The problem is this. To get ADSL you need to have a BT phone line. Yet, except for calling my parents, I don’t really use a land-line phone. This has made using ADSL broadband more expensive than I’d have liked as I had to pay £11 a month for a phone line I don’t make calls with1. Fast forward to last month, when I find that I can get cable broadband without phone or digital TV service.
On Saturday we hosted the first Thanksgiving dinner at Chez Darlington. Due to the size of our kitchen this became a bit of a logistical nightmare but we persevered.
Well, I say “we” but pretty much all the cooking was down to B with me in more of a motivational role, insisting that the spinach and cheese casserole smelled really good and that the turkey looked great. I got the easy job as it was true!
To most readers here I think I’m right in saying that the [Markets in Financial Instruments Directive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiFID “MiFID”") won’t mean much. It’s some new Europe-wide legislation designed to help regulate financial transactions.
Stop yawning. Please. Come back! This isn’t going to be completely dry and boring, honest.
So, anyway, one of its major elements is a concept called “best execution.” This isn’t a choice between a firing squad or a noose. The idea is that a trader has to be able to prove that they made the best deal, with the right people, at the best price. (On a serious note, I think this is a sensible idea, I’m just not convinced that regulation is the right way to achieve it.)
Is this neat or huge security hole?
(You need a Mac with an iSight camera to make it work.)
It slightly bugs me that the first thing a lot of people ask about my photography is what camera I use. I tend to think that it’s the photographer that counts rather than which particular machine you use, but, still, it’s a popular question and so here is the answer.
EOS300D
FEATURES: Reasonably compact (by SLR standards!), simple and quick to use, intelligent feature-set
After my positive experience with the EOS300, this was the obvious choice for my first digital camera. And the first thing to say is that there’s nothing wrong with the 300D, it’s just that…
As I mentioned previously, I am in the process of reducing the number of websites that I need to support. To that end, some time ago I moved the content from StephenDarlington.com to here with the intention of decommisioning the old site. That day is coming shortly. The actual domain isn’t going away for a while yet, but soon it will redirect to www.zx81.org.uk/blog/.
If you can read this, you are accessing my new web server. As with all of these things, there is no such thing as a completely clean transition, so if you notice anything amiss please do let me know.
On a similar note, moving my domain from my ISP to another provider has also affected my email. So if you have sent me email in the last day or two and it bounced back (or I’ve not replied) that is why. Please try again!
It seemed to take pretty much everyone by surprise. Techie-oriented website Slashdot greeted the introduction of the iPod with the words: “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” Even I, on the way home from Tottenham Court Road with a first generation, 5Gb model, thought, “What have I done? I’ve just paid £350 for a walkman!” And I did wonder about the name.
But we all underestimated Apple. Five years later and now it’s difficult to see someone on the London Underground without an iPod and they’ve captured the public imagination in a way that few products have in recent times.
The short story is that if you have a standard configuration things should work entirely as you’d expect. That is, download the archive which, these days, comes as a RedHat “rpm” file. Become “root” and enter “rpm -ivh oracle-xe.rpm” and wait a bit. The install goes away and creates all the required users, starts up the listener and creates a default empty database.
CentOS, for those that have not come across it, is a Linux operating system built from the same source package as RedHat Enterprise Linux but without the support contract.
I was amused when, while working in [North Carolina in 2003](/travel/misc2003.html "Pictures of Charlotte, North Carolina"), I visited some friends for Thanksgiving. All their neighbours introduced themselves and then, on finding I was English, apologised. “It’s not our fault, we didn’t vote for him!” Stood amongst those liberal, well travelled and smart people it was difficult to reconcile this with the fact that they lived in a country that had a president that was none of those things.
It’s bizarre. Virtually every American I’ve met has disliked Dubya, yet over the whole country, despite a number of obvious set-backs, his popularity has rarely been in question. Why such a contradiction? How did it get like that and how soon will the US be returning to normal?