Author Archives: alex

Exploring Python @decorators

Posted on May 28, 2011 by alex

Today I’ve been using Python decorators to factor out common functionality in test cases. I ran into the slightly (!) interesting problem of how to define a @decorator(like_this). That is, a decorator that takes a parameter. It’s fairly trivial to … Continue reading →

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Ubuntu 10.04 LTS – experimenting with overcommit

Posted on May 14, 2011 by alex

I currently running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as my desktop. Neither Unity nor GNOME Shell (in GNOME 3) really interest me, but that’s for another post! This one is about the exasperation I feel when Linux overcommits too much memory and … Continue reading →

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So Microsoft is buying Skype …

Posted on May 11, 2011 by alex

Yesterday (10 May 2011), news broke that Microsoft is paying $8.5B for Skype (or roughly £5.2B in English).  Skype is a rather good, if proprietary, telephony/conferencing app that is multi-platform. It currently works on Windows, of course, but also on … Continue reading →

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Rant: Just because something is hard …

Posted on March 23, 2011 by alex

<rant>I’m doing a beginner’s French course at the Open University. It’s great. It’s also hard work and takes lots of time. However, the forums seem to attract many posts about how it is “suitable for beginner’s” or that “it’s not … Continue reading →

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Call Centre PIN Codes

Posted on February 8, 2011 by alex

With the recent snowy weather in December, my roof sustained a fair amount of damage. Enough damage, in fact, to require a claim on the insurance. All well and good. In fact the insurance company have been very good and … Continue reading →

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Fun with BAA

Posted on August 2, 2009 by alex

BAA is British Airports Authority.  They ‘run’ the main airports around London which include Heathrow, Gatwick and Standsted.  Unfortunately, Heathrow T5 is the centre of operations for British Airways.  I say ‘unfortunately’ because travelling through T5 is a thoroughly unpleasant … Continue reading →

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TDC kicks off to a 2nd great day

Posted on May 15, 2009 by alex

The Thinking Digital Conference kicked off to a great start on it’s second (and last) day.  The comedy of Tom Scott was a fabulous tonic to the rest of the first session which kicked off with an exploration od “Digital … Continue reading →

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Extreme Window Cleaning at the Sage

Posted on May 14, 2009 by alex

The picture says it all.  (Had a twitter failure, this was supposed to be a twitpic …)

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Excel is too buggy to be used?

Posted on March 19, 2009 by alex

Interesting post by Rob Wier about year and date problems in Excel.  I’m using OpenOffice instead.  They’ve hopefully fixed the problem in Excel by now though?

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Losing Liferea

Posted on March 19, 2009 by alex

… has probably been the best thing that has happened to me on my desktop.  It started after an update on Intrepid 8.20 which broke Liferea and stopped it from running.  The effect has been to stop me reading endless … Continue reading →

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