| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 |
| 11:53 am |
|
| Monday, April 14th, 2008 |
| 4:57 pm |
|
| Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 |
| 2:18 pm |
That reminds me: sysadmin wanted We're looking for a sysadmin here at work, as Dan is leaving very soon! Mostly Linux work with some windows. |
| Thursday, March 20th, 2008 |
| 4:10 pm |
Today..
.. must be a record for the number of comments I've written but decided not to hit "post" on. Ah well, bank holiday weekend coming up. I still have no internet at home, so see you on the other side.
(Meanwhile, it turns out that the BT "webwise" automatic advertising spyware thing, "Phorm", is even weirder than I thought and is run by Russians..) |
| 9:46 am |
Useful savings institution http://nsandi.com/products/ilsc/howitworks.jsp - it appears there's an OK-paying savings account that's run by (or at least outsourced by) HM Treasury, which looks like a useful safe harbour for people worried about their savings. |
| Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 |
| 3:09 pm |
|
| Thursday, March 13th, 2008 |
| 12:06 pm |
|
| Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 |
| 11:01 am |
Ireland "not a foreign country" http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/mick_fealty/2008/03/goldsmith_and_the_irish_vote.htmlI like this sort of thing, a reminder that borders and nationality are somewhat blurred, and that the country is a series of special cases glued together by history. Even the old feudal boundaries are not completly erased; Bona vacantia for abandoned inheritances and companies is handled differently in the Duchys of Lancaster and Cornwall. There's a strong Modernist line of thinking which likes to "tidy up" the constitution, bulldozing ancient common law and replacing it with a steel-and-glass modern State. Sometimes it's very necessary, but I'd like more understanding of what's being replaced rather than a desperate rush for a reform every day before the press deadlines.. |
| Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 |
| 5:14 pm |
|
| Friday, March 7th, 2008 |
| 4:44 pm |
First week of new house
Thanks to everyone who helped in the move :) It was pretty stress free - we had a plan, a list of all the heavy items we needed to move, and a good chunk of stuff in boxes already. We managed to move everything in daylight on Saturday, and spend Sunday picking up additional stuff we needed. Even managed to find a good value sofa. No internet yet, nor for a while; we've got a phone though. So no LJ from me until Monday, and a short entry here. |
| Thursday, February 28th, 2008 |
| 2:25 pm |
Tweed Power Note top picture(won't make any difference to Government policy of course, but it's fun to watch) |
| Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 |
| 11:55 am |
Wish I had time for more coherence Will to write lots of text is in short supply. I think I'm too easily distracted. I've had the half-formed ideas for an essay I want to write about fear in computer games and the OODA kicking around in my head for ages. Another fragmentary thought: perhaps one of the reasons computer games aren't thought of as "art" and don't have a respectable critical journalism is that although they're clearly capable of imparting emotional experiences to the player (joy/fear/frustration/beauty/victory etc.) the experience is so different for each person it's hard to discuss. It can also require a much larger time investment to get experiences out of a game, especially lengthy or difficult ones. |
| Thursday, January 31st, 2008 |
| 12:28 pm |
3 Things, briefly
Yesterday I went to York for my grandmother's 100th birthday. It was lovely to see her; I think she enjoyed it, but was tired out by all the people especially her great-grandchildren (my cousin's - I'd not actually seen them before myself). I also met Barbera, who's done a lot of looking after her in recent years.
Last week I pushed the big SELL button on my savings which are exposed to the stockmarket. I was a bit puzzled when the online banking service didn't give me the option of saying which account I wanted the money sent to; and in due course two large-denomination cheques arrived through the door. This feels very anachronistic, but somehow more secure.
I still owe LNR a response to the "year of your life" meme :) |
| Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 |
| 3:50 pm |
Not a startup any more
I had a "I didn't know you could do that with our software" moment today, as someone showed me a circuit diagram with coloured programmatic highlighting. To be fair, this isn't the first time I've been the last to find out about a feature through not paying attention :) It makes the diagrams so much more readable, although they still don't have any captions. That's been on someone's "too minor to get round to" list for ages now. I'm still rather proud of my old abandoned visual layout I wrote in about 2 weeks of horrible C/Tcl/Tk hybrid back in 2002, must dig it up and see if I can get it working again. It used a spring model to minimise the squigglyness of the diagrams.
Programming question for the internet: suppose I have a set of data structures in C++ that look very much like an SQL join table, representing object relations e.g. (where <-> means has pointers in both directions)
A <-> AlinkB <-> B
A <-> AlinkC <-> C
However, it's not a pure join table, so I can't just collapse it to A <-> B, I actually want to store a little data on each link record. What's the most efficient way of doing it? Note that the problem may be large - hundreds of thousands of such records in memory. |
| Monday, January 21st, 2008 |
| 2:47 pm |
Open Source simcity Someone asked me if this existed recently, but I can't remember who. Now it appears the answer is yes: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/micropolis/Recently I have: - been slightly ill for ages (v annoying) - had a good time at ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) hazyjayne's party - played moar warcraft (now l38) - had a very positive annual review at work. I may be having an "internal busman's holiday" to a different group as I've been working in the same area for about 5 years now and am a bit bored. |
| Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 |
| 2:11 pm |
Craving etc This lunchtime I had a random craving for orange juice, had to go to tesco and buy a litre of it. No idea why, I just really wanted that particular taste. Maybe I have scurvy. :)
Having spent Friday evening in Addenbrookes with a friend of mine who broke his shoulder on the way to having dinner with us, then on Tuesday driven back from work past an accident at the Cowley Road megajunction, I think it's getting a bit dangerous outside. Take care on the roads, everyone.
This Google renewable energy plan is a very interesting one. As google is basically a company that takes in very smart people and electricity and outputs bits and waste heat, this is an ideal expansion for them. Renewable energy is going to take some ingenious dispassionate thinking to get right. They might even be able to solve the baseload problem somewhat by ramping up or down CPU speeds of entire datacentres in response to energy cost and availability. |
| Friday, November 9th, 2007 |
| 3:19 pm |
orld of orcraft Recently Laura set me a challenge: she would try out Eve Online, which I've been a fan of for ages, on condition that I tried out Warcraft. After she didn't enjoy Eve and I enjoyed WoW, we've both been playing it for a week or so now. My impressions: ( Read more... ) |
| Thursday, October 18th, 2007 |
| 4:10 pm |
Motto by mistake http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2193487,00.htmlSkim the article, all the fun is in the comments. Someone posts to the wrong thread and his banner is taken up and run with by the CiF peanut gallery. I read CiF to pass compiling time at work. The articles are of highly variable quality, but there is usually at least one comment that is better than the article, or demolishes it with a sharp point, or repeats some argument that is held by many people yet is beyond the conventional political franchise. (on debate on the internet in general, ( waffle )) |
| Thursday, October 11th, 2007 |
| 2:57 pm |
Driveby computer games post http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/That is a really good blog, written by various members of the UK games journalism intelligensia. It's a bit like Edge only daily (they update a lot), minus the glossy paper, extravagant layout, and £5 pricetag. Examples of why I like it: Fun series of articles on the characters of TF2 References to song lyrics I actually knowInterview with the lead designer of EVE OnlineThe latter article describes very well how I feel about EVE Online: fantastic, but not reccomendable to everyone. Like Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, which is brilliant and would definitely make any list of my favourite books, but also has a depressing ending and is shot through with feelings of isolation. Reccomending it to people would feel more like inflicting it on them, but if you like that sort of thing, then it is exactly, brilliantly, the sort of thing you like. It's been a while since I read anything; I've finished davefish's copy of Altered Carbon, which is completely gripping and reads like a Chandler/Gibson collaboration. I should probably dig into Words of Mercury (prewar travel writing). |
| Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 |
| 5:24 pm |
Driveby politics post I have been reading the Guardian commentisfree website at work, and some topics appear to be stuck records there at the moment... ( long, contains politics ) |
