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Four fours
Over the weekend I wrote a little ugly perl in order to solve the ‘four fours‘ problem. Essentially the problem is to make as many positive integers as you can, using only four occurrences of the digit ‘4’, and some mathematical symbols. For instance: 17 = ( 4 * 4 ) + ( 4 / 4… — read more
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Changes at Nominet that I support
I suppose I have been quite critical of Nominet recently (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for instance). So I am pleased to say they’re suggesting something today with which I agree. Today Nominet announced a ‘program for evolving the .uk namespace‘. Much of the release is to do with a new consultation… — read more
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Poor science journalism ‘too often ignored’
I plan to make this the first of an occasional (for which read ‘when I can be bothered’) series on poor science journalism. Let’s look at this slow-news-day article from the BBC News website, entitled “Alcohol calories ‘too often ignored’”. All quotes are from that article. I’m going to presume there was some scientific research behind… — read more
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Adding SQL support to dhcpd, part 3
I blogged here about adding SQL support to dhcpd. I’ve fixed a couple of issues – mainly memory leaks. I have no idea how I missed these before (sigh). The good news is that the server ran for sufficiently long for the process to get to many gigabytes in size, and nothing crashed! You can… — read more
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Autism and Orwell
This is is a deeply scary article about a young autistic man trapped in what the author describes, without exaggeration, as an Orwellian nightmare. I can’t put it much better than the original author, so I encourage you to go and read it. — read more
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BT TotalCare is a total waste of money
Around 15:15 today, one of my ISDN2 lines I use for voice, and the analogue line I use for DSL (and thus internet access) went down. The ISDN2 line is just dead, the voice line has such a loud buzz on it it’s unusable (occasionally accepts DTMF digits) and the DSL suffers accordingly. Both are… — read more
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BMI travel madness
Today, I flew from London to Edinburgh, which is a fairly frequent trip for me, given Flexiant is in Livingston, and I live in London. I always try to fly BMI, on the basis that it’s not BA, which is the alternative. Today, however, BMI experienced a complete logic failure in customer service. The London… — read more