Aaron B. Russell's personal blog
11 Mar
I’m reposting this from an email I received from the people over at 38 Degrees, because it’s important.
The BBC Trust has now launched an official consultation on its proposals for massive cuts to its services. It’s asking us to email to say what we think of their plans to cut their website in half and scrap BBC 6 Music and Asian Network.
We need to make sure the BBC gets an overwhelming number of responses against these plans. The more of us who send an email against the cuts, the more chance we have of changing their mind.
It only takes 1 minute to email the BBC Trust and speak out against the cuts using this online tool – please click here to add to the pressure:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/email-the-BBC-TrustThere are already signs that our pressure is starting to force a rethink behind the scenes. Sir Michael Lyons, Chair of the BBC Trust, has accepted that, “if we find that there’s massive public concern that we need to take account of, then we will go back to the Director-General to rethink the strategy.” You’ve already helped with that by adding your name to the petition, but it would help even more if you also sent a quick email to the BBC.
38 Degrees isn’t the only organisation campaigning to stop these cuts to the BBC. Last week campaigns sprung up across the web – on facebook, on twitter, and on petition sites. To have the biggest impact, we need to work together. So this week we’re teaming up to make sure as many emails get submitted to the consultation as possible. 38 Degrees, and the organisers of the biggest other petition against the cuts, and the biggest facebook group, can work together to spread the word about how easy it is to send a formal consulation response against the cuts. That means that this morning nearly 200,000 of us are getting a message like this – if we all take action, our impact will be huge.
Please send a quick email to the BBC now and tell them what you think of plans to cut 6 Music and the Asian Network:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/email-the-BBC-TrustThanks for getting involved,
David, Hannah, Johnny, Nina and the 38 Degrees Team
5 Mar
Hold on tight, this one’s a wobbly electro treat with a bit of dubstep thrown in for good measure with sounds from the likes of Ellie Goulding, Joe And Will Ask?, Riton, and Hostage. Crank the volume way up, and get your weekend started with some serious oomph!
If you love the Unadopted Podcast, please add Unadopted on Facebook and tell your friends about the podcast!
Want to send music in to the Unadopted Podcast? Now you can! Visit the Unadopted Soundcloud and send your music in (it’s dead easy). If I like it, I’ll try and get it into one of the sessions!
Listen now over at http://unadopted.co.uk/podcast/. If you haven’t already set it up, click the “Subscribe” link
on the right-hand-side when you get there to get the podcast automatically delivered right into your iTunes or RSS reader whenever I release a new session!
11 Feb
So. It’s been on TV now so I’m allowed to talk about it.
The BBC just showed an episode of Horizon called To Infinity and Beyond, and I got a credit at the end of it. Shiny. :)
Why? Because I made something shiny that helps answer the age old question: If a monkey sat at a typewriter for an infinite amount of time, how long would it take to write the entire works of Shakespeare. You can even download a copy of the shiny thing yourself from Google Code, and do pretty much whatever you want with it as it’s been released under the BSD License.
Enjoy!
6 Feb

Just over a year ago, I created a bunch of SSL certs following the instructions here: http://www.devklog.net/2008/05/25/generating-ssl-certificates-that-will-make-firefox-3-happy/
I’m having some interesting problems creating a new certificate to replace an expired one.
When I created a new certificate (as a leaf of a self-signed CA cert), to replace the expired leaf, I got a message saying that the certificate already existed.
I backed up and then deleted the expired cert and tried again, to no avail.
I saw this old thread which seems related to the problems I’m having, but the solutions there didn’t help me (I’m already manually picking serial numbers in the format yyyymmddnn, where nn is the number of certificates I’ve created that day, and deleting the Certificate Authority folder from Application Support in my home library didn’t make a difference either).
Anyone else had similar trouble? How did you resolve it?
21 Jan
I really really really want to retake my profile picture (below).
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The original image was a bit of a fluke, taken on a crap cameraphone about six years ago, and is only 288×352 @ 72dpi. I need a need a better quality version, really soon. Any tips/ideas welcome.
12 Jan
Bringing things way downbeat (around the 105bpm mark) and spanning a whole bunch of genres, here’s some nice music from the likes of Mr Scruff, Q-Tip, Boards Of Canada, Bis and Moonbootica. I’ve been wanting to play a whole bunch of this stuff for ages, but it’s a lot slower than the usual Unadopted Podcast fare, so haven’t been able to work it in.
If you love the Unadopted Podcast, please add Unadopted on Facebook and tell your friends about the podcast!
Want to send music in to the Unadopted Podcast? Now you can! Visit the Unadopted Soundcloud and send your music in (it’s dead easy). If I like it, I’ll try and get it into one of the sessions!
Listen now over at http://unadopted.co.uk/podcast/. If you haven’t already set it up, click the “Subscribe” link on the right-hand-side when you get there to get the podcast automatically delivered right into your iTunes or RSS reader whenever I release a new session!
20 Dec
Going to Soulwaxmas last weekend made me want to record another podcast session. Music this time around from Faithless, Sidney Samson, Delphic, Florence, Dizzee, Zombie Nation, Felix Da Housecat and more. Get stuck in!
If you love the Unadopted Podcast, please add Unadopted on Facebook and tell your friends about the podcast!
Want to send music in to the Unadopted Podcast? Now you can! Visit the Unadopted Soundcloud and send your music in (it’s dead easy). If I like it, I’ll try and get it into one of the sessions!
Listen now over at http://unadopted.co.uk/podcast/. If you haven’t already set it up, click the “Subscribe” link on the right-hand-side when you get there to get the podcast automatically delivered right into your iTunes or RSS reader whenever I release a new session!
18 Nov
It’s time for another funpacked session, with awesome sounds from the likes of Foamo, Boys Noize, Fake Blood and Armand Van Helden’s rather dirty remix of an early nineties anthem. Crank the volume up and let your neighbours party too!
If you love the Unadopted Podcast, please add Unadopted on Facebook and tell your friends about the podcast!
Want to send music in to the Unadopted Podcast? Now you can! Visit the Unadopted Soundcloud and send your music in (it’s dead easy). If I like it, I’ll try and get it into one of the sessions!
Listen now over at http://unadopted.co.uk/podcast/. If you haven’t already set it up, click the “Subscribe” link on the right-hand-side when you get there to get the podcast automatically delivered right into your iTunes or RSS reader whenever I release a new session!
3 Oct

I recently tried to use the image_science gem for Ruby, but it didn’t work after installation because it was looking for FreeImage.h. Thinking it’d be an easy fix, I headed over to http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/ to go grab a copy of a binary file to install, but there wasn’t one.
Undeterred, I went to grab the source and compile it myself. It didn’t work. Eventually I figured there were two key issues:
First problem is easy to fix, just replace both instances of /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.3.9.sdk with /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk (or, 10.5 for Leopard, or 10.4u for Tiger).
The second part was a bit more fiddly because I wasn’t sure if order was important, so I started by replacing all instances of i386 and I386 with x86_64 and X86_64 respectively. Then, I replaced all instances of ppc and PPC with i386 and I386.
If you don’t want to worry about making all these changes, you can simply download my Makefile.osx here. It’s built for Snow Leopard, but it’s easy to change it for Leopard or Tiger.
28 Sep

I was having trouble making chan_sccp compile against Asterisk 1.6 — it kept dying saying that AST_CONTROL_T38 was undeclared. Turns out the solution is easy — Asterisk replaced AST_CONTROL_T38 with AST_CONTROL_T38_PARAMETERS, so you need to replace something in sccp_pbx.c. Full instructions available here.
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