Lee Packham

Or at least – they might as well of done. The Sony PS3 blog details the next update which will remove the “Other OS” option of the PS3. That is, you will no longer be able to install Linux. This comes shortly after Geohot had broken the PS3 hypervisor (the thing that makes the Other OS option possible) to execute code on the PS3 itself.

So – in essence, they’ve basically admitted they can’t fix it and decide to just disable a feature that is heavily used in research labs around the world – PS3 clusters and the like are not more!

My VAT bill for the phone finally arrived! DHL have been slacking it seems. It was correctly catergorised and as such there was no import duty charged, just the 17.5% VAT (which came out at £62.24). Excellent.

Still loving the phone. Started doing more active development on it recently – more on that soon.

Just to preface this – I do not have a particular affiliation to any party. This year, after a debate about politics with a friend of mine, Mike Arthur – I am determined to properly research my vote time.

My local MP is the Rt. Hon. Iain Duncan Smith MP of the Conservative Party. So, when a leaflet came through from the Church End Conservative lot (be warned, the blog sucks… badly) with the opportunity to be able to meet him cropped up – my wife and I accepted. In particular I wanted to raise the issue about the Digital Economy Bill, something that I firmly believe should be close to everyone’s chest. We were both not sure what to expect.

The meeting was full of local people that were raising some rather mundane questions (recent planning decisions and the like). It matters to them, so they should raise it I guess. Then the candidate going for local election actually picked me out to ask a question – so I asked Iain Duncan Smith rather than her. I addressed everyone by pointing out YouTube in relation to the act – the minor detail that even watching a video that has copyrighted material could constitute a breach in the act – and that perked the interest of everyone to the rest of the question.

I asked Iain Duncan Smith what his or the party’s stance on the act is – his response was interesting. In essence he explained the rules around the next few months that should prevent the bill going through.

The part that surprised me the most… he came up to me afterwards to re-iterate that he would raise my concerns. He may, or may not – but he made an effort. It was a good 10 minute conversation – I was really appreciative of the time. A lot of people take the mickey out of the man – but he’s really not ‘that’ bad.

Even more surprising, we ended up being the last ones to leave as we spent so long talking to one of the candidate councillors. It turns out we were the youngest people there – and that made us attractive to talk to! Now… I’m 30, my wife is not much younger… so… wow. Is political engagement really that poor that it’s reserved to the old fuddy duddies? Surprising when there is so much going on that effects so many young people at the moment. Not surprising when politics really isn’t taught at school.

Next up, to try and get into a meeting with the other parties going up for election locally.

Today I flipped over the x64 kernel on my MacBook Pro. So far, noticing the memory allocation/deallocation performs a lot better. Very very nice. Might actually alter the nvram settings to make it permanent.

I did however suffer a stability issue that forced me to hard reboot. I was brew (homebrew rocks – but that’s another post!) building in one tab of terminal and then a ‘svn co’ in another tab. I hit CTRL-C on svn and it hung. Tried to kill -9 things it really wasn’t having anything of it. Not sure what caused it. Logs don’t show much either. I’m sure i’ll get to bottom of it at some point.