Monthly Archives: May 2009

by | May 20, 2009

I killed it

Work have very kindly updated our IT clients recently, or are at least in the process of doing so. On Monday I was presented with a rather nice HP laptop, which is my replacement for the ancient IBM Thinkpads that we currently have to put up with.

This new laptop uses Vista, which I’m not so familiar with. I spent the best part of Monday and a bit of Tuesday getting to grips with its differences to XP – of which there are many. It seems quite an improvement, but only time will tell.

It wasn’t long before I wanted to alter the installation to better suit my needs. The hard disk was partitioned into a single drive (C:) and there was no extra partition for data. I think that this is pretty poor practice, in that the best way to configure Windows is to have a smaller partition for the OS and a bigger one for your data; that way if Windows crashes and you need to reinstall you haven’t lost all of your precious files.

Our IT department didn’t think it’s important to do this so I attempted to “fix” this little oversight by using the in-built Vista Disk Management tool to resize my C: Drive and create a new partition for my data. It seemed to do this with no complaints and even continued to work after it had formatted the new space. I copied over my (rather hefty) Outlook .pst file from my old laptop and imported my saved mail messages.

All was fine. Until this afternoon, when I powered the laptop back up. It couldn’t find the operating system. Ooops.

I performed a few diagnostics from the HP BIOS and everything seemed OK. I’d obviously managed to kill my new laptop within 36 hours of receiving it.

Well done me.

I then had to go to the IT guys and explain the situation. They couldn’t understand why I would want to do what I did. Well, I think the installation is inadequate for my needs – but I obviously couldn’t say that to them. They told me that they’d need to re-image the laptop and I could pick it back up tomorrow.

So, a solution but not a great one. It turns out that I could have tried to use the Recovery Console that’s available on a Vista boot disk – but we don’t have any of those; all these laptops are built from an image.

At least I didn’t have a lot of data stored on there, considering that there’s no data partition to protect my information from just this sort of eventuality.

Anyway, I’m not entirely sure why the OS died. The Disk Management tool offers the ability to shrink the C: drive and doesn’t warn of impending boot fail. I suspect that Vista has taken a hand in its own demise, and so it’s more of an assisted suicide on my part rather than an outright murder.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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by | May 20, 2009

Nortel: shame on you

A friend of mine had been working for Nortel for a number of years and found out in March that he was going to be made redundant. This is a sad story in itself, but it’s made worse by the way that Nortel’s administrators Ernst and Young have implemented these redundancies.

They’ve chopped these UK employees out without giving any notice, nor giving them their contractually-agreed notice pay. All they’ve got is the measley statutory redundancy pay (as paid by the tax payer) and subsequent job-seekers allowance of £65 or so a week. All this while paying $23million in bonuses to some executives while these redundancies were being announced.

It stinks, and they’ve been protesting in London:

Watch this and hope that other employers don’t try the same thing.

The system is broken. If there’s money in the company to pay bonuses then there’s money to pay a fair severence to the unfortunate many that have been cast off. Shame on you Nortel.

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by | May 20, 2009

Earth rise

I was born about six weeks before the first lunar landing. Yes, that was nearly 40 years ago. 40 years!

Despite my birth happening around probably the most exciting event in the history of science I didn’t really start getting into astronomy until fairly recently. I’ve been reading the odd blog post by Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer, as it were) and since I started reading his posts I’ve been getting more and more into cosmos-related science stuff.

I’ve been recording lots of astronomy programs from the various documentary channels, and while much of these programs are a little gimmicky I do love finding out more about our universe.

The closest astronomical body to our Earth is obviously the Moon. It’s right there in the sky and we still haven’t really found out an awful lot about it. Luckily for us there’s a Japanese satellite orbitting the moon as we speak and they’ve released some absolutely astonishing video clips taken by their HD camera.

Have a look at this one – called Full Earth Rise:

How incredible is that? Take a look at it in full-screen mode. It’s a bit jerky but the view is amazing.

[found via Wil Wheaton]

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by | May 15, 2009

Ruby Elizabeth

Jo and I spent a little more time down at the Queen’s Medical Centre this morning having a rescan, after Wednesday’s aborted attempt.

This time Baby Rutt was much more co-operative and we managed to finish the scan. There was a little bit of jiggling about to get baby in the correct position to see the heart and kidneys but when everything was checked no problems were found.

This doesn’t mean that our baby is going to be defect-free, of course, but it is a relief that there’s nothing obviously wrong with our child and that there’s a good chance that she’ll be OK.

She, yes. We also had the sex checked out and there were some white dots that we were told were our daughter’s lady bits. Our daughter! Bloody hell, I’m still getting used to these words while it sinks in that we’re going to be having a girl!

Ruby Elizabeth Rutt

She’s going to be called Ruby Elizabeth Rutt and she’ll arrive (hopefully) around the middle of September. A daughter! Us! Heck, me a dad!

So many happy thoughts today and a bit of realisation that we’re going to be parents. Happy days!

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by | May 13, 2009

Awkward bugger, like daddy

Jo and I visited the Queens Medical Centre this afternoon for our 20 week scan. We’re actually at 22 weeks (over half way there!) and were looking forward to finding out the sex of our developing bundle of joy.

Unfortunately, Baby Rutt wasn’t playing ball. He (or she) was too busy sleeping with his (or her) back to us and the sonographer couldn’t see the heart, liver or kidneys. Worse, his/her bits were invisible due to some crossed legs.

So, we have revisit the QMC on Friday to have another go.

Other than that, though, everything seems to be looking OK. They were fairly sure that our baby doesn’t have Down’s Syndrome (a worry when we’re both in our late 30s) and there were two arms and two legs and some nice-looking bones. The spine looked particularly impressive.

Hopefully we’ll see more in a couple of days. Our current scan photo isn’t very good so perhaps we’ll get a better one that, which I’ll stick up on here.

Some good news though – everything is proceeding to plan so far.

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by | May 13, 2009

Mega Shark v Giant Octopus

If you thought that Snakes On A Plane was a huge pile of nonsense, I suspect that you might think similarly of the amazingly named Mega Shark v Giant Octopus:

Oh my word! It makes Snakes look like a Kenneth Branagh-produced lovvieathon.

Must see this, if only because Debbie Gibson is in it

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by | May 12, 2009

Get some adamantium up yer

Life has been pretty hectic around here recently, resulting in reduced blog post frequency and lack of fun time. I’ve had loads going on, especially with Open University, band and work taking up most of my free time.

I’ve even found that I’m on the intertubes much less than previously, which is a distressing thing to happen to a guy at the best of times.

Still, we managed to fit in some “us” time the other weekend and decided to go and see a pleasant, little film called Wolverine.

We both liked the X-Men films, even if the third one was a little daft, and Wolverine was our favourite character from those movies. Well, he would be for Jo because she loves Australian men for some reason – I just liked him for his impressive lambers.

Wolverine, the film, is an impressive affair. It fills in quite a bit of backstory hinted at from the X-Men films so far and does the fight scenes with plenty of guts and glory. Logan’s Brother is brilliantly played by Liev Schreiber and much of the supporting cast are as butch, and as funny, as you’d hope.

It takes itself a little too seriously, perhaps, but I think it’s the best X-Men film so far. Ace.

As this is an “X-Men Origins” film, you have to wonder who they’re going to do next. I’m thinking an Xavier/Magneto double header (they were friends in the past). I’d go see that, for sure.

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by | May 8, 2009

Ruby

Ruby’s hand, originally uploaded by rutty.

We visited a good friend of mine last year and his youngest son had just had a little baby girl. She was gorgeous, and had the rather lovely name Ruby.

We’d been trying for a baby for a few months at this point and decided on names. Ruby was our choice for a girl too. They’d even chosen the same middle name: Elizabeth.

I took some photos of the possible name-a-like and this was probably the best. It’s a bit on the clichéd side but I still like it.

There’s a photo competition at work which requires photos based around the theme “newness and excitement” and I don’t think there’s anything more new and exciting than a newborn baby. I’ve entered this shot.

I’ll have my own baby to take photos of come September! Looking forward to that. The baby, I mean, rather than the photo opportunities.

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by | May 5, 2009

Yet another new theme

My quest for a blog theme continues. This time I’m trying out Irresistible by Woo Themes, a rather nice free theme with lots of options.

This includes something that I’ve been after for a while: a lifestream. It’s not that my life is particularly exciting or anything, it’s just that I’ve been wanting to incorporate a feed of my various internet-related activities into one place, and now I have one.

It uses the Lifestream plugin for WordPress and integrates nicely with the custom front page. I also like the option for some Flickr thumbnails in there too.

There are various things that need changing. I’m not happy with the font choices (colour and sizes) and I need to create a new logo, or figure out how to use the blog name instead of an image. These things I can figure out but might take a few days/weeks/months. Expect things to break when I start to arse around with the CSS.

I think I’d also like to make a few changes to the layout, but we’ll see. I’m notoriously fickle when it comes to blog themes and there seems little point in investing lots of time into designing new elements, or changing existing ones too much, if I’m just going to ditch it for something else later on.

I do rather like this one, though. However, I also said that about the previous one. And the one before that

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by | May 1, 2009

Links for April 27th

Giving It Away

The thing about an e-book is that it's a social object. It wants to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm (nasdaq: PALM – news – people ) device, pasted into a mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation–when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were "My friend suggested I pick up…." The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth.

Plan to monitor all internet use

Communications firms are being asked to record all internet contacts between people as part of a modernisation in UK police surveillance tactics.

The home secretary scrapped plans for a database but wants details to be held and organised for security services.

The new system would track all e-mails, phone calls and internet use, including visits to social network sites.

Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow’s Economy

An interesting article about the Information Economy. Related to my latest OU assignment

50 Incredible Photography Techniques and Tutorials

In this post we present useful photographic techniques, tutorials and resources for various kinds of photography. You’ll learn how to set up the perfect environment and what techniques, principles and rules of thumbs you should consider when shooting your next perfect photo.

Book Review: Questions of Truth: God, Science and Belief

John Polkinghorne's former student Nicholas Beale runs a website on behalf of his mentor, on which questions about religion, and the relation of religion to science, can be posted. This apparently self-published book is a compilation of 51 of these website questions with Beale's and sometimes Polkinghorne's answers. The questions range over creation, the existence of evil, evolution, intelligent design and most of the other familiar old debating points, plus "How does the death of Jesus save the world?", "Why believe Jesus rose from the dead?" and "How much do you need to believe to be a Christian?"

Since these latter questions premise membership of the asylum already, I shall focus just on the various questions that touch on the relation of science and religion

Owning a camera doesn’t make you a criminal

When George Bush pronounced the war on terrorism as the "war on tourism", we thought it was because he was an idiot.

Maybe not, because it seems that tourism and terrorism are the same thing – or at least, they are to some police officers. How else can we explain the harassment of tourists who took photographs of a bus station?

Study finds pirates 10 times more likely to buy music

Piracy may be the bane of the music industry but according to a new study, it may also be its engine. A report from the BI Norwegian School of Management has found that those who download music illegally are also 10 times more likely to pay for songs than those who don't.

40 Amazing Online Photography Magazines

Whatever country we live in, we’re probably all familiar with the well-known photography magazines available in our newsagents and bookstores. The UK has Practical Photography, France has Photo, the Italians have Zoom and the Americans have American Photo. What you may not know is that there are many more photography magazines that are only available online. And some of them are good, very good.

Free data sharing is here to stay

Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an "information economy". The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations of the world's governments. For decades now, they have been creating policies to "protect" information — stronger copyright laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to protect anti-copying technology.

The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you've paid for it.

That means that we have to make it harder for you to share information, even after you've paid for it.

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