St. Mary’s Church Eastwell & Lake

 

 

Underwater Technology

Yesterday I spent the afternoon in Canterbury and whilst walking along side one of the small rivers that flows through the city I came across this piece of underwater technology.  A Compaq laptop.

Web Leopard

After taking the BBC (Lab UK) “Web Behaviour Test” I am apparently  a “Web Leopard”.

Fast-moving - Web Leopards like you are adept at getting information from the internet very quickly. Your speed is a trait you share with real-world leopards, which are among the fastest land animals.

Solitary - Leopards live alone, fending for themselves in isolated home ranges. Similarly, the Web Leopard likes to go it alone when looking for information, rather than rely on social networks, or other sites where the users create the content.

Specialised - Web Leopards are best suited to performing one task at a time rather than multitasking. The real-world leopard is similarly specialised, being perfectly adapted to silently tracking its prey before pouncing.

Go take the test at: Discover your inner animal

SourceForge Block Syria, Sudan, Iran, N. Korea & Cuba

Is Open Source Still Open?

…SourceForge.net the world’s largest open source software development web site blocked users from downloading free open source software from “banned locations” meaning users and developers form Syria, Sudan, Iran, N Korea and Cuba are banned…

ref: ArabCrunch En

The OU has caught a cold

It is not only county and borough councils that have been caught out by the collapse of several Icelandic banks.  It now appears that a number of UK universities have also caught a cold, including the Open University.

The Open University said it had invested £6.5m in UK subsidiaries with the Icelandic banks.

"The funds at risk with these two banks, although significant, represent less than 4% of the university's cash holdings and 1.5% of the university's expenditure budget this year.

"There is no threat to the university's operations and staff and suppliers will be paid as normal," said vice-chancellor Professor Brenda Gourley.

This really begs the question "What was so special about these banks to entice so many high profile depositors?"

ref: BBC News

Keep things safe

Since starting my OU studies one of my primary concerns has been making sure I have adequate backups of all my OU data.  This is especially relevant to the current course being studied and the TMA being worked on.  There can be nothing more frustrating and depressing than loosing a TMA that is 90% complete and having to recreate it from scratch.  Data loss can come in many guises, such as hard disk failure; loosing a memory stick; corrupt file, and with this in mind I always have 3 copies available at any one time.  One on my home PC, one on my laptop and one on my work PC.  This sounds nice and secure but the problem has been in keeping the 3 machines synchronised.

Over the last few years I have tried various methods including manual copying and trials of commercial packages (i.e. Handy Backup).  Well today I have come across an Open Source program, Synkron, that looks as though it will do the job.

It has a number of features, including:

• Synchronise multiple folders
• Tabs allow you to have more synchronisations running at once
• Periodical synchronisations automatically sync your folders in selected intervals
• Restore files, which were overwritten during the synchronisation
• Add files and folders to black list to make sure they won't be synchronised in the future
• Make schedules and backup using multisync
• Propagate deletions

With multiple supported platforms:

• Apple Mac OS X (Universal)
• Microsoft Windows (Installer)
• Linux/Unix (Source code, RPM, Ubuntu, Archlinux and ALT Linux packages)

The one drawback is the lack of documentation, although there is a support forum.  Even so it is a simple program to use and I would recommend taking a look at it if you are wanting a way of synchronising data.

Hmmm??? Good or Bad?

Having just seen via John Naughton's blog that you can rate the readability of a blog, I thought I would give it a go.

The result for my blog is:

Now this could be deemed as being good as you my audience must be an intelligent bunch of people to keep coming back and reading my blog.  On the other hand it could be bad, in other word's my English is dire and I am using to many technical terms.  Hmmm???

Tower Crane - Completed

Well it's Monday morning and it looks as though the tower crane has been completed.

Tower Crane

Behind the building where I work there is a construction site where they are in the process of constructing for building, 2 of which will be over 40 floors high. Today they are installing a tower crane and I have decided to photograph it's construction.

ref: Picasa - Tower Crane