Monday, December 20, 2004
Jeepers. Those links have really been piling up. Perhaps I should do something like Adrian with del.icio.us...
- A man's been arrested in connexion with the stabbing of that police dog-handler.
- An American university has told its students to stop using Internet Explorer.
- No longer will Cambridge smell of wee at night, thanks to Pee Pods. Has anyone seen (or even used!) one of these yet?
- This new bridge in the Massif Central looks amazing.
- Liverpool wants to hold the Eisteddfod, but the Archdruid isn't keen on the idea. I think I'd have to agree with him—one of the main functions of the 'Steddfod is to bring Welsh culture and language to an area, and I very much doubt that the good burghers of Liverpool (Lerpwl) would be inclined to replace their native Scouse with Cymraeg.
- Thunderbird has recently reached version 1.0. It's a free email app from the Mozilla Foundation (the creators of Firefox). Safer than MS Outlook, and it's got a decent spam filter.
- Lots of stuff about sharks recently... They navigate by magnetic fields. And eat surfers. The shark responsible for that attack is now being sought by the Australian police. Bizarre. I mean, what are they going to do? Bring it in for questioning?!
- Detention without trial is illegal in the UK. Really? I thought it was only liberal democracies that had wishy-washy ideas like that.
- Give your home a brain (i.e. wire your entire house up to your computer). Now, I like this idea, but I'm not sure everyone would...
- A new species of monkey has been found in India.
- Not only the world's tallest building, but it has the fastest lifts.
- Mobile phone vibrators.
- Artificial cells.
- NASA are going to 'smack' a comet with a huge probe. Seems a bit aggressive, but I take their point about geologists needing their hammers.
Friday, December 10, 2004
Just had to blog about a great piece of software I found yesterday. It's a freeware text editor called HTML-Kit, designed, as the name suggests, primarily for creating and editing Web pages and scripts. At work (where I use a Mac) I use Tex-Edit Plus for that kind of thing, but at home on my PC I had been muddling along with Notepad or Word. Ugh...
What else? Tomorrow we're putting up the Christmas Tree. Yay! And on Wednesday we bought an M&S luxury Christmas Pudding.
South America has launched a new trading block. Continental-scale unions of countries are, I think, an inevitability to be welcomed. Paradoxically the political and economic protection offered by such vast unions is probably the best way to protect local cultures from the negative aspects of global 'market forces'. A new report highlights the increasing use of English as a world language. While it is not necessarily a bad thing to have a world language, it is deplorable that such a development should occur at the expense of other languages. Language is a beautiful, ever-changing reflection of human culture and creativity, and to replace the current variety and richness of expression with a single language, is tantamount to deciding that since the Mona Lisa is the world's most popular painting, we might as well scrap every other painting in existence. The new South American union would be unlikely to adopt English as its lingua 'franca', but also I should think that the rights of the continent's indigenous peoples would be better served by their being able to represent themselves on a wider stage.
Researchers now have evidence of tool use by wild capuchin monkeys.
What else? Tomorrow we're putting up the Christmas Tree. Yay! And on Wednesday we bought an M&S luxury Christmas Pudding.
South America has launched a new trading block. Continental-scale unions of countries are, I think, an inevitability to be welcomed. Paradoxically the political and economic protection offered by such vast unions is probably the best way to protect local cultures from the negative aspects of global 'market forces'. A new report highlights the increasing use of English as a world language. While it is not necessarily a bad thing to have a world language, it is deplorable that such a development should occur at the expense of other languages. Language is a beautiful, ever-changing reflection of human culture and creativity, and to replace the current variety and richness of expression with a single language, is tantamount to deciding that since the Mona Lisa is the world's most popular painting, we might as well scrap every other painting in existence. The new South American union would be unlikely to adopt English as its lingua 'franca', but also I should think that the rights of the continent's indigenous peoples would be better served by their being able to represent themselves on a wider stage.
Researchers now have evidence of tool use by wild capuchin monkeys.
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
I can't believe how far ahead I am with Christmas preparations! I've already posted half the presents (to one set parents and one set of grandparents), and I'm working on the remaining two (other set of grandparents and my brother). I've bought Christmas cards too. This unheard of efficiency (normally I leave it till the last weekend) is largely attributable to L's good influence. I'll still be leaving her presents till the last weekend, but that's just because she'll be away then, and I can't trust her not to try to find them if I buy them earlier and hide them. 
So the weekend was very hectic with Christmas shopping taking up most of Saturday day, and then babysitting Saturday evening. Sunday I had to finish off some OU coursework, and then put up shelves in the kitchen.
I've been doing more php and MySQL stuff at work, and had noticed how nearly every example script I came across used foo and bar as example strings or variable names. Well, this very detailed memo explains the origins of that practice.
Thanks to Al, for alerting me to the fact that Office 2003 and Windows XP can now be converted to Welsh-language. I'm pleased to see that Welsh beat Xhosa and Nynorsk to it!
According to this Wired article the trend in highways planning is to remove as much of the signage and markings from roads as possible. The principle is that if drivers are less guided, they'll feel that the road is more dangerous, and therefore drive more carefully. I agree with this up to a point. It is far too easy to drive according to the signposts and not pay attention to what's actually happening (think of waiting at traffic lights where you can be so focused on the lights changing to amber that you don't look to see whether the way is clear to go). On the other hand, this sort of principle can be taken too far: in school PE lessons crashmats are no longer supposed to be put under climbing equipment (if they're not used, so the thinking goes, kids will take more care not to fall off). I'm reminded of my grandpa's comment when seatbelts were made compulsory: 'Instead of making everyone use seatbelts, they should fit every car with a large spike in front of the driver's head!'
So the weekend was very hectic with Christmas shopping taking up most of Saturday day, and then babysitting Saturday evening. Sunday I had to finish off some OU coursework, and then put up shelves in the kitchen.
I've been doing more php and MySQL stuff at work, and had noticed how nearly every example script I came across used foo and bar as example strings or variable names. Well, this very detailed memo explains the origins of that practice.
Thanks to Al, for alerting me to the fact that Office 2003 and Windows XP can now be converted to Welsh-language. I'm pleased to see that Welsh beat Xhosa and Nynorsk to it!
According to this Wired article the trend in highways planning is to remove as much of the signage and markings from roads as possible. The principle is that if drivers are less guided, they'll feel that the road is more dangerous, and therefore drive more carefully. I agree with this up to a point. It is far too easy to drive according to the signposts and not pay attention to what's actually happening (think of waiting at traffic lights where you can be so focused on the lights changing to amber that you don't look to see whether the way is clear to go). On the other hand, this sort of principle can be taken too far: in school PE lessons crashmats are no longer supposed to be put under climbing equipment (if they're not used, so the thinking goes, kids will take more care not to fall off). I'm reminded of my grandpa's comment when seatbelts were made compulsory: 'Instead of making everyone use seatbelts, they should fit every car with a large spike in front of the driver's head!'
Saturday, December 04, 2004
It's been an odd week. Had been feeling pretty crap with a cold over the weekend, and was off work on Monday when it began to turn into the familiar sinusitis. I seem to get sinusitis every other month now, and it ain't pleasant (headache, pressure in the head, dizziness, nausea, and sometimes worse). L pointed out that maybe I ought to see a doctor about it. Being a bloke I don't tend to think of things like going to the doctor or taking medicine (I prefer to suffer and moan until someone tells me what to do). Saw the doc on Tuesday morning, and was prescribed antibiotics and a steroidal nasal spray that I'm to take every day for the next three or four months. Seems to be doing the trick, though—I was back at work on Wednesday, and I'm feeling almost normal now. My dad texted the other day to say that he'd been in hospital with viral meningitis. His temperature got up to 39.8° and he had to go in an ambulance. Blimey.
I'm being unusually organised about Christmas presents and cards this year. I've already bought some, and we're going to brave the crowds in town today to finish it off. Anyone wanting ideas for what to get me could do worse than peruse this list of toys or this one of 'tools' from Wired. I urge you to follow the link to the 'Stadium Pal', and particularly the testimonials.
I'm being unusually organised about Christmas presents and cards this year. I've already bought some, and we're going to brave the crowds in town today to finish it off. Anyone wanting ideas for what to get me
could do worse than peruse this list of toys or this one of 'tools' from Wired. I urge you to follow the link to the 'Stadium Pal', and particularly the testimonials.
