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!
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.
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 »
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 »
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!
Check it out on Foreign Policy
Thanks to Torn for bringing this to my attention - Alston report: AFP behind killings. The full report has more detail (local copy).
Until Apple release the SDK for the iPhone, we are relegated to creating iPhone aware web-apps. I was inspired by the Facebook and Google optimised pages for the iPhone to investigate the details of the Safari browser.
Here are some resources to help you create Safari-savvy pages: