Spinning around

Now that the majority of the results are in, here’s some spin on the results for each party: Pro-party spin Conservatives: Huge gain in number of seats, beat Labour into second place, can probably form a minority government or possibly coalition with Lib Dems. David Cameron will likely end up as the new occupant of […]

Bytemark backup script

As some people are aware, I use Bytemark for all of my hosting, and I also resell some of their services. I’ve recently switched to performing my backups via rsync and thought I would share the simple script I use in case any other Bytemark customer is looking to do the same thing. #!/bin/bash BACKUPDIRS=”/etc […]

Thoughts on tax reform

In the run up to the general election, one thing which has disappointed me is that none of the three main parties have used the economic crisis as an opportunity to suggest radical reform of the tax system in the UK. Sure, the Lib Dems want to increase the personal allowance and introduce a mansion […]

django user variables and login forms

I’ve been working on Pub Gateway this afternoon, and I ended up with a slight problem with django’s authentication module. I’d managed to build a working login form which sent the user back to the home page if they entered a valid username and password. The only other thing I wanted was to change the […]

A pint with the party leader

Everyone has been talking for the last week about how well Clegg did in the recent leaders debate on ITV. The polls have him on anything up to a 14 point lead on Cameron and Brown, and everyone seems to be joining the 101 Facebook groups and buying the t-shirts. Yes, you too can be […]

Register to vote

Have you registered to vote? There’s still time, it’s a really simple process, and it gives you the power to help decide who will represent your area in Westminster for the next five years. You may also have local elections, depending on your area. Alas, I haven’t got round to forming the Currybeer Party in […]

Thoughts on frameworks

I’ve been building dynamic web sites for over ten years now, and one of the things which has bugged me enormously is the huge amount of repetitive code I have to write, especially for form handling (including validation) and access control. At least half of my coding time is spent on this sort of work, […]

Announcing… Pub Gateway!

Pub Gateway is now available for your viewing pleasure. A few things to note: The design is simple, because I’m not an artist and can’t create amazing logos. I’ll probably pay someone to come up with a decent design and logo at a later date. There are only a few pubs available as I haven’t […]

Thought for the day

Thought for the day (which probably wouldn’t get onto Radio 4): Any sane mail server logs the IP address of any remote server which connects to it and attempts to deliver spam. It’s possible to map an IP address to a physical location, with a reasonable degree of accuracy (if you pay for a good […]

UKUUG Spring conference

Three days of this week were taken up by the UKUUG Spring 2010 conference, which I seemed to volunteer to lead the organisation on once again (and for next year as well by the looks of it!). I’ve still not fully recovered, probably as a result of going down with a cold the morning after […]