as Zettai Zetsumei Toshi or the name under which it was released in the UK, SOS: The Final Escape). What made Disaster Report special was that it was a survival ( Read more... )

If you're still not clear on what credit default swaps or collateralized debt obligations are, or why these are bad things, now's your chance to find out ( Read more... )

Recipé time again. This is a synthesis of a number of different recipés for this dish I found dotted around the web. I've tried it several times and it works really well (as I'm sure Ruth will happilly testify). Especially if one is feeling under the weather.

Soupe à L'oignon
Serves 2, Preparation time: 60 mins (approx)

Equipment

• Two saucepans ( Read more... )

I've been in the process over the past few months (very sporadically, I might add) of writing a project planning tool. It still doesn't do much yet, but it's at the stage now where it will produce a simple functional Gantt chart (with an NSDate based model and view). (There are also some ugly drawing glitches ( Read more... )

Spent 20 mins in the O2 shop trying out a Samsung Wave. I know it's not an iPhone, but it's a good £300 cheaper, and it does most of the iPhone type things that I need. The screen is also quite beautiful and very readable - I downloaded an eBook of Dracula to test that out.

I'll wait and see if a Bada SDK for Linux makes an appearance. Ideally ( Read more... )

Right, I've seen too many Makefile tutorials that were clearly written by people who have been smoking copious amounts of skunk, so I'm going to post this in the hope that it will make life easier for anyone else writing a small C or C++ project ( Read more... )

Apparently, Raquel Welch recently wrote a rather negative opinion piece in the Telegraph about the oral contraceptive, which is 50 years old this week. I'll leave it to a a couple of readers of the Guardian to explain what the pill actually meant (and means) for women ( Read more... )