/dev/urandom

Believe me when I say I am no fan of Belkin gear.  Its very overpriced and often poorly made.  In fact I have hardly had any Belkin hardware that I haven't had to take back for not working as advertised (especially wifi kit).

A long while ago I was given a Belkin USB bluetooth dongle, which I completely forgot about, my wife washed my coat one day with the dongle still in it.  It came out quite badly scratched but in one piece, I shoved it in a draw and forgot about it.

Today I wanted to link up my new(ish) Sony K800i to my Dell D530 laptop which doesn't have bluetooth.  I remembered the dongle, dug it out and plugged it in.  2 shockers:

1. It worked perfectly!
2. Ubuntu saw it straight away and configured it!

I just saw this and thought it was fantastic, nice one Sebastian!

See Sebastian's blog for the dialogue that go with it.

Sebastian Bergmann's Vader Testing picture

"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy bugs is insignificant next to the power of testing."

"Bugs do not concern me, Admiral. I want that code, not excuses."

etc...

I have had big respect for Richard Branson whilst growing up.  He has made buckets of money but still appears to the casual observer as a human being.

Virgin have had an internet division for a very long time, I used it about 7 years ago under the brand name virgin.net, back then I wasn't in a broadband area so had to cope with dial-up.

About 9 months ago we lived in a cable area, and since Virgin bought NTL they have re-branded their TV and Internet company as Virgin Media.  We moved house and took Virgin with us, unfortunately this wasn't a cable area so we took their 8MBit ADSL package.

Slow is an understatement of their service, a quick search on your favorite search engine will prove this.  I am currently connected at a full 8MBit (well, just under) with great line quality (the exchange is a couple of hundred yards away) and I am currently downloading updates for Ubuntu at a whopping 5Kbytes/sec (no, that's not a typo).

Most evenings I will be lucky to get 50Kbytes/sec, but this evening it is particularly bad.  It was this bad around this time last month but fixed itself within a few days.

In the mornings is when its best, at 6AM I will get a full 8MBit, but that doesn't help me much now.

So my options are to stick with this terrible service, or pay the offset £50 connection fee to leave them (I know, its backwards, but that's Virgin for you).

Thanks to Creative Lee

We found this in of one of our windows at work recently, spot the birdy.

Bird print on our window at work

There has been a lot of misunderstanding with the patent from amazon here.

Most people seem to think this means they are patenting 404 pages.  If you read it again you will see its client side and they are actually patenting spyware, which is even more intriguing.