White Trousers

Posted on July 3, 2008 by Paul — 2 Comments ↓

One of the fashion items of the moment among young women in the UK is the white trouser. Being male I’m all for this innovation, though I might advocate certain restrictions (the 60-something woman I saw at the beech with a too-small hipster pair and a boob tube, for example). It struck me that this trend is a direct result of cheap overseas labour. If trousers cost Â£50 per pair you’re unlikely to get anything as impractical as white, because they’re not going to last more than a few months without becoming bra-strap gray. But if the trousers cost a tenner and you can get a season out of them before they fall apart anyway, why not?*

*Obviously there are ethical reasons why not, as well as ethical reasons why. My point is that it’s interesting to see such an impact, not whether it’s right or wrong.

Bike Maintenance and Mobile Phones

Posted on July 2, 2008 by Paul — 1 Comment ↓

I’ve been having problems with my front derailleur over the last few days, and last night I spent 10 minutes by the side of the road making adjustments. Unfortunately I’ve never quite got round to buying a multi-tool, so instead I was using the back cover of a Motorola Razr (surprisingly effective). Once I got home I overhauled the system (so expect bits to start dropping off within 2 days), and a tool will be ordered today.

Clowns

Posted on June 24, 2008 by Paul — No Comments ↓

This is one of the most terrifying images I’ve ever seen.

This might provide some protection.

No You Are

Posted on June 22, 2008 by Paul — 2 Comments ↓

Gordon Brown is planning to tell the Saudis that they need to spend some of their oil profits helping us not to need their oil so much. As stupid as that sounds, there’s a key line that makes it even worse:

The prime minister wants oil producers to invest some of their profits in long-term energy projects in Britain, such as wind farms and nuclear power.

We are an oil producing country, though not to the scale of Saudi Arabia of course, and we’ve shown only half-hearted interest in spending on renewables. I can’t imagine why the Saudis would want to do better for us than we have for ourselves.

Solaris, NWAM and Static IPs

Posted on June 19, 2008 by Paul — No Comments ↓

A new feature in OpenSolaris is NWAM, the NetWork Auto Magic, um, thingy. It’s a handy tool that automatically configures your network connection. Unfortunately it unhandily has no GUI at the moment, though one is in the works, so if it doesn’t work right first time you can quickly get lost in text files and Google searches. In my case I wanted it to do its normal magic, but to use a static IP address at all times. Here’s how I did it:

svcs svc:/network/physical This should show that ‘nwam’ is online and ‘default’ is disabled. If it doesn’t, off to Google with you!

Edit the file /etc/nwam/llp so that it says something like yukonx0 static 192.168.1.50/24 – yukonx0 is the name of your network adapter (mine is for a Mac Mini ethernet port), 192.168.1.50 is the IP you want to assign, and /24 shows that your subnet mask is 255.255.255.0. Your values will vary.

Edit the file /etc/nsswitch.conf and add dns to the hosts line, to give hosts: files dns.

Now delete the default route entry (this may well not exist, but it’s safest to remove and recreate): route delete default 192.168.1.1 (your default route may be different). Then add the entry back in permanently: route -p add default 192.168.1.1.

Finally restart nwam with svcadm restart svc:/network/physical:nwam and wait for a moment. It should tell you that it’s connected with IP 192.168.1.50 (or whatever you selected). Once that’s done you should be able to connect to the Internet, and more importantly be able to reboot and have it still work. Though it shouldn’t be necessary, if it’s not working immediately try rebooting.