It is with a sense of foreboding that I read the news about Kraft Foods’ purchase of part of United Biscuits. United Biscuits make Jaffa Cakes, the nicest biscuit (or cake?) known to man and a favourite of the Elbeno household. Kraft Foods is owned by the Altria Group, which…
Why programming is fun
This week I have been working with a colleague on optimising a piece of code. Last week, what we started out with (a first implementation) was taking over 80ms to run in my test case. We had confidence that the overall algorithm was the correct one for the job, so…
A fascinating read
Mrs Elbeno bought me Silence On The Wire for my birthday. It’s been a fascinating read. There are tons of interesting things you can do with IP packets, both in the field of passive forensic analysis and for the purposes of active subversion. There are a lot of fascinating lower…
just fine them already
The EU has to back up its threat with action, and soon. The verdict is not so different to that of the US DoJ. But the eventual outcome of that case proved the DoJ toothless – where are they now? Now the EU has a chance to prove to the…
Saturday…
So, England out. Wayne Rooney to be vilified in the press no doubt – and poor penalties from Gerrard and Lampard too. If only they could have played the first 90 minutes like they played in extra time, it might have been a different result. But – Murray puts out…
it's all geek to me
After a conversation with recently I got to thinking: what do all the letters of the Greek alphabet represent? What is their canonical meaning to me? Here's the result of my thoughts. α (alpha) : A quite buggy version of software. β (beta) : A prerelease (but not so buggy)…
impressiver and impressiver
It’s been at least 4 hours since my last post about Linux, so it’s time to relate my latest Ubuntu adventures. I’m well impressed. A few weeks in to using Ubuntu, and everything’s still rosy. Everything still “just works”. Sound, webcams, iPod, automounting, everything that (I’ve learned over the years)…
Superman Returns
Pretty good. Plenty of scenes remade like or reminiscent of the original(s). Good special effects. The plot and or pacing was a bit uneven though; it just started to get interesting and it was over. Oh and Sir Richard Branson makes a cameo as “Shuttle Engineer”.
Dungeon Fun
I escaped from the Dungeon of Elbeno! I killed Greatbiggary the arch-demon and Linca the kobold. I looted the Wand of Linux, the Armour of Mathematics, the Sword of Kinepela, the Dagger of Trivia, the Sword of Unicycling, the Sceptre of Open Source and 89 gold pieces. Score: 114 Explore…