Don’t upgrade Ubuntu on old Thinkpads

Basic message of this post: If you have an old Thinkpad with a built-in Intel graphics driver (particularly a R50e), do not upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx) as there is a critical bug with the graphics handling. I made the mistake of upgrading this weekend and now I’m stuck with a […]

Don’t break up the banks

(Disclaimer: I own, or have owned, shares in some of the companies mentioned below) There has been a lot of talk recently about breaking up the banks by separating their retail and investment arms—more so now that Vince Cable has a position in government. What makes me rather cross is that the politicians have clearly […]

Spinning around

Now that the majority of the results are in, here’s some spin on the results for each party: Pro-party spin Conservatives: Huge gain in number of seats, beat Labour into second place, can probably form a minority government or possibly coalition with Lib Dems. David Cameron will likely end up as the new occupant of […]

Bytemark backup script

As some people are aware, I use Bytemark for all of my hosting, and I also resell some of their services. I’ve recently switched to performing my backups via rsync and thought I would share the simple script I use in case any other Bytemark customer is looking to do the same thing. #!/bin/bash BACKUPDIRS=”/etc […]

Thoughts on tax reform

In the run up to the general election, one thing which has disappointed me is that none of the three main parties have used the economic crisis as an opportunity to suggest radical reform of the tax system in the UK. Sure, the Lib Dems want to increase the personal allowance and introduce a mansion […]

django user variables and login forms

I’ve been working on Pub Gateway this afternoon, and I ended up with a slight problem with django’s authentication module. I’d managed to build a working login form which sent the user back to the home page if they entered a valid username and password. The only other thing I wanted was to change the […]

A pint with the party leader

Everyone has been talking for the last week about how well Clegg did in the recent leaders debate on ITV. The polls have him on anything up to a 14 point lead on Cameron and Brown, and everyone seems to be joining the 101 Facebook groups and buying the t-shirts. Yes, you too can be […]

Register to vote

Have you registered to vote? There’s still time, it’s a really simple process, and it gives you the power to help decide who will represent your area in Westminster for the next five years. You may also have local elections, depending on your area. Alas, I haven’t got round to forming the Currybeer Party in […]

Thoughts on frameworks

I’ve been building dynamic web sites for over ten years now, and one of the things which has bugged me enormously is the huge amount of repetitive code I have to write, especially for form handling (including validation) and access control. At least half of my coding time is spent on this sort of work, […]