I hope no one on the Right quotes George Orwell again, because that would mean they "hated Britain" (Orwell wrote harsher things than RM). — James Bloodworth (@J_Bloodworth) October 3, 2013 Indeed; I remembered Orwell being very harsh about British complacency, or what looked like it, early in the Second World War or just before…
Read More Hating Britain, Orwell editionSo Andy Coulson, famously, was subject to a background check by Control Risks before joining Downing St. There was some doubt as to whether he had actually gone through the positive vetting process. Supposedly he had, and he was cleared to see “Strap 1” material. But then it turned out in fact the DVA hadn’t…
Read More We didn’t let Coulson see anything sensitive except for the SIGINTIt’s probably a telling data point that I, and quite a few other people, thought Faisal Islam was being sarcastic about this story and the councillor had somehow finagled the money. Perhaps he got the council to buy the property from himself? Emerging low trust society, h’ware ya. obviously I meant Stevenage Council bought 20…
Read More Simple Plan implementation!The Ed has got everyone’s attention by promising to freeze consumer energy prices. It’s one of those moments, as with hackgate and Syria, when he succeeds in making the prime minister look irrelevant and bypassed. Having whined a bit, at least some of the energy companies moved to accept the policy voluntarily. The most interesting…
Read More Rolling back the frontiers of privatisationSo I went to the Royal Academy’s Richard Rogers exhibition. Pretty interesting, but bloody hell, the privilege and self-satisfaction, it is to laugh. All the way round, there’s a belt of little personal quotes, photos, artefacts and the like that constantly remind you that his parents’ flat in Florence overlooked Brunelleschi’s Dome (I count three…
Read More Occupying RogersHere’s Tory MP Greg Barker just giving up, giving up and passing out the talking points from his financial backers directly, without any further intervention on his part. npower response to Labour energy policy announcement http://t.co/hf1lbbZZj3 — Greg Barker (@GregBarkerMP) September 24, 2013 He may yet delete it, so: Ha ha, Tories doing PR for…
Read More A slight return to Gambetta vs. NpowerSo, I was out at #OpenHouseLondon this weekend. It turned out to be a quick case study about all the “rebirth of industrial policy” stuff set out in Duncan Weldon’s piece in Renewal. The building in question is the Mildmay Community Centre in Dalston. It’s a Passivhaus, designed to a standard developed in Germany to…
Read More Some serious blogging? why not.Note: This is going to be both technical and long. If you find this difficult, skip, unless you also have an Ubuntu Linux system, other than the current developer version (13.10/Saucy Salamander), with an ext4 filesystem. In that case, upgrade your copy of e2fsprogs immediately to version 1.42.8 or above. You can obtain it here…
Read More When your filesystem attacks, to say nothing of USB sticksSo I spent part of my weekend tinkering with robots. I should actually have committed more but I was conflicted and a bit overscheduled, but anyway I got to the UK NAO user group’s hackathon out at Queen Mary College. This was an interesting experience; I’ve been to a few events like this before in…
Read More A weekend with robotsIt has come to my attention that this blog has been a bit grumpy lately.
Read More Noted.