Myself, Coding, Ranting, and Madness

What do you do when the Network Fails?

Here's a thought...given the increasing use of the Internet Protocol for just about everything, what do you do when the network goes down? I'm currently sitting in my office and, thankfully, it's only mid-afternoon - normally a time I hate due to the amount of time it feels like I've been here. Today, however, 4PM was punctuated by a switch or router somewhere upline of us going offline. I don't know quite how far up, but high enough that it was noticed very quickly and that, although the device came on quickly enough, it took several minutes for the devices to all reregister and be assigned IP addresses. Well, that's a guess - I'm kinda still waiting on mine to start working again.

Filesystem RSS

The file server in my flat, Eliza, got upgraded from 2TB to 4TB storage over the weekend. A most glorious undertaking, resulting in the power supply no longer actually fitting into the case and, instead, being left just beside it. Although, that's probably doing wonders for the air circulation.

0'0”

A Reference Point for the Lords

Very short post today. Sorry. Comment, and I might expand in the comments :P

Much to a lot of peoples disappointment and annoyance, I'm probably going to be writing quite a bit about the The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled, considering the current set of Bills looking at reforming the Lords. I'll pick up on those bills another day - although, if you want to find out for yourself, see what David Steel has done towards this - and instead quickly remind people why the lords exist. This is kind of discussion bait, and will lay down the basis for future ramblings about the lords.

Things to do in London: Part n of q

I've been living in London for about three years now, but it took my entire flat getting jobs and be running around the country every week for us to realise that we haven't actually taken advantage of the city we were living in. And so we're now trying to do something every weekend.

All of the major museums have been free for about a decade - and they're certainly worth the visit. I'm going to be mentioning the bigger ones / clusters that you can spend a day at without having to travel long distances in between; this has already been done to death on the web so, I suspect many will skip this section

Code Your Own Music Streaming Service

It's actually really quite simple, and may soon even be almost legal (I'll get back to that point another time). Almost all media players can stream over HTTP, the primary protocol of the web, so it's just a matter of making the files available. You can just have your music collection in a folder that in available to the internet, and go from there. But, I decided to do it with slightly more finesse.

2001: A Space Oddity

2001 is famous. Not very well understood, but famous. It also has a production cycle and time-frame that surprised me when I found out about it. Unlike almost all comparable things today, the film and the book were produced concurrently, but separately. The stylistic differences between the two are stark - right down to the planet that Discovery travels to. And, of course, the level of explanation. In the film, this entire post might be a single still shot for a few seconds:

An Interlude of White-space

After finally settling on the title, I was rather tempted to use the post as a space to perform John Cage's "0'00"" in the style of his early work "4'33"". But, I doubt such a post would get many readers

What I am here to talk about is one of the many peeves which I was able to fully rationalise during my group project. I think it is fair to say that doing a large programming project in a group of 14 over 5 weeks is a reliable way to get slightly stressed, and form some pretty hard-set opinions. The particular one for now, as people might have now guessed from the title, is spaces, tabs, and blank lines.

Yet Another Post on the DEA

The main challenge to the Digital Economy Act, by TalkTalk and BT, has been quashed dead. And has been for the better part of a month - everyone seems to have forgotten that this is going on; that, or I missed a load of news. The application for an appeal after the initial case failed was thrown out of the High Court back in June

A Day in the Life of Ivan Codemonkey

It's rare that I actually consider any one of my days worth mentioning to others. The odd event, when they ask me how I am. But today felt a lot more like a series of noteworthy events. Maybe it's all a matter of perspective. Well, of course it is; furthermore, I suspect that in a weeks time, this post will be the only sign that I ever thought today was special