Oh, sure. I have cycled on some of the roads around here on occasion and the quality of the surface away from the centre is (even more) horrendous.

What bugs me is the reasonably high proportion of cyclists who, judging by their demeanor, body language and behaviour, seem to be in a little world of their own, unaware that they inconvenience other road users as much as those other users inconvenience them. If I felt they were trying as hard to treat me with courtesy as I was them, I wouldn't get riled by it.

As I've said, our current transport infrastructure sucks. Doesn't mean those of us who don't have the opportunity to ditch the car aren't equal sufferers. I'd much rather doze on a train or bus, or get some exercise and save myself some petrol on a bike, than fight my way through the traffic twice a day .. but it's just not an option for me.

You see, this is an example of the apparently unassailable moral high ground that cyclists (seem to believe they) occupy.

If there's no room to overtake, I don't overtake. As I said, I don't like killing people.

Cars overtake in smooth curves. The further out I have to move, the longer it takes me to get back in. Increased risk and fewer opportunities.

On wide-ish roads, there is often room from a car each way *and* a cyclist. Less often is there room for a car each way and multiple cyclists.

Tractors are usually driven by farmers who produce food, arguably a useful job. They have sometimes also been known to pull over to let cars past.

As I said, I accept the environmental, health and cost saving benefits of cycling, but in the current world, not everybody can use them for every journey. Let's please vote for more cycle paths, and while we're waiting, can cyclists please understand that drivers are not (all) the minions of the antichrist?

[Incidentally, I'm not picking on cyclists. The behaviour of pedestrians on the outskirts of my town is increasingly dubious, too (in the centre I feel they're more entitled to take right of way - there's no particular reason it should be clogged up with cars, after all.) When I was a kid, it was drummed in to me that I had a certain responsibility for my own safety when interacting with traffic. What the hell happened to that?]

To use shared folders in a Linux guest, you also have to type a mount command directly :-)

I have to say, though, NetworkManager is growing on me. 90% of the time it just works, and on the odd occasion you need to drop back to using /etc/network/interfaces, it just gets out of the way.

I've come to the conclusion over the years that, in fact, desktops are not ready for the desktop. Bring back dumb terminals (or centrally managed smart ones.) Failing that, computers-as-appliances. Most people don't care enough to responsibly use the power that full-featured systems give them, and I've given up believing I can change that.

That should be "\\vboxsvr\<sharename>". The slashdot comment handling code is another mysterious oddity in my book.

Though on second thought, as a cyclist, I'm not sure a deathly laser assault on drivers is completely unwarranted.

As a driver, I often have the reverse thought. I work weekends, and what is a nice ride out of the suburbs for lots of cyclists is my commute. What is it with convoys of cyclists? Either two (or more) abreast, stretching the overtaking distance substantially or preventing it completely, or in indian file leaving no gaps for cars to pull into, meaning you either have to try and overtake anywhere from 2 to 6 bikes at once, or not at all.

I'm a realist. I know we're going to have to throttle back on car use a lot in the future. I'm quite happy to pay more road tax to fund better public transport, and if it was better I would use it. Perhaps we can build more off-road cycle lanes too? Bikes and cars just don't mix - the size, vulnerability, and speed differentials are just too great.

In the meantime I wish cyclists would realise that some people still have to drive to make a living. We're not arseholes, most of us have good spatial awareness and don't really fancy the idea of killing anyone. Any chance of some consideration going in the other direction?

Rant over.

Hmm, looks like bridged mode doesn't always play nicely with wireless.

Host-only mode with pptpproxy or parprouted might do the trick - there's a recipe for using the latter here.

Network configuration just seems to get worse and worse in later versions of Windows. I set up a Vista box for my neighbour and I still can't get my head around the "architecture" of all the different networking views. God alone knows what W7 will be like.

Win2K made sense,, XP was still reasonably sane, but I think you might be right in thinking there's a bug (either in XP or the VBox addons) that mean the shared folders aren't always visible depending on how you use explorer.

Alternatively, typing "\\vboxsvr\" in the run box, or the explorer address box, should do the trick. I would test but I deleted my last Windows VM (finally!)

Could you not just use bridged mode (or "host interface networking" or whatever it's called this week) instead of NAT?

.. then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.

If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.

But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.

There was also the SlugBot..

It's common enough in various regions of the UK that I think it probably constitutes "dialect."

Ditto learn v. teach ("I'll learn you a lesson you won't forget ..")

All of which is not to say that I like it.

Learn to understand your moods. It took me ages to realise that I have "thinking" moods and "doing" moods, and they're not really interchangeable:

Great insightful designs, or even just a clear understand of what needs to be done and in what order, usually comes to me when I'm relaxed, and often when I'm away from the computer, possibly hiking or something like that. In that mood, however, I rarely actually want to drag myself back to the computer and implement stuff.. "Doing" moods, on the other hand, have a slight edginess to them, a need to make progress (or fear of not making it) which unfortunately tends to inhibit deeply creative thinking. The only solution is to make fairly detailed plans in thinking mode (and bludgeon myself into jotting them down if necessary), so that I know what I need to do in the next doing mood. Non-trivial problems that arise while "doing" have to be put off until the next "thinking" time, but it's a system that works for me.

Your ideal system will probably differ, but with a bit of introspection and practice, you can probably find it..

Exactly. The code degenerates into an unreadable mess and the type-safety goes out of the window. *sigh*

Possibly. I've not kept up to date with all the new-fangled toys you kids have these days ;-) Does it support generic programming? Also, isn't it only cross-platform because of Miguel de Icaza?

There are lots more elegant, reasonably high-performing, cross-platform languages around now. It's probably a much more interesting time to be getting into IT - as long you as you can find a company that actually lets you use the cool new stuff ..

The problem is, the alternative with these big, old, crusty legacy systems is to convert them in a "big bang", and it is usually pretty bloody difficult to just to figure out what the existing system is doing and and why. For some reason businesses seem to be quite happy to effectively "encrypt" lots of knowledge about their processes and throw away the key .. doubtless the understanding of the system did at one time exist in the brains of some humans, but they've usually long since moved companies, retired, or even died.

In this situation, a line-by-line transcoding that might (with some in-depth study) be comprehensible by Java coders and yet (with some gnashing of teeth) still by comprehended by COBOL coders, and more importantly be reasonably likely to duplicate the logic of the old system, is probably not a bad stepping stone. Hopefully it's a base from which the system can be converted piecemeal into "proper" Java, and extended.