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On politics and principle
Jim Hacker (Yes Minister): “It’s the peoples’ will. I am their leader; I must follow them.” Recent attitudes to a prospective post-Brexit parliamentary vote shows the declining importance of principle in British politics. It seems to me that in the first 75 years of the last century, politicians had principles which, in general, did not… — read more
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Nominet – Sir Michael Lyons’ Review
A year or so ago, Nominet‘s board commissioned Sir Michael Lyons to perform an independent external review of Nominet’s operating model and governance arrangements. Sir Michael reported to the board in October, and the board have now released both Sir Michael’s report, and their response. I spoke to Sir Michael briefly at the last AGM,… — read more
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On Nominet’s price rise
Nominet has announced that it is to increase its prices for UK domain names. The announcement states in essence that prices will rise from a minimum of GBP 2.50 per year per domain (i.e. GBP 5.00 for two years – the same per annum for longer periods) to a minimum of GPB 3.75 per year… — read more
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“RSA modulus is not a positive number” – say what?
Golang complained today: RSA modulus is not a positive number I wondered whether this was a fault with our cert(s) or whether golang was loading it properly. As there was no canonical resource on the net for how to diagnose it, her’s what I did (some anonymity applied to the cert): First: which gives these… — read more
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Determining if an SSL private key and public key match
A quick note on how to do this, partly so I don’t forget. I used to think (and Google says) that the answer is to compare the output of the following two commands: Links may suggest md5sum on the output to make the moduli easier to compare. Well, this is all very well as far… — read more
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Three UK Incompetence – Home Signal – #HomeSignalFiasco
My Three Home Signal device has now been down for eight days. Despite their twitter support people (@ThreeUKSupport) saying periodically that they think the problem is fixed, my understanding is that this is pretty much a network-wide outage. Ringing the support number for 3 Home Signal (0800 358 4828) leads to a recorded message saying “We… — read more
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UK 2015 Election – Votes per seat
One of the interesting aspects of the 2015 UK election is the disparity between votes cast and seats gained. The table below shows (for the parties that actually gained seats) the number of votes cast, the seats gained, and the votes per seat. It then goes on to show how, if those seats had been… — read more
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Testing sparse files on filing systems
I had an interesting situation today where qemu-img create performed oddly when using one particular NFS filer. The symptoms were: with -f qcow2 it worked as expected, and a 500G image is approximately 1MB with -f qcow2 -o preallocation=metadata, the image took hundreds of gigabytes This is not meant to happen. The files are meant… — read more
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Amazon Wooden Spoon Unboxing
I was so excited to receive my five new 46cm/18″ Jala Beech spoons from Amazon today. Well, I was so excited to receive the five massive boxes each containing one spoon, that I thought you’d all enjoy a step-by-step account of the unboxing. Let’s first have a look at how they looked when they arrived.… — read more
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krane.io – multi-cloud Docker
I don’t normally blog about Flexiant related stuff here, but this is a fun open-source skunkworks project, so I’m making an exception. We’ve released krane.io, an apache licensed tool that allows you to use the Docker command line you are familiar with across multiple clouds. The announcement is below, but you’ll get a better idea… — read more