Author Archives: Huw Lynes
Great River Race
I found out the other day that something called the Great River Race was setting off from the Millwall Slipway which is only walking distance from my house. So on Saturday afternoon I wandered over shortly before the start to … Continue reading
Posted in Life, photos
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Westminster Skeptics: The Revolution Will Be Digitized
After being in London for nearly a year I’ve finally managed to make it to a Westminster Skeptics in the Pub meeting. I was rewarded with an entertaining and thought-provoking talk by crusading journalist Heather Brooke. Based on her new … Continue reading
Posted in Internet, Life, Politics, Tech
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Health, Evidence and Economics
I was going to write a post about Fukushima today, but instead I ended up having a discussion about Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) and it’s intersection with free-market economics. This was precipated by Anne-Marie Cunningham sharing a couple of papers … Continue reading
Posted in Politics, Science
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Willing to pay for sync?
Matt Assay had an interesting post up on the Register today about Amazon’s kindle store outselling Apple’s ibooks. His thesis is that this is driven by the fact that Amazon has a much larger range of titles and that kindle … Continue reading
Intelligence² Nuclear Debate – It’s Got To Be Nuclear
I attended the recent Intelligence² debate – It’s Got To Be Nuclear – held at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington. You can listen to the full audio of the debate and subsequent Q&A session at the link above. The … Continue reading
Posted in Politics, Science
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Intelligence² Debate – It’s Got To Be Nuclear – Initial Thoughts
I’ve just got back from the debate held by Intelligence² at the Royal Geographical Society in South Kensington. The motion was simply – It’s got to be nuclear – although both sides agreed that the pro-nuclear camp were clear that … Continue reading
Unix Server Reboot Controversy
Paul Venezia has been getting a certain amount of flack for suggesting that rebooting Unix boxes is an inherently bad thing. I mostly agree with him. People have been pointing out the value of regular reboots as part of maintenance. … Continue reading
Posted in SysAdmin
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A Little Piece Of History
I received the item below in the post this week. And it has made me super happy. The reason that the arrival of this unassuming chunk of grey material made me so gleeful is its history. I’m a bit of … Continue reading
Posted in Life, Science
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Being Slightly Smarter With seq
This post comes from my ever-growing file of ‘how the hell did I not know that’ issues. On the cluster at work we have a bunch of machines with names like mysite12 or mysite237. So quite often I’m writing shell … Continue reading
Stepping Through Large Database Tables in Python
In order to report usage on our PBSPro compute cluster at work I wrote a simple set of python scripts to dump the accounting information into a MySQL database. This has been working fine for the last year churning out … Continue reading
Posted in Tech
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