I vaguely remember someone telling me ages ago that Linux distros don’t come with a Disk Defragmentation utility (like Windows does) because files on Linux don’t get fragmented.
For some reason, I didn’t really challenge that very much at the time, and it’s remained at the back of my mind as a bit of an assumption. One of the things I’ve learned on my Linux course this week is that this isn’t true.
Today was day 1 of my Red Hat Linux System Administration course – a week long chance to cram for my Red Hat Certified Technician exam on Friday.
What I didn’t realise was that I have to sign a non-disclosure agreement before I take the exam – preventing me from revealing any details about what the exam is like.
Spoilsports – that ruins my idea for Friday’s post. 😉
Last month saw the launch of the Fundraising Standards Board – the new “self-regulatory” body for fundraising in the UK. It comes with a groovy logo (a blue tick with “FSB”) which charities can use to reassure people donating money that they are nice fluffy types.
From their website:
…we will handle public complaints about how our members … raise money as well as offering the public a “mark of reassurance” to look for when giving to charities in the future…
…membership is voluntary… and [involves agreeing to] a strict set of codes and a Fundraising Promise committing them to treat the public with respect, fairness, honesty and clarity in all their money raising activities…. [and] an independent, robust and transparent complaints process…
[This is] an independent body you can go to if you are unhappy about how a charity raises money.
I’ve talked before about Millennium Volunteers, wondering what will happen to it and whether the new organisation V will keep it going as it is.
They are obviously wondering themselves, and have published the outcome of some research carried out last December into the Millennium Volunteers “brand”. The intention is to help inform decisions made about what to do with MV going forward. It makes for interesting reading.
On the one hand there was:
Strong preference from young people to refer to “Millennium Volunteers” rather than the acronym “MV”.
However, on the other hand, there were comments about changing “Millennium Volunteers”:
because “millennium” is seen as outdated and the use of the word “volunteering” puts young people off
For lots more statistics about the perceptions of MV, the benefits it brings, and thoughts on how the value of volunteer efforts can be measured, have a look at the summary of their findings which can be downloaded in PDF form from mvonline.gov.uk.
I guess the jury is still out on the future of MV.
Does anyone still use ‘pine’? We used to use it at my University, and I loved it.
For those who’ve not come across it before, Pine is a very nifty text-based email client. And (as I seem to be going through a nostalgic love for all things command-line based at the moment), I miss it.
With that in mind, for no reason in particular other than that my mind was wandering in a particularly boring meeting, I thought of creating a pine-inspired email client for myself. A bit like pine, but more task-oriented to fit in with my GTD approach to personal organisation.
I had a bit of a rant last week (surprise!).
To cut a long story short, one of the less fun things about where I live is that on a Friday or Saturday night, some local thrill-seekers like to liven up their walk home from the pub by breaking off car wing mirrors. What fun(!)
I’ve lost count of the number of Saturday mornings where I’ve come out of the house and looked down the street to see a line of cars, each with their wing mirrors either hanging off or broken off entirely.
So when it happened again last week, and I found myself with my PDA and some time to kill, I wrote an email to my local MP and councillor. It was rambling, it was whingy, and it was a little bit ranty. It was a chance to vent.
More constructively though, it was out of curiosity for the sort of response it would get. How politely can a politician say “so what do you expect me to do about it?” 🙂 I am interested in politics, and in the (often overlooked) role that our local policitians have. So I wanted to see what happens when someone actually raises a concern with their local representatives.
WordPress made a change to the WebSphere MQ blog this week which screwed up a bunch of my posts. Yesterday morning I had a few people at work point out that code samples in posts (text surrounded in <pre><code> tags) were being chopped in half – the lines truncated at the point where they went off the edge of the column that they were in.
This included a post which I had only written the night before! It looked fine when I checked it before I went to bed, and then the first email I got at 6.40am the next morning was a message from Nigel to say that he couldn’t read the samples properly. Grrr.
To their credit, WordPress did respond to my query pretty quickly, and helped me get it fixed. They had changed the CSS stylesheet used on the blog to add overflow: hidden “…so that images and such so not flow into the sidebar and cause problems there….”.
For $15 a year, you can unlock the Custom CSS page, and change it back. The fix:
#primary {
overflow:visible;
}and now our code lines are readable again. Yay.
Microsoft provide a command shell for Windows Mobile as a part of their Developer Power Tools package.
I fancied giving it a try tonight (for no particular reason other than that I like using the command line, and my phone has a full QWERTY keyboard) so followed the instructions to install it.
No luck – it didn’t work. No errors, it just didn’t work – nothing happened.
It took a bit of playing around with, but I’ve managed to get it running…