Random quote
June 26, 2006
From Paul Graham’s latest essay:
Lord Acton said we should judge talent at its best and character at its worst. For example, if you write one great book and ten bad ones, you still count as a great writer—or at least, a better writer than someone who wrote eleven that were merely good. Whereas if you’re a quiet, law-abiding citizen most of the time but occasionally cut someone up and bury them in your backyard, you’re a bad guy.
Almost everyone makes the mistake of treating ideas as if they were indications of character rather than talent—as if having a stupid idea made you stupid. There’s a huge weight of tradition advising us to play it safe. “Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent,” says the Old Testament (Proverbs 17:28).
The first paragraph made me chuckle; the second raised an important point. I shall endavour to follow Lord Acton’s advice.
Firemen
June 23, 2006
As I left the gym at about 8 I noticed a fire truck and a police car in the street just outside. There was also a small group of people, some uniformed and some not, looking up the wall. “Surely it can’t be a fire”, thougth I; I had heard no sirens, I saw no smoke and the uniformed people outside didn’t seem to be in a hurry so I went back to the office across the street.
While grabbing the few things I needed to pick up before going home I saw the firemen raising a ladder to one of the windows on the first floor and as I left a few minutes later a man in a suit and sporting a leather briefcase were being guided down the ladder. Turns out he had been locked in the office by his colleagues…
World Cup sweepstakes
June 8, 2006
I drew England in the office world cup sweepstakes. As it’s the only country I could say with reasonable confidence is actually in the world cup I’m quite happy about this. Having no interest in watching football I entered the sweepstakes for the good cause (half the pot is going to the winner, half to charity) but at least now I’m guarranteed to find out if I win.
WordPress++
June 6, 2006
Being a stickler for punctuation I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find out that WordPress (which powers this site) knows about em-dashes—used to inject things into sentences like this—and en-dashes. En-dashes are used to denote ranges of numbers, for example: 13–34; see how much better it looks than 13-34?
Em-dashes and en-dashes are produced by typing --- and -- respectively.
Update: according to Jerakeen this is actually done by Markdown. Props to Markdown instead then.
Notes on running a mixed Debian system
June 4, 2006
So you want to stay mostly on stable but pick some bits from testing/unstable. I know I do; I’ve fallen off the wagon again (I’m quite proud I’ve managed to stay with a pure stable system so long—ever since sarge came out).
First, you need some testing/unstable sources. I’m going to assume you know how to do that. If not, then just forget about running a mixed system. It probably isn’t for you.
Second, you need to set your default distribution. You do that by putting the following line in /etc/apt/apt.conf:
APT::Default-Release "stable";
Technically, that should do it. Check by running the command apt-cache policy to see that the stable source(s) has higher priority than either of testing and unstable. If you’re like me and want more control you can put the following in your /etc/apt/preferences file:
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 900
Package: * Pin: release a=testing Pin-Priority: 600
Package: * Pin: release a=unstable Pin-Priority: 300 This says that we should prefer candidate packages from stable over testing, and from testing over unstable. Check again by running apt-cache policy that the priorities are as you expect.
One important note here: I originally used sarge, etch & sid in place of stable, testing & unstable in my preferences file to avoid any nasty surprises when etch one day becomes the stable distribution. Unfortunately, this didn’t actually work and I did a bit of head-scratching before somebody pointed me at the apt-cache policy command.
More notes on Debian package management found here.
Local news
June 4, 2006
Dear Lazyweb,
Where can I find out what has happened in my neighbourhood? When I came home Friday night I had to get a cop to follow me to my door because the police had closed off a large area around my flat. There was a lot of police cars around and at least one or two ambulances as well. As it happened right outside my door I’d be curious to find out what all the commotion was about.
Pigeon-free zone
June 4, 2006
When I moved to this flat about a month ago the balcony was covered in pigeon poo. It’s quite alarming how much they managed to excrete in the few months the flat’s been empty. I cleaned the balcony in the belief that the pigeons would leave my balcony alone now that somebody was living in the flat. How wrong I was!
My distaste for the flying rats has been brewing until today it finally overcame my fear of heights. This morning I have passed time balancing on a dining chair on the balcony first washing and scrubbing the metal girder the little buggers like to sit on, then gluing spikes to said girder so they can’t land there. Hopefully now they’ll leave my balcony alone.
