Buxton

The crescent
The Crescent

It’s a bit unfair to call Buxton a baby Bath, but it is. Built to service the spas by the 5th Duke of Devonshire it’s cute. It has a station with an hourly service to Manchester and beyond, though I suspect it had a much better service back in the day.

Buxton station
Buxton station

It has the obligatory park, lots of pubs and craft beer outlets, some decent restaurants and of course the assembly rooms in the crescent:

The assembly rooms
The assembly rooms ballroom

A pub:

A pub

If you’re in the area, it’s worth a visit.

The monarchy

The Queen

Let’s start by asking the question: “how on earth in the 21st Century do we still have inherited wealth and privilege on this scale in a monarchy?” Most other civilised countries seem to do OK without it, and all the pomp and pageantry that goes with it. I’d sooner see an elected figurehead looking solemn than an inbreed who got there by chance of birth.

I’ve been collecting choice nuggets about the royal family on Facebook, so here they all are, and more, in one place. It’s by no means a complete list. Can you tell I’m not a fan of the monarchy?

  1. Prince Andrew was caught up in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. This let to the family paying as much as £12 million to Virginia Giuffre.
  2. The royal family is notoriously racist. That’s probably to do with the queen’s cousin, Prince Philip, but have you ever seen a black footman?
  3. The Bowes Lyons had two children Nerissa and Katherine who were mentally diabled. So what did they do? Put them in an institution and never visited them.
  4. Because of a clause in the law, Charles doesn’t pay inheritance tax on the the £750 million he inherited from the queen.
  5. The Queen presided over the Malayan Emergency from 1948-1960, where an estimated 6,700 guerillas and 3,000 civilians were killed.
  6. In Kenya, the Mau Mau rebellion from 1952–1960 was brutally repressed leading to some 90,000 Kenyans killed or tortured.
  7. From 1962-1969 there was a covert war in Yemen. That led to around 200,000 deaths. My dad did his nation service there, ten years before that.
  8. From 1965-1966 there was a genocide in Indonesia which alongside the Americans, we had a large hand in.
  9. Obviously, there was Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland in 1972. NI was a mess, obviously, but really?
  10. A lot of her wealth came down through slavery starting with the first Elizabeth. Meghan Markle’s treatment by The Firm shows that attitudes haven’t changed much.
  11. The queen has privately invested millions offshore.
  12. In 1949, before she became Queen, Elizabeth took a stance against women’s rights? She attended the rally for a conservative group and spoke out against women who divorce their husbands.. She was patron of this far-right organisation to the end.
  13. In 2010, the Queen applied for a poverty grant to heat the royal palaces.
  14. The Queen is heavily invested in uranium based weapons.
  15. The Queen and Prince Philip went trophy hunting and shot a tiger in 1961.
  16. New: The queen and the CIA attempted to overthrow the Australian Gough Witlam left-wing government in 1975.
  17. Charles was pretty tight with pedophile Jimmy Savile.
  18. Charles brokered a £4.4 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia and recieved a suitcase of cash for “charitable” purposes.
  19. Charles is still backing homeopathy.

At least she continued the tradition of having her bees informed that she’d died.

That’s all I’ve got for now. If you have anything else, please leave it in the comments.

condoms
condoms

Running Oracle database server on a Mac.

Due to my upcoming job having a large part being Oracle, I figured I should install Oracle on my Mac. I found this article on the Oracle site that made running it in a virtual machine look easy. Simply, it’s:

git clone https://github.com/oracle/vagrant-projects
cd vagrant-projects/OracleDatabase/21.3.0-XE 
# Optional: download the Oracle Database installation file and place it in this directory
vagrant up

And that’s where the wheels fell off. I haven’t used Vagrant for a couple of years. My Vagrant fell into a wibbling heap. I needed to do the following to drag everything up to date:

brew install vagrant

And then install Virtualbox from the Virtualbox downloads page. Bringing up vagrant then refreshes the vagrant image, brings the oracle image up to date and runs it.

    oracle21c-xe-vagrant: INSTALLER: Started up
    oracle21c-xe-vagrant: Oracle Linux 8 BaseOS Latest (x86_64)           3.3 MB/s |  49 MB     00:14
    oracle21c-xe-vagrant: Oracle Linux 8 Application Stream (x86_64)      3.2 MB/s |  37 MB     00:11
.
.
.
    oracle21c-xe-vagrant: INSTALLER: Oracle preinstall and openssl complete
    oracle21c-xe-vagrant: INSTALLER: Environment variables set
    oracle21c-xe-vagrant: INSTALLER: Downloading Oracle Database software

You’re going to need the instantclient libraries. Do the following in the instantclient directory, you might want to have copied *.dylib* into /usr/local/lib:

$ chmod u+w *
$ xattr -r -d -s com.apple.quarantine instantclient_19_3

vagrant ssh into the Virtualbox, sudo su – to root, thence to the oracle user and sqlplus sys as sysdba gets you in. This isn’t wildly useful but it’s a start.