I wasn't very clear, was I? I was referring to find's -ls option, which I wasn't aware that it had. It seems every time I look at find's manpage, it's acquired a couple of new options. I'm convinced the developers are trying to make it Turing-complete :-)

That's useful too, though most shells don't expand '*' to include files whose names start with '.'. You have to match them explicitly with something like -

du -ms * .[^.]* | sort -n

'.[^.]*' matches any file or directory whose name starts with '.', then has any character except '.', then zero or more characters. Basically, that filters out '.' (alias for the current directory) and '..' (alias for the parent directory), but gets everything else that starts with '.'. A lot of cruft can accumulate in those hidden directories. I've found that Gnome's thumbnail generator can use huge amounts of space under ~/.thumbnails, for example.

The specification for the SMS message format pre-dates Y2K by about 15 years. I came across it in 1995 (and thought it was useless - what sort of idiot would try to fit a message into 160 characters? And who would want to type it on a 12-button keyboard?). Where I worked, nobody worried about Y2K until about 1998.

Yet more cynical Slashdot nerd demands that even more cynical Slashdot nerd turn in his nerd card for not recognising a Simpsons quote that references Star Trek...

(It's Grade School Confidential, the one where Principal Skinner and Mrs Krabapple carry on a sordid affair in school. Bart finds out about it and exposes them in front of his classmates. "Set your faces to stun" is what he says just before flinging open the door that the lovers are hiding behind.)

We may have to agree to disagree... I don't think computers should be involved in counting votes at all. Any system where the voter can verify his vote after he's left the polling station is open to votes being bought. If the registrar knows which voter cast which ballot, what stops him selling that information to someone else?

Forcing an attacker to hack multiple systems is good, but there's always the possibility of a buffer overflow or SQL injection.

The way I see it, having lots of people count lots of pieces of paper works well for something that has to be done once every three to five years. (If we were doing it once a week, I might want to automate it.) Letting the computers take over that process brings no significant advantages, and adds lots of problems that I believe are insoluble.

Voting machines are inherently untrustworthy. Publish all the code you like. Have it inspected by Donald Knuth. The voters have no way of knowing that that code is what's actually running on the machines in the polling stations, or that the hardware will execute it in the way that the language spec says it should. Attempts to give them a way to know are a sticking plaster over a gaping wound - there are too many things about the machine that are invisible to the naked eye, and too many ways in which the machine can be made to lie.

Paper-based elections need a lot of people to run them. This is a good thing, because someone who wants to rig an election has to bribe or threaten a lot of people. The more people are in that position, the more likely one of them is to blow the whistle. Someone who wants to rig an election that's run by voting machines has to influence far fewer people. That's the whole point of computers - they do work that would otherwise have to be done by people. If you want to bring in lots more people who are hard to bribe or threaten, you might as well have them run the election and leave the computers out of it.

The argument that voting machines will give us the result of the election faster than paper ballots is true but irrelevant. Do you want the wrong answer in half an hour, or the right answer in two days? A politician, once elected, will serve for three to five years, and unless he drops dead or gets a blowjob from the wrong person, it's very hard to remove him before the next election. You'd better be damn sure that the guy you put there was the one the people actually wanted.

Thanks for that. I've had a quick look around it just now, and I'll definitely be spending some more time there.

I replaced the default distro with Xenium, as I wanted something a bit more familiar. Sadly, the guy who created it looks to have lost interest in it, so it's good to see someone else picking up the torch.

Even when I bought it, it wasn't the best value for money. The attractions were the small size and low weight, and the fact it ran Linux out of the box.

To me, this machine is essentially a portable electric typewriter. I write novels (as if you can't tell from my sig!) and I want something I can use for writing when I'm away from home. For years, I used a Psion 5mx, which I eventually gave up on when the touch screen stopped being touch-sensitive.

I'd wanted to replace the Psion, but couldn't find anything with a decent screen and keyboard of a similar size and weight that didn't come with Windows out of the box (wanting to avoid the MS tax). I don't like to buy second-hand, as you don't know how careful the previous owner was.

Then along came the eeePc, and I thought it was what I'd been waiting for... until I saw it ran Xandros. Their patent deal with MS makes them a non-starter for me.

Then I saw the CnMBook / Alpha 400 / whatever else it's called. I noted that it had a CPU on which no current version of Windows will run (I think NT had a MIPS port about 15 years ago). I couldn't find anything not to like about their Linux distro, so I treated myself to an early Christmas present :-)

Yes, that's the one. It's sold under so many different names that I have no idea which is the real one and which are just symlinks.

Yeah, they might not understand the Internet, but they understand their obligations under the GPL :-)

The CPU in mine is a 400MHz MIPS clone. No idea how that compares with an x86 or ARM device. It has 128MB of RAM and 2GB of on-board flash. It has an SD slot and 3 USB sockets, so you could plug 4GB into each of those, for a (rather unwieldy) 16GB of additional storage.

It takes about 2 minutes to boot into an X desktop. More annoying is that it doesn't have a suspend or hibernate mode - or if it does, I haven't found it. It has a key with "Zzz" written on it, but this just switches off the screen backlight. Still, it does what I bought it for.