Deryck Thake.com

IT and NHS

Deryck — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 18:00:16 +0000

After listening to Ross Anderson on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning I went straight to The Big Opt Out and filled out the opt out templates for myself, Mrs Deryck and Deryck Junior. Until any British Government is able to deliver a big IT project on time, to budget and without a jungle full of bugs I will keep my information well away from it’s databases.

Inland Revenue IT cock up

Deryck — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 18:20:19 +0000

Doh! I feel for this and paid up. Yet Another Government IT Fiasco.

Multimedia message

Deryck — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 14:00:02 +0000

Multimedia message

Deryck — Wed, 25 May 2005 14:00:03 +0000

Admiralty arch … where I seem to have spent most of today.

Pictures from my mobile

Deryck — Fri, 20 May 2005 21:06:35 +0000

I just added John Blade’s wp-mail hack to my installation of WP. Now I can upload photos directly from my mobile phone to this site. I put a cron job in to poll for new pictures every hour. His hack has a few bugs, the fixes are described here and there is a good tutorial on emailing posts to WP available in the Wiki too. An example is a picture that I took this morning, shown below.

Multimedia message

Deryck — Fri, 20 May 2005 19:39:19 +0000

Magdalene College, this morning

Nice number plate!

Deryck — Tue, 17 May 2005 18:51:53 +0000

Tesco car park, Leytonstone (NOT photoshopped, I swear).

Thunderbird teething problems

Deryck — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I installed Thunderbird last week as a replacement for Outlook Express. The principal reason was security, a secondary reason was to reduce the amount of bloated Micro$oft software on my computer and a third reason was to see if it was a big an improvement on OE as Firefox was on Internet Explorer.

Pros

Easy to install
Easy to copy email from OE (and other mail tools)
Easy to copy server and account settings from OE (and other mail tools)
Superb junk mail filtering that probably means I can ditch my knowspam account
Good keyboard navigation and keyboard short cuts (eg, ‘n’ takes you to the next unread message, ‘j’ marks an email message as junk)

Cons

Impossible to copy OE message rules to TB filters.
TB filters are defined on an email account basis so if I wanted to put all my CSS emails into a single folder for each of my 3 POP accounts I would have to define the same rule/filter 3 times. Under OE I would only have to have done this once.
Can only define one SMTP server

And today I had a particularly annoying problem. The same newsgroup posting appeared 4 times, I could not mark 2 of these posts as read. Then all the messages from that group were marked as unread. Then TB crashed. This happened several times. In the end I had to unsubsubcribe from the group, subscribe again and mark all the messages as read. A particularly annoying feature is that when you restart TB after a crash it displays by default a feedback form wizard so you can tell the folks who wrote TB about the problem. This is probably a good idea but really irritating when you just want to get back to work. I switched that feature off.
I’ll stick with TB for a while longer but at the moment it seems to be a moderate improvement over OE, not a quantum one.

The Aviator

Deryck — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Went to see The Aviator last night. An impressive film alright but didn’t really give you too much information about the man himself. A quick look at the Wiki entry for Howard Hughes revealed more that the film left out: 2 marriages, syphillis that may have been the cause of his OCD in later life and so on. But even the Wiki has probably just scratched the surface, the man was obviously very clever but why did he never get his high school diploma?

Vodka/Billie/Blaze/Mona

Deryck — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

My new neighbours held a house warming party and invited all their neighbours round as well as their own friends and family. It was the first time that I had spoken to some of my neighbours. The topic turned to Vodka who it seems is well known to them. In one apartment she is known as Mona (”moaner”), in another as Billie (after the singer) and in another as Blaze. She receives food from all of them hence her low-slung belly. Embarrassingly I was asked more than once “is she pregnant?” Later in the evening Vodka joined the paty herself, nonchalantly walking in to an apartment with 50+ people in it and settled herself on the sofa ignoring the loud music but probably quite interested in the chicken drumsticks near by.