The Clan of the Cave Bague

There are times when you just have to do things the hard way. For example, on finding a bug in a piece of software deployed to thirty-odd client systems, it would generally be considered a good idea to connect to those systems, ascertain whether or not said system was affected, and then patch and test as required.

That would be a good way to do it.

The FAIL bot would not be a good way to do it.

What the FAIL bot does is connect to all client machines, have a cursory glance around, and then blatt a big wad of binary FAIL onto the system, whether it needs updating or not.

I wonder which approach we’ll go for….

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Well, there’s a turn up for the books! It appears that Phorm are being dropped by Orange. Hopefully more ISPs will follow suit. In an interview with the Financial Times, a representative from Orange said:

“Privacy is in our DNA, so we need to be honest and clear about what we are doing. We have decided not to be in Phorm because of that… The way it was proposed, the privacy issue was too strong.”

It’s nice that it’s not just us geeks who see that Honesty and Phorm are not good bedfellows.

El Reg has a nice article about it here.

Starcraft / Broodwars.

It’s got me again.

So I was woken up the other day by the sound of Son #2 leaping about excitedly because The Goon Show was on the radio. (Actually, it was the TV, as that’s where our digital reception comes from, but let’s not let today’s climate of technological ambiguity get in the way). So, as I was awake anyway, I ambled down the stairs and sat shivering in the living room wondering what I was doing up at that ungodly time of the day.

Unfortunately, listening to Spike Milligan before actually being awake is not a good idea. I am now, officially, broken. Some essence of Milligan has seeped into the twisty canals of my spicy brain and has congealed into a nasty tendency to turn everything I hear into a silly nonsensical poem in my head. And it won’t stop.

“I wants more wenches,

More wenches and mead.

I wants more wenches,

Mead and wenches is what I needs.”

Alestorm – Wenches & Mead

An Evil Git

Well, I promised my lad I’d have a few games of Magic with him at the weekend. The trouble is, he has a Mortivore. It’s a pretty rare card, and it’s rare because it’s bloomin’ evil. In two ways. First of all, its strength and toughness are equal to the number of cards in BOTH graveyards combined – i.e. the more he loses, the stronger this thing gets and the more I’M losing, the stronger it gets. As bad as that is, though, it also has an enchant – for the cost of one black land, if it’s ever ‘killed’, it just instead becomes tapped and then at the end of the turn is removed from the field back into the players hand. So every time it gets summoned, it’s obviously more powerful than the last, and as long as he keeps playing that one land, it’s unstoppable.

I hate it. I need to google a strategy.

I’ve just realised I haven’t written anything on here since the 13th of October. That’s not very good, really. Having said that, saying nothing is probably better than posting every day but having nothing to say. Anyhoo, as it happens, I DO have something to say today and this is it:

KDE 4.1 is really nice. I’ve upgraded my work Desktop to Ubuntu 10/08 (Intrepid Ibis) and it happens to come bundled with the new build of KDE. And I have to say, it’s very very nice indeed. It’s a lot more substantial (i.e. doesn’t feel as delicate as previous versions) and also provides a nice little desktop area and restructured launch menu thingy. I haven’t used it in anger as yet as my little MacBook still demands all my attention, but so far I’m liking it. It’s shiny.

I don’t normally post recycled lols, but I have to make an exception for this one.

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