Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Dysfunctional Techno-habits

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New Scientist has a nice little article called “Just can’t get e-nough” about habitual problems some people get from using the Internet.

The web in particular has opened up a host of opportunities for overindulgence. Take Wikipedia. Updating the entries – something anyone can do – has become almost a way of life for some. There are more than 2400 “Wikipedians”, p 36 – you know where to look it up if you don’t know what it means – who have edited more than 4000 pages each (“see Confessions of a Wikipediholic”, below). “It’s clearly like crack for some people,” says Dan Cosley at Cornell University in New York, who has studied how websites such as Wikipedia foster a community. To committed Wikipedians, he says, the site is more than a useful information resource; it’s the embodiment of an ideology of free information for all.

Favourite terms – crackberry and cheesepodder (( someone who goes hunting for those cheesy old numbers for their iPod )) . 🙂

Detentions in Iraq

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Two Americans get picked up in a raid on a dodgy security company in Iraq, both are innocent and one has been working as an FBI informer, which is why the raid happens. They then spend months in custody before finally getting released.

Nathan Ertel, the American held with Vance, brought away military records that shed further light on the detention camp and its secretive tribunals. Those records include a legal memorandum explicitly denying detainees the right to a lawyer at detention hearings to determine whether they should be released or held indefinitely, perhaps for prosecution.

Donald Vance made a very good point:

While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.

Another case of “do what I say, not what I do”. 🙁

Flying fun

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Just chatted to a friend of mine who’s in Singapore airport at the moment, when I asked him how the flight was he said:

when they tell the flight attendants to tighten their seatbelts you know you’re in for a rough ride!

🙂

An Amusing Collection of Quotes

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From Shelley about IE7:

Writing Learning JavaScript and now Adding Ajax, as well as creating web page applications such as my photo popup has led me to an epiphany: Microsoft really doesn’t want us to use IE. No, I’m not being facetious–the company would probably prefer that people move to another browser.

(Those looking for an alternative might want to try Firefox)

Shelley also mentions how she has to test with IE6 now, using a Virtual PC image:

According to the IE weblog, this VPC image will only function until April 1st, 2007, but I think the April Fool’s joke is getting people to reserve both memory and disc space–as well as having to go through Microsoft’s validation process–just to test against a browser. What happens after April, then? Are all the Windows 2000 installations going away? There will be no need to test for IE6?

But there seems to be a problem with those images, as Paul Morriss found out, Microsoft seems to think they’re dodgy knock-offs, even though they came from them originally:

Just for fun I then decided to upgrade IE on the Virtual PC to IE7. When it got to verifying whether the copy of Windows on the Virtual PC was genuine it concluded it wasn’t.

He’s got a screenshot as proof..

Then, as a final funny thought, this worked example from Sterling W. “Chip” Camden derived from a theory by Shelley that “Every spec should be written like it was going to be read by VB developers.”:

See Dick and Jane play tag.
See Dick forget his namespace prefix.
See Jane throw an exception.
Run, Dick, run!

🙂

Richard Dawkins website blocked for being “occult” and “religious”

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This is a classic from the New Scientist Feedback section (25th December) where Eliot Attridge let them know that when he wanted to read more about Richard Dawkins:

Unfortunately, the school has installed a net filter called Netsweeper which, Attridge discovered, blocks access to www.richarddawkins.net on the grounds that it is an “occult site”.

To add insult to injury when Eliot tested with Sonicwall that described his site as “religious” – I wonder which wrong label would infuriate Dawkins most ? 🙂

Quenamari Ice Plateau

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Dear Lazyweb,

Reading New Scientist for 2nd December 2006 I came across an article about the Quenamari ice plateau in their “This Week 50 Years Ago” section:

The strange feature of this ice formation is that it exists apparently without fresh supplies of moisture in the middle of a region which is entirely free from ice and snow for most of the year despite its altitude of about 18,000 feet above sea level. No glacier feeds this ice; no high mountain peaks are near enough to snatch rain from the clouds to water it. It is unique – so glaciologists say – and its existence remains a mystery.

Problem is that when you search for what’s known about it now there’s very little information, either how it formed or even whether it still exists given the current episode of global warming that’s going on.

Anyone got any clues ?

To Each As They Deserve – A Good Example of Political Satire

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John Howard to be deported after failing citizenship test

Category: News article

Topic: Politics

Author: Michael Ellerman

Year created: 2006

Overall rating: 4 out of 5

Content rating: 4 out of 5

You absolutely have to read Michael Ellerman’s satirical news article “John Howard to be deported after failing citizenship test“.

I hereby lend it any Google foo that I have..

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Record Weather

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As the bushfires rage today the BBC is reporting that it was the hottest December day in more than 50 years, at 41.1C.

I went looking around the Bureau of Met website but could only find the spring records for 2006, and something caught my eye. Now I knew that this spring was very dry, with the north east having their driest spring recorded and most places getting less than half of the usual, but the new record for Wilsons Promontory shocked me. The previous record was in 1911 with 112.6 mm of rain, but now the new all-time (134 year) record is just 58.2 mm, barely half the previous record.

Not good records to see broken.