Despite the French “No” to the EU constitution, the sun came up the next day, and world continued to spin round the sun. And it occurred to me that – as someone who thinks he’d probably say Yes, though without being entirely sure why – perhaps a No wouldn’t be such a terrible thing after [...]

Off to see Anna’s parents’ new house, in a new county. Great Malvern is beautiful. The hills looked like this…

The foxgloves looked like this…

Would be grateful if you could tell me what this one was…

And Malvern looked like this…

All the photos can be seen here.
Tags: greatmalvern, flowers

There are lots of reasons why I can’t stand Desert Island Discs. There’s the…
Guest: …and so that really started a 10 year reign of abuse by my father, and he would beat me, and assault me, really on a nightly basis, and my teachers wouldn’t believe me, and when I finally plucked up courage to [...]

Martin Fowler’s original article on inversion of control – now better referred to as dependency injection – is definitive but lengthy. And in all the verbiage the central message gets lost. Instead, here’s a snappy explanation of dependency injection in bullet points (i.e. less brainwork required). It’s all the better for the hand-drawn diagrams.
Here’s my [...]

Me: So where are you going on holiday?
Them: Tampere.
Me: Where’s that?
Them: It’s the Manchester of Finland.
(And it’s here.)
Tags: tampere, holidays, finland

I’ve been struggling for months – well, vaguely wondering in my off-moments for months – to work why I find ID cards just plain wrong. I think – and I’m still not totally sure about this – that it’s about ownership. So, dear reader, let me take you on a journey through the brambles of [...]

Elastic bands, my friend, elastic bands. Only last week Royal Mail reported an unexpected profit and several targets met. And suddenly I’m starting to see these things everywhere. Everywhere. Not just any old elastic bands, but these very particular thickish, deep red, medium sized ones. There’s a photo of one below – and I’ve included [...]

Marcel Berlins today outlines the pros and cons of the proposed law against inciting religious hatred.
Pros:

To resolve the anomoly that the current law against racial hatred defends Jews and Sikhs, but not, say, Muslims.
A jury should easily be able to distinguish between legitimate criticism of a religion and a personal attack on individuals in a [...]

I was getting very excited last night over the wonderful subversion version control system. I decided it was high time I kept part of my Linux home directory in Subversion, and it worked a treat. There was a bit of a sticky point after I put the .subversion directory itself (the user-side config files) into [...]

It wasn’t until I opened the paper on the train platform that I was reminded about the strike at the Beeb today. So it was very odd morning, stumbling around, thinking I was listening to the Today Programme, but confused as to why Peter Day was reporting. My thinking continued: This report is going on [...]