Last Regatta before Summer Break

 Posted on June 30, 2012  (Last modified on January 10, 2020)  |  richm

What a strange few months. The weather has meant that there seems to have been hardly any regatta racing this year. Luckily Talkin Tarn Regatta went ahead and with 425 entries it was a roaring success. It was a busy day for all the officials and umpires. I spent 7 hours starting crews over the day with a constant stream of crews feeding up to the start. Luckily the start is sheltered so we didn’t suffer too many alignment problems with the wind but it certainly got a bit rougher in the mid part of the course. [Read More]

A Little Piece of Pi

 Posted on May 29, 2012  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  richm

Yippee my Raspberry Pi arrived at the weekend along with a free tshirt from Premier Farnell - Element 14. After searching for a suitable empty 2G SD card I transferred the latest sample Debian install onto it and it booted straight away. Very easy! The kids like the look of it and were amazed that they were allowed to look and touch. They couldn’t quite get their heads around the fact that it was a whole computer. [Read More]

Rivers for Change

 Posted on April 26, 2012  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  richm

This evening I attended an event hosted by Transition Durham and the Environment Agency Lower Wear Catchment Pilot folks. They are looking to pull together all of the river users and pull together some plans for improvement of the river. Tonights session started out with a brain storming session to capture information about the river users, their needs and known issues. It then turned into a discussion session looking at how to reach out to the wider community of river users. [Read More]

New Laptop Disc

 Posted on April 22, 2012  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  admin

Yesterday I installed a new 750 gig drive into my laptop to replace the existing 250 gig drive that was factory fitted. I was finding it increasingly difficult to fit the Android source code; various other git repos and most annoyingly Maven repository caches that Eclipse and friends insist on gathering in each workspace. The transfer of the data went pretty painlessly. Mostly thanks to the flexibility of Linux for booting and good old Knoppix to allow me to easily boot from the new drive and reinstall the boot sector. [Read More]

Rowing Calendar

 Posted on March 4, 2012  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  richm

The  latest edition of Regatta magazine arrived earlier this week. It contains the British Rowing Racing Wall Calendar for 2012/13. Good to see that Durham Regatta is highlighted as a British Rowing Row for Gold event. We are still working on the exact program of events here in Durham but I can’t wait for June!

Raspberry Pi

 Posted on March 3, 2012  (Last modified on January 10, 2020)  |  richm

So demand for Raspberry Pi has been quite amazing. It managed to take out both RS Components and Farnell sites for a few hours on 29th February. I eventually managed to register an interest in the devices on both sites later in the day. Today I received an email from Farnell stating that they are taking orders in batches with delivery scheduled in about 30 days. Needless to say I’ve placed an order and it seems we get a free -tshirt thrown in too. [Read More]

Durham Regatta – Row for Gold

 Posted on February 16, 2012  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  richm

I have just heard that Durham Regatta has been accepted into the British Rowing Row for Gold initiative. This is a brilliant opportunity for us to build on a lot of the great work that our local rowing clubs (e.g. Durham ARC Explore Rowing) and the Tony Blair Sports Foundation (Get Going, Get Rowing) have been doing to introduce the sport of rowing to a wider audience.

R.I.P. Peter Burdess

 Posted on January 24, 2012  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  richm

What sad news to hear that Peter Burdess passed away suddenly. Whilst in his 80s Peter was an inspiration to us all. He was as fit and active as anyone could hope to be. Peter made a huge contribution to rowing in our region as a competitor, coach, volunteer and supporter. His picture appears on many photos on the walls of the Durham ARC Boathouse spanning over many decades. He has been particularly effective in bringing newcomers into rowing. [Read More]

SPF Records

 Posted on January 15, 2012  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  admin

I have been using Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records on my oldelvet.org.uk domain for quite some time. This allows me to list the computers that are allowed to send email for a particular domain. This helps to cut down the amount of that falsely claims to come from that domain. The main benefit that I see due to this is that I get less Backscatter incorrectly addressed bounced emails (also see Backscatterer. [Read More]

MAC address and encryption salt

 Posted on December 13, 2011  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  richm

I just spotted a report about the timthumb wordpress vulnerability and whist doing a bit of background investigation I spotted that they were considering using a local MAC address as an encryption salt. That made me wonder if the imminent arrival of IPv6 enabled servers/sites could introduce a vulerability here because IPv6 often uses the MAC address to generate a unique link local (and in some cases global) IPv6 address. [Read More]