Fridge water filters

Just recently our fridge water filter needed replacing and because the recommended supplier (some place in Birmingham) was out of stock I decided to look around. After a bit of searching, I found this site –American Fridge Filters.
They were about 20 pounds cheaper than the place in Birmingham, replied to my enquiry quickly, had the filter in stock and shipped it promptly. All in all, excellent customer service and I’ll be using them in 6-9 months when the filter light comes on again.

Using vmware server console on Mac OSX

Just recently I’ve been experimenting with VMWare Server on a Linux host and although it’s easy enough to use the console to manage it from a Windows PC, I normally only have my aging PowerBook to hand.
Since there’s no proper OSX console application for VMWare (why not!?), I needed to figure out a different way to manage the virtual servers.
Two options immediately spring to mind – (1) Fire up Virtual PC, Start Windows, Use the Windows console, or (2) Find a way to use the Linux VMWare console.

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Flying bananas

How’s this for a truly bizarre project? http://www.geostationarybananaovertexas.com/
For me, this raises a few questions though, the first of which is Why? The second is WHY?
I had a quick look through the site and in the legal bit it says there are basically very few laws that apply for traffic between 25,000m and “space” – but they have to get it to an altitude of 25,000m first.. and then what about it coming back down afterwards? I can just imagine a pilot report seeing a giant banana in their flightpath 🙂

Merging two hashrefs in Perl

I came across an interesting and very simple way to merge the contents of two hashrefs today. A hash is made up of pairs – a key and a corresponding value. As an example, the following can be pasted into a shell session on most machines that have perl installed.
perl -MData::Dumper -le ‘
$x = { a => 1, b => 2 };
$y = { c => 3, d => 4 };
$x = { %$x, %$y };
print Dumper($x);

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Shartak – now with added music

Before you start complaining, I didn’t go crazy and add a dodgy midi track to the Shartak website. I stumbled across a forum thread this evening and apparently Shartak players are forming their own record label.
Once finished, the Heads Down tracks will be available at a MySpace account – http://www.myspace.com/headsdownriot
*EDIT* URI of MySpace account changed – 3rd March 2007.

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