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Occasional musings that fall out of my brain and on to the site. Occasionally more occasional than I'd like. But will try to fix that.

Things I know now that I didn't last year

Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 18th March, 2008 @ 00:00

As it's been a while since I posted, I thought it was time for a general brain dump to serve as a reminder to myself that I've not spent the entirety of 2008 doing nothing whatsoever. What follows is a list in no particular order, of no particular merit and most likely of no real relevance or interest to anyone...

  • There are very few problems in life that can't be solved with a nice cup of tea.
  • Australia has 5 DVB-T multiplexes, each carrying only two or three video channels, but with each network operating one HD service. Trying to multicast them VLC results in the same massive memory leak as multicasting UK streams, but VLS is quite happy to do it without a fuss, as always.
  • The hand operated valve of the radiator of an old fashioned central heating system like mine is the outlet, so a leaking radiator continues to drip when it's turn off at that end.
  • Four adults can get an off peak Travelcard from Bedford to London return, including zones 1-6 travel for only £11 each. East Midlands trains 7pm service is off limits because off peak starts at 19:01.
  • IronPython allowed me to build a web services middleware doodle for two companies who do things the Microsoft way. Being able to build .NET apps in a language as nice as Python makes Windows seem like a much more accessible platform. And there's even IronPython Studio.
  • My car is worth much more than I thought, though might need to fix a couple of things on it first, and I'm not convinced it's a realistic price.
  • On DAB, instead of calling each MPEG transport stream a multiplex as per DVB, they're called Ensembles, which is so sweet and appropriate.
  • Wikipedia use PowerDNS instead of BIND and it seems like a much more flexible and scalable DNS server. The Wikipedia guys wrote a special backend to allow them to send visitors to servers in different parts of the world depending the IP address making the DNS query. Armed with this knowledge I've setup the site of my one of my clients using the same technique to send Chinese users to a local Squid accelerator proxy within the Great Firewall.

I may have learned over things too, but apparently I've forgotten them again. Kthxbye

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