Dave Holland's home page

Impossible fractals
2:00pm, Thursday 30 October 2008

These are rather beautiful.

HP LaserJet 2600N and Debian
12:02pm, Friday 27 June 2008

Just documenting a gotcha I found while setting up my shiny new LaserJet 2600N with Debian.

The instructions say you need Ghostscript 8.54 or later because 8.15 has colour-handling bugs. Great - Debian has 8.54...

dave@zenda:~$ dpkg -l '*gs-gpl*' | grep ii
ii  gs-gpl         8.54.dfsg.1-5  The GPL Ghostscript PostScript interpreter

But wait, my printouts look vile. Colour is blotchy and washed out. Some time later - what's this?

dave@zenda:~$ gs --version
8.15.3

Oh. There's another version of Ghostscript installed...

dave@zenda:~$ dpkg -l '*gs-esp*' | grep ii
ii  gs-esp         8.15.3.dfsg.1-1etch1 The Ghostscript PostScript interpreter - ESP version

Ths fix is to do update-alternatives --config gs and select the gs-gpl flavour. Now I have lovely prints and the colours look fine.

Hopefully this will save someone else the hour's head-scratching over poorly-coloured prints which I spent!

Sausages per mile
12:26pm, Thursday 19 June 2008

As part of National Bike Week, my employer is offering free breakfast to staff who cycle to work. Excellent! Shall we do some sums?

My cycle to work is just over 3 miles. It takes me about 25 minutes depending on the prevailing wind and how long it takes me to cross a busy roundabout. That classifies me as a "leisurely" (a.k.a. "unfit") cyclist. These sources more or less agree, that consumes about 113 calories.

A grilled sausage provides about 118 calories, according to these sources .

This would be astonishingly convenient if I had eaten a single sausage for breakfast. However I actually ate two sausages, a hash brown and fried bread. I don't think my cycle ride home is going to outweigh my surplus breakfast. Oops!

Me-me-meme
5:32pm, Wednesday 18 June 2008

I don't do memes often, but this one could be funny and/or interesting.

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. Anything you want, good or bad. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised about what people remember about you.

Er, comments aren't enabled here so you'll have to email me instead and I'll add the best/worst here...

Surveillance
4:37pm, Tuesday 17 June 2008

Excellent quote on the surveillance state from Cory Doctorow:

Outside of dramatically failed experiments like the Soviet Union and East Germany, policing has never been a business of gathering data on every single person and arresting the guilty ones. This doesn't catch guilty people, it ensnares the innocent and acts as a kind of monetary black hole, absorbing all the cash we can toss into it, growing larger and more voracious by the day.