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I recently had to re-install my work laptop with Oracle Linux 7. With backups, it didn’t take too long to reinstall. The most time consuming task was compiling Emacs 24.5 from source. Emacs 24.5 is required for the excellent Prelude starter kit I have recently adopted. There are a lot of pre-requisite packages for Emacs that are available (but not included) in Oracle Linux 7. As part of the ‘Emacs for Everything’ experiment, I have also started to use an Emacs package called ‘elfeed’ to read RSS feeds and while it worked in my new, shiny environment, I noticed it ran much slower then previously. I tracked this degradation to the fact that OL7 ships with a dated version of ‘GnuTLS’ (3.3.8 released in September 2014) whereas the latest version is 3.4.9 (released in February 2016). ...

This is the famous ‘Hello world’ program written in Python in colour using Markdown. #!/usr/bin/env python import sys def hello(name='world'): greeting = "hello " + name print(greeting) if __name__ == "__main__": hello(*sys.argv[1:]) This took me a long time to get working.

Getting email No mail. In three whole days. Weird. I wonder if it’s Thanksgiving over in the States. Not even any football related banter. Is this thing even on ? Then I realised precisely why I was sitting alone in an island of blissful isolation, devoid of all email communications and staring at an Inbox in a perpetual state of ‘Zero’. I had forgotten to configure inbound email. When I was testing, I used mbsync to synchronise emails from my ISP which worked well (fast, reliable, well documented) with bi-directional sync between IMAP and my local Maildir. ...

Aka ‘DARK WEB HACKER COST ME $1600 SHOCK HORROR !’ After I set up my Jekyll site and uploaded the content to Amazon S3 using ‘s3website’, I remember thinking ‘I must re-read that section about securing the configuration file with AWS credentials in plain text’. If the source code of your website is publicly available, ensure that the s3website.yml file is in the list of ignored files. For git users this means that the file .gitignore should mention the s3website.yml file. ...

I have used CVS and then SVN for version control. As I now use GIT for a couple of projects, I found this set of GIT tutorials very useful as they are well-written, use plenty of examples and outline where and how GIT differs from Subversion.

Although hosting on GitHub pages is an excellent option, I decided to move this blog to Amazon S3, mainly because I have used S3 before. Also GitHub pages only supports a limited set of Jekyll plugins and I wanted more flexibility to add any plugin and (potentially) run a different version of Jekyll. I also took the opportunity to switch the theme to the rather minimalistic but stylish Poole and installed the useful s3website utility to automatically synchronise the static site to Amazon S3. As you are charged for upload/download traffic, an intelligent sync process (rather than uploading everything) for deployment is important. ...

Welcome…to the atrocity exhibition. Fittingly, this site is powered by Jekyll and Github pages, but the precise details will probably take a series of 1,739 posts.

‘Is she a werewolf ? ‘No’. ‘Does she have the ability to spontaneously transform into a fierce animal ?’ ‘No’. ‘Is she a robot ?’ ‘No’. ‘Is she a very early version of a robot that is running version 1.0.1 (alpha) of the software that meant she lost to that human-robot hybrid ?’ ‘No’ ‘Is she a normal human but just set 200 years in a post-apocalyptic world where water, fuel and sunlight are at a premium ?’ ...

A lot of people write in and ask ‘Norman - whatever happened to that SIPP you started 10 years ago ? Has it produced enough to retire on ? Was it a lot of work ? Did it outperform the FTSE100 ?’ I took the ’long term buy and hold forever and ‘strategic ignorance’ ethos to its logical extreme and forgot about the SIPP completely. Once all the pension funds were transferred and a collection of high yielding UK shares purchased, I forgot about it. I didn’t sell any shares. I didn’t feverishly check the balance daily. I didn’t panic during the banking crisis of 2008. I didn’t respond to any corporate actions. Occasionally, I bought a new share once enough funds had accumulated from dividend payments. ...

‘Is this Grimm ?’ ‘No’ ‘Adventures of New Grimm ?’ ‘No’ ‘New adventures of Grimm ?’ ‘No’ ‘New: Adventures of New Grimm ?’ ‘Yes’ ‘Is this a repeat ?’ ‘No’