Status-Q

Just back from a wonderful week in Tuscany. Not long enough.

I noticed a sign in town yesterday.

Quinns of Cambridge - the orignal Irish pub

Well, yes.

If you use the vi editor, and you sometimes find that your cursor keys don't work, then you should read on. Anyone else should go and do something more fun. And we vi users should probably give up on it and use another editor. It is the 21st century, after all.

I often have this problem, and it's generally when I'm ssh-ed into a remote Linux box, which is the main time I use vi. The problem is that the machine at the far end has the wrong idea of what type of terminal you have. In my case, it tends to think that I'm on an 'xterm' or an 'xterm-color', which I'm not, but that's what the Terminal app on my Mac is configured to look like, and the value gets carried through to the other end.

The best thing seems to be to set the terminal type to 'linux' on the remote machine. There are several ways to do this:

• You can set it at the local end for the ssh process:
  TERM=linux ssh me@remotemachine
  and the value should be carried across.
• You can set it in the environment at the remote end, eg.:
  export TERM=linux
  vi filename
• You can set it in vi, once you discover things aren't working:
  :set term=linux
• You can put set term=linux in your .vimrc file at the far end. This seems to me to be the most useful if you hit the problem regularly.

[Original Link]

I'm not a great sports-watcher, but I did see the women's 10,000m final and was very annoyed by the BBCs unswerving devotion to Paula Radcliffe, who didn't even bother to finish her race. They seemed to think it was just fine that she should give up when she realised she wasn't going to get a medal. I call it very bad sportsmanship. I think if you start a race, you should finish it, even if you come last. She certainly wasn't in a state of extreme exhaustion; she simply decided it wasn't worth it.

I also felt very sorry for Kathy Butler, who came about 10th but ran a good race, and who actually finished, and who was almost completely ignored by the commentators. It's not as if we have such a plentiful supply of athletes that we can afford to ignore them. Anyway, I appreciated this Times article by Giles Smith.

The more time I spend in the States, especially in the run-up to an election, the more grateful I am for the UK's Liberal Democrat party. Not because I expect them to win many seats, nor even because I'm likely to vote for them, but because I think having a third party is immensely important.

• It reduces the extreme 'us or them' polarisation that we see in the US.
• It means that most policy decisions are not simply black and white; and when there are only two options on a particular topic, you've got an odd number of entities and hence a two-to-one split rather than simply 'my word against yours'
• A 'central' party starts to become attractive if either of the others goes too far to the left or right; this keeps them in check
• It allows for greater movement of voters. It's much easier to feel that you're moving a bit in one direction or the other than to 'cross over to the opposition'

[Original Link] This ZDNet leader asks about how the US political situation may be harming Microsoft. There are some wonderful examples of small cultural slips having big bad results in this quoted article.

An NYT article today quotes Tina Fey, "Let us not forget the brave Halliburton executives that stormed Baghdad..."

[Original Link] This looks like a nice home-backup solution.

[Original Link]

I'm back on page one! Of what, you ask? Of a Google search for 'Quentin', of course. I used to have a regular position on the first page but those fellows Tarantino and Crisp have been getting a lot of attention recently.

I notice, with envy, that my pal John Naughton is not only on page one of the 'Naughton' results, but he has first place! And third place! I can only dream of such fame.

A while ago, I replaced a Windows NT Server machine belonging to some friends with a basic Dell machine running Redhat. They're only really using it as a file and DHCP server, but I'm pleased to see that it's about 9 months since the last reboot:

[qsf@master qsf]$ uptime
 11:56pm  up 266 days, 11:56,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00