MacBook Air insides

May 10th, 2009

The MacBook Air is lovely, but could use a bit more disk-space. Looks like the 5mm 1.8″ drive in the 1st generation product doesn’t come in larger capacities than 80GB. Ifixit and AnandTech have illustrations of the insides.

Articles by Michael Lewis

May 5th, 2009

I just came across this book review of “Liars Poker”, a book I’d enjoyed reading (whilst doing something entirely different, studying this). It contained links to two great articles recently penned by Michael Lewis; one on the Icelandic meltdown and the other on the meltdown of the investment banks. Thanks Russ!

Investment bankers :-)

October 17th, 2008

George Parr on subprime – very funny!

The truth of balance sheets of US Investment Banks:

There are two sides of the balance sheet: the left side and the right side.

On the left side, there is nothing right…
On the right side, there is nothing left.

Enjoy the weekend!

Olympics handover

August 25th, 2008

Watching the closing ceremony in Beijing, you cannot help but being amazed at the imagination and quality on display from the Chinese.

It was thus with some dismay I watched Boris Johnson walk in with the Beijing mayor to wave the Olympic flag. An ill-fitting suit, unbuttoned, a bad hair-do (which admittedly is par for the course with Boris).

Then came the London welcoming presentation. Unimaginative, lack of messages, badly executed.

Embarrasing.

Free X server for Windows

June 16th, 2008

I recently found XMing, a free X server for Windows, providing a useful alternative to VNC for accessing remote Ubuntu desktops. Instructions here.

Preserving UTF-8 filenames from Windows to Linux

May 1st, 2008

On occasion I access (Ubuntu) Linux servers from Windows using Putty and WinSCP. In order to preserve UTF-8 filenames, some snakeoil is required. Read the rest of this entry »

Setting up SCP/SFTP chroot access to Ubuntu/x64 server

February 4th, 2008

scponly provides a mechanism to enable secure file-access to a server, with marked improvement over FTP.

scponly can be setup in a) normal mode, whereby the user can see the whole of the file-system of the server, or b) in chroot’ed mode, whereby the user only sees the files the server administrator has granted access to. The latter is what I wanted, but there are a few extra steps required for 64-bit kernel servers. Read the rest of this entry »

Expensive travels (iPhone)

December 20th, 2007

I have been travelling a bit since I got my iPhone, and got a nasty shock yesterday when the phone was barred by O2 for having reached a billing-level of £323 above my monthly subscription. Due to a bug in the O2 web portal this level of charges were not apparent to me.

After 3 sets of emails back & forth to their (outsourced) helpdesk that left me frustrated I called the O2 iPhone customer support line. A nice Northern englishman took me through the website navigation to the right page to show me how the charges had arisen. He then surprised me by gently offering to in this instance waive the data-roaming costs incurred; as this was my first bill using the iPhone. Magic!

Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday 13th was quite a day…

December 17th, 2007

Check it out on Foreign Policy

UN report on extrajudicial killings, Philippines

December 17th, 2007

Thanks to Torn for bringing this to my attention – Alston report: AFP behind killings. The full report has more detail (local copy).