About Me
I'm a thirty something engineer with an interest in Computing (particularly Linux), Psychology and Mathematics. Married with three kids, I've been studying with the Open University since 2008, I'm focussing on BSc (Honours) Computing and IT (B62).
An enthusiastic but amateur runner.
Yeah and a total geek.
Category Archives: Ubuntu
A quick thank you
I needed wxMaxima but the version in the repositories is a little older (one major revision). Compiling from source is straightforward but a recent discussion I had with students showed they shied away from it. So I figured I’d try … Continue reading
Posted in Ubuntu
Tagged CAS, Mathematics, Maxima, Packaging, Planet Ubuntu, Thanks, Ubuntu
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Forget everything you knew about coding (or perhaps remember, depending on your age)
This Christmas I’m going to embrace the past. COmmon Business Oriented Language (COBOL) 85 standard was the first language I was taught. Napier University was a feeder into the banking and insurance industries in Edinburgh at the time and they … Continue reading
Best Linux comment ever
Extract from an article over at “The Art of Manliness” that gives instructions on editing hosts to block time wasting sites: Linux If you’re using Linux, you’re probably a geek and don’t need some guy who blogs about manliness to … Continue reading
I killed my PS3
I’ve been playing the brilliant “Assassin’s Creed – Brotherhood”. So much so that I’ve killed my PS3 – it now overheats and turns itself off after about three minutes (if its booted from cold), beeps three times and flashes the … Continue reading
Linux is not a get of jail free card
I’ve been having line problems with my ISP – British Telecom. To cut a long story short we see a 75% speed drop, phone BT, jump through umpteen hoops and they reset the profile at the exchange. The fault is … Continue reading
Samsung ML-1915 with Ubuntu
I picked up a cheap laser printer, a Samsung ML-1915. It isn’t automatically configured by Ubuntu 10.10 as it requires the Samsung Unified Linux Print Driver. The page explains what to do but in synopsis, you need to add the … Continue reading
Any colour will do
I hope Dustin Kirkland wont mind me re-posting this but it’s so insightful I felt I must. Poul-Henning Kamp posted this concerning Free BSD development over eleven years ago…
Twitter vulnerabilities, using Windows, studying and new WordPress themes.
Graham Cluley, a Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos, has a nice blog piece on the Twitter worm from earlier this week. To cut a long story short, he reminds us of the importance of sanitizing inputs. Still, it was more … Continue reading
Posted in Coding, Computing, Linux, Open University, Ubuntu
Tagged Coding, Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Wordpress
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Bash
Two things that improve my bash productivity – stopping the cursor keys inserting characters in vim and history search in bash. Edit ~/.vimrc or /etc/vim/vimrc (for system wide) and add turn off vi compatibility: set nocompatible The latter can be … Continue reading
Install web applications locally on Ubuntu
I was talking with someone yesterday who is hacking a WordPress theme together. If you work with web sites, being able to run a site locally allows testing, experimentation, developing new themes and even just checking that a software update … Continue reading
