Laptop Diaries III

On my Sun/Oracle blog, I wrote an article about configuring my Laptop, primarily about getting X-Windows to work under Solaris. This documented some research, but not a solution, and as an easter egg, I pointed at some Gnome and Windows eye-candy. You can read it if you want, but its out of date; I wrote this pointer article in Feb 2016 and every piece of technology mentioned is obsolete. …

About: Risk

I was preparing a project proposal before christmas and we were trying to define what a risk was (Again!). Some mediocre (if the cap fits……) project managers think to improve their credibility by saying risk every other word. I offer you (& them) the following, although its not original,

“A risk is an event that is futuristic, uncertain and detrimental.

Its a new FUD! …

Dragon’s Den & Flying Cars

The BBC are showing a TV program series called “Dragon’s Den”. Despite my interest in fantasy, this is about venture capitalism, not sword & sorcery, albeit with a very British spin. Yesterday, a show went out which sums up the crapness of British industrial management. Each week the show gets a bunch of self-made rich tossers into a loft and asks would-be entrepreneurs to beg them for money to invest in their business.

Yesterday, Kestrel Aerospace, who are building a personal air vehicle based on a proprietary and innovative engine within a craft that looks a bit like the aircraft flown by Arnie in the fim “The 6th Day”.  …

Laptop Diaries II

How to  build a triple boot laptop. First, I salvaged as much as possible. Fortunately this consisted of the whole of the windows partition, and some parts of the Linux partition, including some parts of $HOME & /opt. Most importantly it included /opt/install which acts a bit like “My Downloads”. This meant that I have a list of most of the products originally installed on top of RH Linux. (These include Star Office, Acroread & Mozilla (I also downloaded GNOCL, but only played with it). I used “Ghost” to save the windows partition. …