Category: Activities

I’ve been putting off upgrading my home machine from RedHat 7.3 for years, it seems. RedHat is making noises about end-of-lifing 7.3, so I knew if I wanted the latest security patches, I was going to have to upgrade soon. This weekend was it.

What a royal pain.

I’ll probably post later about the joys and sorrows of upgrading, but for now let me just say that if I could have postponed it another year, I would have.

This post will also serve as a test to make sure I’ve finally got all the bits re-installed. Thank you CPAN.

What I’m currently working on is a digital content system for cinemas. So far, theatres and advertisers have been a little slow on the uptake. So this article is good news.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Film | Cinemas set for ‘digital revolution’

Bowling ball mortar. Be the envy of your gun club.

No, this isn’t based on anything that’s happened to me recently.

How many hardware engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

• One to turn the lights on and off a few times to see if he can reproduce the problem. S/he then escalates it to the:
• One to swap it with another light bulb in the same room to see if it’s the fixutre. S/he then calls:
• One to bring in the hot-swap light bulb, only to find it’s the wrong type of bulb. That gets called back to the office, where:
• Another one orders the correct bulb via second day air. The other hardware engineers go home for two days, leaving you in the dark until eventually:
• Another one brings in the newly arrived bulb, but puts it in the fixture of an already working bulb and closes the call.

At this point, a progammer picks up the working bulb that’s sitting in the garbage and installs it. Problem solved.