Tuesday, February 29, 2000
Whoops. Votes have come in for our college union elections, in particular, those for the post of publicity officer, which I was running for:
Publicity OfficerDan Hon 52
Conall Patton 113
RON 14
Abstentions 5TOTAL 184
I guess I email Connall now and ask to be on the team to produce our new newsletter.
- posted at 23:58 :: feedback
I've mucked about a bit with the design of the front page. Once I persuade Dreamweaver to change the templates for the static non-Blogger'ed pages, then the whole site will switch over. Unless there are any complaints (and I expect that there'll be many), in which case, send them to me. The old design is available here but is no longer being updated.- posted at 23:55 :: feedback
BBC News is reporting on the shooting of the six year old schoolgirl. This kind of thing should never happen, and in my twenty-year-old-opinion, the US has got to look long and hard at why its citizens need such open access to firearms. Coverage on the firearms debate on the BBC News site is here.- posted at 21:07 :: feedback
I saw Dave Gorman's Better World at the 1999 Edinburgh Festival. It was screamingly funny, and he's got a new set of tour dates for 2000. Check out his site.- posted at 19:54 :: feedback
Um, yeah. Richard Branson's great apart from his dire West Coast train franchise, but branding a student portal Virgin Student is just too funny for me to take seriously.- posted at 19:39 :: feedback
Whoops. The Register slates Slate for putting Bill Gates on the front cover.- posted at 19:36 :: feedback
Press release from BT about their new weekends and evenings unmetered tarrif. The story is covered at BBC News here, and at ZDNet News here. Nice to see that BT aren't so much as dragging their feet as just whining, kicking and screaming. But they are doing something. (Admittedly, it's not enough.) This is BT's internet access service BT Internet, not the Surftime product that they will be offering soon as well. If you check the BT press release, annual users apparently get "2 gigabytes" of webspace. ZDNet News points out that BT Internet users will get cut off after midnight. Not so good.- posted at 19:28 :: feedback
Since it's the 29th February, that day when women are "allowed" to propose to men, here's a nice story about how love triumphed in today's Times.- posted at 16:01 :: feedback
Salon reviews Helen Fielding's sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. One-line summary: "It may not add much to anybody's intellectual credentials, but it's a treat to spend some more time in Fielding's warm, whimsical, sneakily wise fictional world.". I just got annoyed with the sequel.
- posted at 14:39 :: feedback
From BBC News, NASA shows of its sandstorm images.I finished Coupland's Miss Wyoming last night. I thought the beginning was a bit weak, but everything tied together at the end. Good book.
Via Memepool - the acronym interaction, expansion and extrapolation engine.
I loved constitutional law last year, so here's the text of the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill. Read it. And then weep (out of pity for us UK citizens, that is). Of particular concern is Part III of the Bill, regarding disclosure of encryption keys. The government maintains that the bill is in accordance with the Human Rights Act that should be coming into force any time now. We'll just see about that...
- posted at 14:37 :: feedback
Monday, February 28, 2000
BBC News reported at 23:06GMT that Joerg Haider, Austria's Far Right party leader had resigned. I think I'm just going to sit around a bit and wait to see what happens.
On a vaguely related note, I fell asleep for about half an hour in an international law lecture today. I'd already read up on the subject, which was the use of force in humanitarian and self-defence contexts, but it was just so dull. It wasn't just me, either... Everyone else seemed to agree with me, too.
Sleep now. Blogger makes it far too easy to post.
- posted at 23:49 :: feedback
I remember Fractint back in the days when I used to muck about in DOS on a 16MHz 386. Of course, I was about nine at the time, and fractals were (and still are) incredibly cool.- posted at 21:00 :: feedback
generation5.org is a new ai-only weblog that I stumbled over after skimming Robot Wisdom today. I've got a great swarm/flocking opengl screensaver at the moment, but I can't find the download url. More later, probably.- posted at 20:00 :: feedback
Apparently, the first letter of your name can tell a lot about you (Harrumph.com)
"-D-
Once you get it into your head that you want someone, you move full steam
ahead in pursuit. You do not give up your quest easily. You are
nurturing and caring. If someone has a problem, this turns you on. You are
highly sexual, passionate, loyal, and intense in your involvement, sometimes
possessive and jealous. Sex to you is a pleasure to be enjoyed. You are
stimulated by the eccentric and unusual, having a free and open mind."
Well, that's me, then...
- posted at 19:40 :: feedback
From last Thursday's New Scientist: scientists have built an RNA-based computer and used it to solve a chess problem:Game of life.- posted at 19:31 :: feedback
Voting started twenty minutes ago for our college union elections... Starting to get a bit apprehensive about the whole thing, but I guess I'll know by Thursday whether I got the post.
From last Thursday's New Scientist, a couple of Australian physicists think that reality may be the product of nothing but random noise. Defintiely an interesting article, and I'm trying to persuade one of my computer science friends to write the code to run a (rough) demo, if I can find an online paper.
- posted at 19:27 :: feedback
I'm running for the post of publicity officer on my college's student union, ironically against my adopted first year college 'son' who's also a lawyer. The problem is that both of us seem to have done the same things (School Paper editors, website designers), and we do the same subject. It really doesn't matter who gets elected, and I think that I came across as slightly arrogant in hustings last night--which is never a good thing.- posted at 13:53 :: feedback
Microsoft X-Box on ZDNet News UK. Shame that most of the details are wrong: yes, it looks like it's going to be an Athlon processor, but I seem to remember that the graphics chipset was going to be done by ATI, and definitely not nvidia.- posted at 13:51 :: feedback
Can't wait to get home to try out our new DVD player - it's a Sony DV-FP11, it's shiny, goes beep, and you can stand it vertically as well as horizontally. I'm impressed. And I want to see The Matrix again, anyway...- posted at 13:47 :: feedback
BT says network may crash again, from The Times, inspiring further confidence in our favourite telecoms monopoly company. Yay.- posted at 13:44 :: feedback
Quick - Amazon.co.uk has this on its front page: We Are Temporarily Closed. No screenshot, I'm afraid, since the PCs in the faculty are far too slow for me to do that kind of thing...
I bought Douglas Coupland's Miss Wyoming the other day and am about three or four chapters through it. I'll let you know if it's any good. Seems to be okay so far. Thought Microserfs was great, though...
- posted at 13:40 :: feedback
Cult & Classic Childrens TV at SausageNet has got my childhood favourite Dogtanian, the bizarre canine interpretation of Alexander Dumas's classic. Great fun.- posted at 13:32 :: feedback
At Ask Tog there's a great discussion on user interface design and what Apple can do to retain/regain its lead. I particularly like the following: "I should be able to tell, by looking at the outside of a file, how much material is within, how old the folder is, and how long it has been since I’ve opened it. I’m not talking about surrounding it with text; I’m talking about using that 24-bit color space to add visual attributes. For example, the more the folder contains, the thicker it should appear. The older it is, the deeper the color should become, with age cracks appearing after several years. The time since I’ve opened it could be represented by cobwebs or dustiness."
And on Salon, there's an article about Eazel, the new UI project for Linux. Great screenshots, as well.
