Who broke the internet?

This is going to be a shit storm. The CJEU has ruled that US owned storage is not “adequate protection” under EU data protection laws and that their laws around warrants are not an “effective remedy”.  They have torn up the so-called self-harbour treaty. Here are some links.

Read more

Crafting in NWN2

As I have said, I don’t like Crafting in my fantasy fiction; it’s not what I see as heroic, although there are some stories that make something of it, for instance the centre of De Laurentis’ “Conan the Barbarian” is the riddle of steel and weapon forging is a small  part of the story, and…

Read more

Playing NWN2 with Grobnar the Bard

Grobnar the Bard in NWN2, needs more of an explanation than I gave in my walkthrough. There is little in the story for which he is compulsory but he can add enormous value. Here are some notes I made.

Read more

Fighting Tholapsyx

About fighting Tholapsyx,  the ancient Red Dragon. We are looking for the Belt of the Ironfist Clan so that we can recruit the Dwarves to the Neverwinter Alliance. This is started at the Iron Fist stronghold where we get more of Khelgar’s backstory; he is a compulsory party companion for the Ironfist caves and Mount…

Read more

1and 1 News Letter tool

I have started to use 1and1’s newsletter tool. It comes with my package. I using it because I need to send to more than 100 people/blast. Here’s some do’s and don’ts and some gotchas.

Read more

Defending the UK

What started it I found myself doing some reading about recent British Defence strategy and policy. It started with a blog by John Snow, questioning the British military’s obsession with supporting the US, it’s a sort of trickle down, but we can’t afford the technology any more. Military technology works because its new and different…

Read more

More on Splash Pages

I want a splash screen on this page. See also this post. This article documents my experiments with Kento Splash Screen. If the short code is before the More line, then it appears on the Home, if after only if one enters the page itself. (So make a tiny article that looks like part of…

Read more

SCBuildit

I have taken to wasting my time with Sim City on my phone,called SCBuildIt. It’s reminiscent of Sim City, that and warcraft. Here are some guidelines.

Read more

Cairo Clock

I fancied a desktop clock for my elementary builds. I found cairo-clock, which has a bunch of default themes and a bunch of add-ons also. It can be obtained via the package managers; I found this, as the package documentation. 

Read more

Unicode in Python

It’s a very long time since I have had to deal with binary code translations, but when dealing with HTML and JSON with Python, I need to get to grips with it. The € symbol for instance requires the extended character set support and rss should be written in utf-8. This page collects the notes…

Read more

Web Site Testing with MaxQ

MAXQ is a web proxy with recording and replay features. It is designed to capture and replay tests. They are quite keen that one understands the terms of use of target sites since many prohibit automated access and these days it would seem defend themselves against it.  This article documents how to run MaxQ and…

Read more

Banking Regulation Reform

I was pushed to look at some of the Banking Regulation reform performed by the last government. My focus was to look at the Vickers aka Independent Commission on Banking and the legislative response. The key proposal is practical measures to protect domestic savings from foreign risk by de-merging or separating the retail and investment…

Read more

Data Flow Diagrams

How useful are the old fashioned data flow diagrams in today’s world, in particular how useful are they in demonstrating process flow? They showed the relationship between external entities (actors), functions/processes, data stores and data flows.

Read more