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Archives for March, 2011


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The Defense of Jisr Al-Doreaa

This is an excellent update of an old classic. Two books in one, the author's have brought Swinton's Duffer's Drift and re-written it for the modern conflicts (which bear more than a passing resemblance to the Boer War). Swinton's book is in the second half of the volume.  The basis for Duffer''s Drift (if you aren't familiar with it already) is that a young officer en route to the Boer War has a series of dreams about his first independent command. In each dream it all goes horribly wrong, but on waking he learns some lessons which he then takes with him into the next dream (without remembering the details of the previous dream). Over the course of six dreams he manages to learn enough lessons for a successful outcome. The scenario is well set out, with appropriate maps and…
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You Cannot E-mail HMRC?

I was somewhat surprised tonight to discover that HMRC apparently refuse e-mails from members of the public (AKA customers) with tax enquiries. This was started because I got a coding notice (dated 21 February 2011)  that said I owed some back tax from a previous year. They claimed to have told me about this already, but I didn't recall that, and since I'm on PAYE (with a Govt Dept) I believe I've paid the correct tax for my entire career. If anything I may have overpaid because my charitable contributions won't have been taken into account (a modest amount though). Anyway, I used a bit of know-how and after the first obvious e-mail addresses bounced (enquiries@)  I then wrote to postmaster@ (the address the bounce came from) and it also bounced. So, being aware of the pan-government standard for personal…
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Ars Magica – Lumen

Recently Lumen has been on a trip to Waddenzee with several of her friends from the covenant at Triamore. (See for the write up). From her perspective the journey was mostly uneventful apart from: premonitions of the attack on the ship they were using (during which she mostly made attackers fall asleep); some searching on a swamp near Waddenzee where she realised that she could spontaneously cast to power the punt they were using; she also made a bird; the visit to Waddenzee itself, where she rescued one of the local women from ill use, employing her as a second maid; a night excursion just on the mainland on return where a lot of time was spent searching in the dark for a particularly unpleasant creature, which was later found to be called a Lamia. So what does Lumen take…
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Moving to New Computer pt.2

I cannot be sure why exactly, but after waiting ages for the iso to be compiled (and trying that a couple of times to be sure) I just couldn't get the remastersys backup distro to work. I managed to get an ISO image fine, and I could install it on the USB stick, and then boot from that same stick. However when I tried to install onto the new machine's hard disk it failed during the file copying process (306% in). After three failed attempts I've fallen back to: installing Ubuntu desktop onto the new machine. After that I installed both openssh and nfs-common and nfs-kernel-server so that I can copy files from the old machine to the new machine. mount the / of the old machine on /old on middenface james@middenface:/old$ sudo mount sternhammer:/export /old made a backup of…
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Moving Ubuntu to New Computer

So I finally got myself a new PC to replace the ubuntu server. The new box is a Acer Revo R3700 from which was £200, very cheap for a brand new box, and it comes with HDMI out. In keeping with my naming policy for devices it will be called 'middenface'. Anyway the plan is to use remastersys to create a live cd from the old ubuntu server installation and then write that to the new box. Instructions about this come from here deb More later as I get on with it, just installing remastersys so that I can prepare the bootable usb stick from the ISO it makes. The other thing I need to do is work out how to swap the hard disk in the new machine to upgrade it from 200Gb to 500Gb. This youtube video shows you…
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