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Our thirteen-week-old daughter had a very slightly dicky tummy, which was enough to make us wonder what the cause might be. One of the first things we needed to rule out was dodgy water in her bottles.

To make up the bottles, we boil freshly drawn water in our kettle. We leave it to cool for about half an hour (boiling water in plastic bottles can apparently release more Bisphenol A) before pouring it into freshly sterilised bottles, which are then sealed.

I remember advice for campers indicating that water should be boiled for some time to kill pathogens. Whilst our kettle boils the water thoroughly, it only maintains a rolling boil for a few seconds. The question is, does this kill the nasty microbes?

According to Survival Topics and The Backpacker’s Field Manual by Rick Curtis

“Boiling is the most certain way of killing all micro-organisms. According to the Wilderness Medical Society, water temperatures above 160°F (70°C) kill all pathogens within 30 minutes and above 185°F (85°C) within a few minutes. So in the time it takes for the water to reach the boiling point (212°F or 100°C) from 160°F (70°C), all pathogens will be killed, even at high altitude.”

So that’s a yes.

An interesting aside: Reading about bacteria lead me to this article discussing how long bacteria survive on dry surfaces. The answer that you didn’t really want to know is that depending on the bacteria, they can live for days, weeks, months or years. So break out the anti-bac surface spray!

Oh – and our daughter’s dodgy tummy was caused by her starting to teethe. You live and learn.

I always forget how to make my bash prompt just the way I like it, so here it is for posterity. In ~/.bashrc:

PS1='\[\e]2;\u@\H \w\a\]\[\e[32m\][\t] \[\e[33m\]\w\[\e[0m\]\n\$ '

This gives me a prompt like this with the time and path:

Here’s the long guide to the codes, and here’s the one I use from IBM.

According to Lifehacker a frozen Linux system that’s not responding to the Ctrl-Alt-Delete three-finger-salute can be restarted more safely than by pushing the power button, which is usually the next step.

Holding down Alt and SysRq (which is the Print Screen key) while slowly typing REISUB will get you safely restarted. REISUO will do a shutdown rather than a restart.

Sounds like either an April Fools joke or some very strange magic akin to the old BIOS beeps we used to use to diagnose PC faults so bad that nothing would boot. Wikipedia comes to the rescue with an in-depth listing of all the SysRq keys.

• R: Switch the keyboard from raw mode to XLATE mode
• E: Send the SIGTERM signal to all processes except init
• I: Send the SIGKILL signal to all processes except init
• S: Sync all mounted filesystems
• U: Remount all mounted filesystems in read-only mode
• B: Immediately reboot the system, without unmounting partitions or syncing

(Discovered originally here)

Did you find the REISUB article useful? I think you’d like Dropbox too. It’s an amazing file-syncing app that works on Linux, Windows and Mac. Free accounts have 2GB storage. If you sign up with this referral code, you’ll get an extra 250MB. So will I. Thanks.

I’ve tried a number of times to write up a comparison of my favourite text editors, showing which features each one has. However, this is a long and complicated job that nobody will pay me to do. As a result, I’m going to keep a list of the problems that cause me to switch away from a certain editor. This at least will stop me switching back and forwards between editors – not because they’ve improved, but because I’ve forgotten why they were bad.

[2008-03-06] The first entry goes to PSPad, which treats underscores and dashes as word-separators, so when selecting text, ‘ab-sol_utely’ looks like three words.

[2008-07-08] Notepad++ is a very capable editor with good word completion and syntax highlighting, as well as pretty much everything else I’d want. However, the ways it decides which directory to open and save files in are just not right – there are two options. I’ve selected both at different times and neither do the right thing. Most of the other editors must get it right, because I just don’t even notice them. Also, the regex search can’t find and replace newlines. Switching between large files can be slow.

[2008-07-08] e text editor now correctly deals with words containing underscores, but its Python highlighter still gets confused by triple-quoted strings. Bit of a school-boy error for a python editor.

[2008-08-01] Intype looks promising, but is lacking tons of features at the moment. Will check back in a year or so.

[2008-08-04] UltraEdit now has SFTP file access, which works a treat. However, it still sometimes mis-highlights triple-quoted strings in Python. Where’s my ‘get off the stage’ klaxon gone? Grr. Also has a weird thing where it sometimes doesn’t quite display all of a character. For example, an ‘e’ followed by ‘.’ is missing the last row of pixels on the right hand side. None of their fancy anti-alias settings seems to help. I ended up increasing the font size (using my programming font of choice, Anonymous). Also, the ‘open’ dialogue takes a long time to appear. Not a showstopper, but annoying.

[2008-10-30] I’m rather enamoured with jEdit at the moment. I’ve tried it many different times before, and it seemed so… javaish. However, it now has anti-aliasing; startup options that make for quick opening; a Windows-ish theme; a tab-bar and open-document-pane plugin; sensible word-wrap (per open document, rather than global); good regex support (deals well with newlines); good triple-quoted-string handling; a hex-edit plugin; auto-complete; a column marker. It’s even quite pretty.

Other editors to try: Editra, EmEditor

We rented a flat in Dunfermline through KLS from October 2006 to May 2007.

Good points:

• Efficient at signing us up and taking our money
• Eventually repaid deposit in full

Bad points:

• Two month notice period. (It’s in the contract, but one month is almost universal at other agencies.) Don’t be caught out.
• Unconcerned by faulty fittings (light fittings, oven) and lack of smoke alarm
• Require written proof that all utility bills and council tax are paid up to leaving date. This is unusual, as the utility contracts are not tied to the property, but to us. The council had to make a special exception for us and send us a screenshot of their payment database.

Conclusion: Avoid if possible.