Last Of The Veterans Dies

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Jul 252009
 

This morning, Harry Patch died. At 111, he was the last of the “Great War”‘s veterans to have fought in the Western trenches and experience the senseless slaughter of trench warfare. One of the “lions led by donkeys”, Harry was an ordinary man who went through extraordinary experiences like countless others. He was lucky enough to survive the war relatively intact physically and mentally.

And he was fortunate enough to live to a great age, outliving all the other veterans of the great war. After he began talking about the war, he became a media celebrity not because he was any more special than any of the other veterans, but because he was still alive and prepared to talk about his experiences.

One thing that may be missed in the media was that he was a dedicated pacifist saying that war was the “calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings” and that “war isn’t worth one life”. And another time: “It wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it. No war is worth the loss of a couple of lives let alone thousands. T’isn’t worth it…the First World War, if you boil it down, what was it? Nothing but a family row. That’s what caused it”.

We all owe him a debt of gratitude for fighting in WWI, for talking about it afterwards, and perhaps most of all we owe him a debt of gratitude for making it plain that war is not something to celebrate.

Theft Insurance – Who Should Pay For It ?

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Jul 122009
 

Just a random thought that just occurred to me … who should pay for insurance on the theft of things … cars, the contents of homes, etc. ? We all know that is normally the victims of theft who pay for it, but why should we ?

Why shouldn’t those who are convicted of theft pay for the cost of insurance ? Attach their earnings after they leave prison until they have paid back enough to cover the cost of insurance in proportion to the amount they have stolen.

Living With A Robot Cleaner (Roomba)

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Jul 032009
 

Well, I have been using a robot vacuum cleaner for a few months now and it’s brilliant. No need to push around a vacuum cleaner once a week; you can set the robot going in the morning just before heading off to work and it gets going.

Of course there are a few “issues” involved :

  • If you have anything that is just the wrong height, the robot can get stuck underneath. It is short enough to vacuum under sofas and the like, but gets stuck under my coffee table, and my storage heaters. I can move the coffee table, but the storage heaters need to be blocked somehow.
  • It has not happened to me, but if you have something a little on the wobbly side it is possible that the robot could knock something off when it nudges around. In fact it is a bit more of a knock than a nudge.
  • You cannot really leave things lying around. Of course that is really good if somewhat tedious. And of course you’ll find things you thought you lost during the first week whilst it nudges all those hidden things into the light.
  • Cables need to be tied up out of the way of the robot. You may think that seating them carefully against the wall will be fine, but the robot will try and drag that cable into the middle of the room. I’m sure it found more usb cables than I’m supposed to have 🙂

Lastly, it may be worth thinking more carefully about whether you need a clock and a scheduler on the robot. I do, but have only used it once to make sure it works. It is easy enough to hit the ‘start’ button that scheduling seems unnecessary. Besides it is always an idea to give a room a quick scan to check that the robot isn’t going to try to do something you don’t want.

Now all I need is a robot that will go up and down the stairs!

Inappropriate Use Of The “Paedophile” Word

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Jun 252009
 

One of my pet hates is the inappropriate use of the word paedophile. If you look up the proper definition of the word it is someone who is sexually interested in children specifically prepubescent children. That means children who have not been through puberty.

Is that the same as someone who is sexually interested in post-puberty “children” ? No it is not. Yet people assume that anyone who has sex with someone under the age of consent is a paedophile. However wrong it is to have sex with someone under the age of consent, it is a different order of magnitude with a child under the age of puberty.

Even more ridiculously, people have even used paedophile to refer to anyone who expresses an interest in anyone a great deal younger than themselves. The “victims” of such “paedophiles” are well over the age of consent.

By misusing the word paedophile, we trivialise the ofense. Sex with an “adult” under the age of consent may be bad, but it is ridiculous to compare it to abusing a 2 year old.

New Server – Possible Disruption

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Apr 102009
 

I doubt anyone will really care, but I am migrating to a new server today so you might notice some disruption as it gets migrated to the server room under the stairs.

Strange as it may seem, I think I am going to miss the old server – a Sun Ultra 60 with 10 disks. It may have been a little on the noisy side, but it was a real server (old Sun workstations are built more like servers than desktop PCs) with a non-Intel architecture. I will even miss the muted growl under the stairs; the new server is so quiet I might not even notice a power failure.

Still the new server should be a little quicker and should eat a little less electricity.

Update: The new server is in and running in the final position. All well so far – excluding the fact that it needs my Eizo monitor rather than my ancient Sony (I really want to use the Eizo where it will be used). And of course I now discover that OpenSolaris has a really useless boot screen that doesn’t show any details. Must find out how to get it to display proper geeky text messages.

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