I’ve just been woken up by the flat moving. Cups rattling, shelves wobbling and my ceiling light clinking against itself. Felt very much like the aftershocks of the earthquake we had a couple of years ago. Here’s hoping no one’s hurt. Update: BBC coverage. So I wasn’t the only one to notice then.

I’ve just had a skim through the Times onlines 50 movies of 2008 and while I was picking my handful of must sees (Cloverfield, Indy 4, and Hellboy 2) I noticed a couple of interesting comments While I’m actually very fan boy about the idea of an Avengers movie (mentioned in the “The Incredible Hulk” comments) I felt a cold shiver of dread when I read 'Hayden Christensen, who has also just signed to star in the long-awaited movie version of William Gibson’s prescient sci-fi classic Neuromancer,‘. Read on →

I attended the Advances in OpenSolaris Network Administration talk hosted by LOSUG over at London Bridge last night. And no one mentioned MySQL. I came out of the session with a couple of pages of notes but two things really stuck out - the talk covered the new developments as a sequential feature list rather than showing you something cool or interesting and then explaining how the new technologies made it possible. Read on →

Ted Neward is the latest person to get linked to in the ongoing campaign to prove that parrot isn’t dead, sleeping or pining for the fjords (sorry, couldn’t resist). While chromatic rebuffs some of Teds points I can’t help but think something is missing - a little outside perspective. chromatic rightfully points out that the project isn’t dead (and has actually been pretty visible in the perl sphere since the start of the year) but look at it from more of an outsiders angle - unless you are already in the perl community it’s not obviously moving. Read on →

This weeks three things are - MySQL 5.1(.20+) can log errors via syslog (finally) IBM Blades run quite well despite being very wet. (don't ask) Amazon Prime is too helpful. (Wooo individual book orders)

I liked the original Hellboy, it had great casting, an OK story and Selma Blair being hot. Well, technically on fire, but we’ll let that slip. I was expecting great thing from the first of the animated Hellboy films - special effects are great but you can go completely overboard with the monsters in an animated film. Instead I spent a couple of hours watching Hellboy Sword of Storms plod along at a very slow pace. Read on →

I own a lot of old comics, piles of DVDs and a somewhat smaller (but still decent size stack) of audio CDs. These take up a lot of physical space, the comics decrease in quality, they all attract dust and are a pain to dig through when I want to find that one song on a compilation CD from 2002. Or was it 2001? I have a lot of data - iso images and virtual machines are among the biggest disk eaters. Read on →

I’ve watched the original Omega Man, enjoyed the Kiwi perspective (named The Quiet Earth) and now I’ve seen Robert Neville Will Smith style - and it wasn’t bad. The plot is mostly unchanged (although explained through flashbacks), the pacing is decent and the feeling of being alone is well conveyed - the DVD store scene is a great glimpse of a man about to lose it. The zombie/mutant hordes are a lot more visually impressive than those in the Omega Man (20 years of special effects and it shows) but their near mindless nature does change the tone and pace a bit. Read on →

It’s not that widely known but O'Reilly offer a user group discount - it’s 35% off the cover price and free delivery so it’s often cheaper than you can get the books new from anywhere else. A few days ago I wanted to order a couple of books and because there are no conferences this month (and so no lovely Josette) I signed up online. The process itself was quick, easy and painless but one step stuck out in my mind - “Password cannot contain special characters or spaces”. Read on →

There is nothing like other peoples code to highlight all those little gaps in your knowledge of a programming language. I know what the first one does: $ mkdir -p {projectone_,projecttwo_,projectthree_}log $ ls -1 projectone_log projectthree_log projecttwo_log And I was a confident (and a little bit happy) about knowing what the second one does: $ mkdir -p {project_one,}log $ ls -1 log project_onelog But I had no clue about this one. Read on →