Import from blog.cottee.org
>I’ve never got a grasp of LDAP but the gods have conspired against me recently in such a way that I can’t avoid it any more. One of my colleagues found LDAP For Rocket Scientists and I’m completely smitten. It’s written extremely well. It’s amusing, informative and makes no apologies for the fact that it’s not a HOWTO. In fact they have some very thought provoking comments about the whole HOWTO thing. e.g. There are innumerable excellent HOWTOs scattered over…
>Kani Miso. Kani=Crab and Miso=brain. But actually these are not crab brains. I often wondered how the hell you managed to get so much brain from a little crab. The answer is, of course, you can’t. Apparently (and not surprisingly) crab brains are quite small. Kani Miso appears to be anything within a crab which is not good wholesome white crab meat. That apart, I love the stuff. I can consume vast quantities of that dark, deep sea tasting, mush…
> Great tits cope well with warmingDon’t tell me the BBC Headline writers didn’t know what they were doing. Or maybe it’s just my puerile sense of humour.
>Was somewhat surprised to discover that although my account is an administrative account, I can’t edit system files from within cygwin by default. To change this right click on your Cygwin shortcut, go to the Shortcut tab, click on Advanced and select “Run as administrator”. This is not just limited to Cygwin apps by the way – you’ll get the same glorious issue if you try and edit hosts using Notepad.
>Did you know you can talk to your AIM buddies with your AIM account, direct through Gmail’s chat i/face? You did? But you can’t see the option? Switch your language to English US (I know, I know, you have standards but come on – this is for a greater good). Now you’ll be able to login with your aim id and chat away. And all your chats will be archived within mail for you to search on later when your…
> If you are trying to get emacs working ‘nicely’ on Windows and you’ve gone the cygwin route and are now having messages like apply: Doing vfork: resource temporarily unavailable Try reading http://pseudocode.cc/2008/03/17/fixing-emacs-m-x-shell-or-m-x-compile-for-cygwin-on-vista/ Worked for me. Thanks pseudocode.cc !!
> It was Selina’s birthday yesterday (ten years old – TEN YEARS!). Happy Birthday little one. Today we all went to Nagoya Aquarium which we’ve been going to for … well, nine years now! It was a hot day, 28 degrees. Nowhere near as hot as it gets and without the humidity that will come after the rainy season but having spent a year in the UK with a crap summer it was hot. The aquarium never gets old for…
> I’m having major problems focusing on one thing at a time at the moment. I thought that being in Japan would help me but it appears not. I’ve made some changes to how I work recently and I’m going to have a go at documenting what I’m doing with code and sysadmin stuff here. Partly as a brain dump for when I can’t remember how I did stuff and partly to see if it makes it stick in my…
>I have a long list of items I like to complain about regarding England. One of my favourite is food. I don’t subscribe to the common misconception that there’s nothing worth eating in England – there is. But generally you have to make it yourself or pay a lot of money. There’s a chain of sandwich shops the North West called Philpotts and they do wonderful sandwiches and you pay for that. Where we currently work there’s one place that…
You don’t have to begin repaying your federal student loans until after you leave college or drop below half-time enrollment in your final year of undergraduate study. Paying them off sooner allows you to save money, meet your loans’ repayment goals and avoid default. But not paying them off yet can be difficult because it can mean you miss the payments your monthly federal loan payment is calculated to cover. What if I don’t finish my federal loan obligations by…