PreshBlog

This afternoon, ATV Johannes Kepler docked with the International Space Station (video here).

It’s delivering “4,534kg of propellant for International Space Station reboost and attitude control”, “1,600kg of dry cargo, 850kg of propellant for Russia’s Zvezda module and 100kg of oxygen”. Whilst attached to the ISS, it will “boost” it, compensating for decaying orbit caused by drag.

The thing, once released from the launch rocket, navigates itself into orbit behind the ISS, and automatically docks with it with astonishing 1.5 cm precision, all whilst while the spacecraft and the ISS are hurtling around the Earth at 28 000 km/h. Impressive stuff indeed. (See ATV flight phases.)

I released version 1.20 of Dancer::Plugin::Database to CPAN last night.

Changes include a couple of minor bug fixes, including fixing test failures on Windows systems, and automatically enabling UTF-8 support if the app’s charset setting is UTF-8, so that UTF-8 data in your database should Just Work.

Heh:

:)

Just a quick post to note that it’s been four years since my first post on this blog, on which my friend Jim commented:

HAHAHAHA, this won’t last long!
Like many blogs before it, it’s doomed to sit on a webserver somewhere and gather cyber dust!!

I may go for a fair while without posting sometimes, but it’s still alive, so hah! :)

Whoops – when I migrated my blog from blog.preshweb.co.uk to www.preshweb.co.uk, commenting was broken because the keys I was using for reCAPTCHA’s API were no longer valid for the new hostname.

I’ve just changed the keys to ones which will work, so commenting should be fixed now. Thanks to Barbie for emailing me to let me know about it!

Just how many hard drives and other bits of kit did the Government waste our money on for their stupid, ill-conceived and now abandoned ID cards scheme? "The government destroyed the final 500 hard drives that contained the national identity register…"

In total about 500 hard drives and 100 back-up tapes that contained the details of around 15,000 holders of the ID cards were magnetically wiped and shredded.

Even if they were going to store a buttload of data on each individual, 500 hard drives for 15,000 people? Seriously?

I’d hate to know how much taxpayer money they wasted in total on this hare-brained scheme.

The taxpayer copped a £400,000 bill for contractors to delete the data collected during the scheme, which was brought in by the previous Labour government.

Part of the cost included the Identity and Passport Service writing to those few people with an ID card to tell them that it was no longer worth the plastic it was printed on.

How much does it send 15,000 letters? I’m sure it shouldn’t cost much to safely destroy hard drives (or, better and less wastefully, securely wipe them then donate them to some computing charity or auction them off…).

David Golden recently pointed out (based on an IRC discussion) that the CPAN Testers FAQ isn’t particularly easy to find and doesn’t show up well in search results, so I’m posting this just to do my bit to make it a little easier to find.

It covers such questions as:

• “How can I indicate that my distribution only works on certain versions of Perl?”
• “How can I indicate that my distribution only works on a particular operating system?”
• “How can I stop getting FAIL reports for missing libraries or other non-Perl dependencies?”
• “How do I contact a tester?”
• “How do I stop getting these reports?”

So, if you need an answer to any of those questions, head on over to the CPAN Testers FAQ where you’ll find your answer.

It would be helpful if the FAQ contained named anchors so that I could link to the answer for each of those questions above, actually.

How not to taxi:

(From accident report on AviationSafetyNetwork – this Boeing 737-2T5 operated by Africa-Air Charter missed a taxiway, tried to turn back using reverse thrust, but instead backed off the tarmac. Expensive reversing mistake!)

I’ve been toying with the idea of redesigning my website/blog for quite some time. I recently retired my old website and redirected it here to my blog. I’ve been considering replacing WordPress with something else, but I think for the time being at least, I’ll stick with WordPress, as it’s powerful and works well for me.

I decided I couldn’t be bothered to attempt my own design for the blog, as I’m not particularly good at design (back-end code is my area of expertise), so I’ve just picked a template I think is quite pretty and functional. That’ll do :)

Not a new video, but new to me – driver does well to regain control during this drift: