Whatever the outcome of the ruling, the important question is whether the British public are happy with known cheats representing them, and their country at the highest level.

Unfortunately, initial testing quickly threw up a problem, and a fairly major one, performance through the load balancer was atrocious, with pages crawling through, images rendering almost line by line, and general all-round slowness. A quick test of the web-site performance directly was nice and quick, and it seemed obvious that somehow the load balancer was interfering. Network connections and cables were checked, configurations on the load balancer and web servers were checked and re-checked, all to no avail. It was not quite late in the day, so it was time to sleep on the matter.

The next morning, with a fresh mind (and a fresh cup of coffee), it was to Google we went, and after a quick read of a number of articles from others who had similar problems (and a few dead-ends), we found someone blaming an incompatibility between the ipvsadm tools and the latest kernel. A quick check of our boot configuration listed two kernels: 2.6.32-220 and 2.6.32-71 – we changed the default option to the older kernel, rebooted the server, and performance was restored. Presumably this issue will be fixed upstream soon enough, but for others with the same issue, simply edit /etc/grub.conf and change the “default=0″ line to load a previous kernel (“default=1″ in our case).

Given that this produces a large, fairly captive market, albeit one with a lot of choice of providers, why do insurance companies do such an awful job of dealing with their existing customers when it comes up to renewal. To take a recent case, when my car insurance came up for renewal recently, I got an automatic offer from my existing insurer through the post. Considering that I had changed my car for a lower insurance group car, had been with the current insurer for a year with no claims, I was surprised and/or annoyed to see the “best deal” quote I was being offered was more than the previous year. A quick search around and I found an equivalent deal at slightly over half the renewal quote, and accepted that.

Of course, when I called up my current insurer to let them know I would not be renewing, they immediately searched again and found me a “better deal”. Why was I not offered this immediately? Why when looking on a comparison site, were they offering better rates then they were offering me direct for renewals? The “better offer” was still not as good as the one I had from another insurer, so they lost my business, but if they had come up with a decent renewal quote to begin with, they might have kept my business.

As covered by our earlier article “Tuition Fees: The Law of Unintended Consequences“, the government has warned that, if too many universities decide to charge £9,000, there may be further cuts to teaching grants. As more universities are due to vote on their fees, warnings such as this are as likely to lead to universities charging the higher rates to make up a shortfall imposed by other high fees, as to charge the lower rate.

To date, no university has announced it will charge below the maximum rate. Probably not a surprise to any of us, except those in government it seems.

The ZX81 taught me Sinclair BASIC and Z80 Assembler, and lessons in writing efficient code, that don’t seem to be anywhere near as relevant to the art of programming these days. Computers have become an everyday object that everyone has, but few are truly interested in. I miss the days when it was an enthusiasts hobby, and just having a computer implied both a greater interest and a deeper understanding.

This version fixes the email format, in particular adding a non-HTML section to the MIME formated emails.

Made in Cornwall (obviously)
D shaped and crimped on one side
Made of uncooked minced or roughly cut beef, sweed, potato and onion
Slow cooked from raw

Full details are available at the Cornish Pasty Association web-site.