From the BBC: Tesco is to change the wording of signs on its fast-track checkouts to avoid any linguistic dispute. The supermarket giant is to replace its current “10 items or less” notices with signs saying “Up to 10 items”. Tesco’s move follows uncertainty over whether the current notices should use “fewer” instead of “less”… Continue reading Tesco Improves its English
Author: Dave Cross
Livery Companies – Project Complete
(Well, stage one of the project, anyway.) A couple of years ago whilst I was working in the heart of the City of London, I noticed that my lunchtime wanders were taking me past a few of the City Livery Halls. I’d always been aware of the Livery Companies, but I’d never really investigated them,… Continue reading Livery Companies – Project Complete
Phone Strangeness
My current phone is a Nokia N91, I’ve had it for well over two years, which is probably the longest time I’ve owned any phone, and I’ve been very happy with it. Of course it’s showing its age technologically now, but I haven’t had any problems with it. But last week, whilst I was in… Continue reading Phone Strangeness
Why Corporates Hate Perl
Over on O’Reillynet yesterday I wrote the first part of a series of posts entitled “Why Corporates Hate Perl“. I’m working through some rough ideas that might just form a talk of the same title at next year’s YAPC::Europe. I didn’t think that anyone would take any notice of my random thoughts, but this morning… Continue reading Why Corporates Hate Perl
Showing Appreciation
I’ve mentioned here before that I run a small free software project which supplies simple web programs. The programs are quite widely used, but we generally only hear from the users when things go wrong. It was, therefore, nice to get a mail from someone who hadn’t had any problems and just wanted to say… Continue reading Showing Appreciation
Breaking Radio Silence
It’s been a bit quiet round here for the last week or so. Sorry about that. I was busy in other areas. I spent the last week in Copenhagen, speaking at YAPC::Europe. Over four days I gave three short talks and a full day training session. It good to catch up with a number of… Continue reading Breaking Radio Silence
Anniversaries
It’s been a week of anniversaries. Wednesday was the tenth anniversary of the first London.pm meeting. And last night we had our tenth anniversary meeting. But for me personally, today is an even bigger anniversary. It was twenty years ago today that I started my first “real” job. I hope you won’t be too bored… Continue reading Anniversaries
The Press on Dawkins
Richard Dawkins‘ new documentary series, The Genius of Charles Darwin, begins on Channel 4 this evening. He has therefore been doing a round of publicity interviews and the results have been appearing in the press over the weekend. It’s interesting to see how different papers treat it. The Times ran a pretty straight article about… Continue reading The Press on Dawkins
More Password Idiocy
When will web sites start to be careful with people’s passwords? Oh, I know that a few sites get it right, but it seems to me that the vast majority still don’t have a clue what they are doing. Here is today’s example. I got an email this morning from a company called RAM (that’s… Continue reading More Password Idiocy
Drizzle
When I first read about Drizzle last week I assumed it was some kind of joke. It turns out that it isn’t, so it just makes me a little depressed. Drizzle is[1] a cut-down version of MySQL. MySQL is the database server than has been known to make grown database designers cry because of its… Continue reading Drizzle