Chris Worfolk's Blog

For better, or for worse, she will never be forgotten. Still Britain’s only female prime minister, and the most successful prime minster of the twentieth century.

Sometimes, you might find that when you try and SSH into another server, it seems to hang, but then after around 30 seconds or so, will suddenly start working again. You can diagnose where it is stopping by using verbose mode.

ssh -vv user@example-server

If you find it is to do with GSS API, you can disable this in your SSH configuration.

cd ~/.ssh/
vim config

Add the following to it.

GSSAPIAuthentication no

This should then speed the login up.

Listen to these Canadian lunatics, suggesting that men should be treated like human beings. It’s political correctness gone mad.

Tweeted by Rich.

I’ve been continuing through Philip Pullman’s triology, His Dark Materials, and recently finished the second book, The Subtle Knife.

I found it slow to get started – I was just bored at first, as the story saw the protagonists running round ordinary Oxford with no fantasy to add some spice to the story. But eventually the stumbled back into the other worlds and the story picked up, it eventually became entertaining and ultimately worth baring through the early chapters.

It’s also clear that this isn’t really a trilogy of books, it’s one book split into three parts – reading one and not the others wouldn’t make much sense, or provide any conclusion to the stories.

Have you ever been told that only 7% of communication is verbal? The other 93% is not about the words you say, but the body language, tone and gestures that accompany it.

Incredible isn’t it? Almost too incredible. Indeed, there is a reason that it feels too incredible to be true – because it isn’t true. It’s a statistic based on the work by Albert Mehrabian at the University of California, which you can read all about on Wikipedia, that tests how people feel towards the speaker. But it doesn’t accurately translate into what percentage of your message is verbal or nonverbal.

Mehrabian states this on his website:

“Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking. Please note that this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like–dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable. Also see references 286 and 305 in Silent Messages – these are the original sources of my findings.”

And has previously said in an email that was reproduced in the book Lend Me Your Ears:

“I am obviously uncomfortable about misquotes of my work. From the very beginning I have tried to give people the correct limitations of my findings. Unfortunately, the field of self-styled ‘corporate-image consultants’ or ‘leadership consultants’ has numerous practitioners with very little psychological expertise.”

Of course body language and vocal variety are an important part of communication. But the words you actually say do count for something too.

A bit late, but I found this while clearing out my computer and realised I never posted it.

Recently, a new lunch place specialising in jacket potatoes opened across the road from our office, named Jackpots.

I tried it out last week, though I wasn’t overly impressed. The potato was nice and the toppings were OK, but I think a few key problems let them down. First of all, you can’t build your own potato. They have a few toppings you can select a combination of, otherwise you have to go for a “set menu” style. In an age of Subway and Barburrito, it would be much better if they could just lay them all out and you could pick any combination.

Secondly, I don’t think the containers they give them out in. They’re like the noodle boxes you get from Wokon. They do fold out to form a flat surface, but they don’t do this very well and that is equally annoying as it has no edges. Give me an old fashioned takeaway box any day.

If you’re using a Cisco Linksys E1000 router, you may have noticed that it creates a guest network – but there is no sign of how to control it or change it through the web interface!

Strangely, that is how it is – Linksys seem to have omitted any kind of control over it from the web interface. The only way you can modify it is to run the Cisco Connect software on your computer.

Launching this will bring up a control panel, of which the bottom left option will be “guest network” and from here, you can make changes.

It also appears, from the list of available wifi networks, that the guest network is not password protected. This isn’t the case if you have set a password, but it does not use the standard WPA or WEP encryption. Instead, it allows clients to connect, but them prompts them for a password before allowing them internet access.