JeremyP's Blog

Once in a Generation...

2010-10-10T22:06:00.002+01:00

... come these posts.Also, according to numerologists, says the Channel 5 News, 10/10/10 comes "once in a generation". Let's examine that: the last 10/10/10 was exactly 100 years ago and the next one will be in exactly 100 years. That seems a long time for a generation. Maybe they meant a repeating number in a date. Well 9/9/9 was last year and 11/11/11 will be next year. That seems rather

It could be worse

2010-06-29T19:08:00.002+01:00

Last Thursday, I was sitting outside a bar in Italy with a cold beer and I watched the current World Champions (Italy) come last in their group in the World Cup. Previously, I followed the total self destruction of the French challenge. Tonight, either Spain or Portugal will "crash out" just like we did. It's not our divine right to win at football and our team just isn't very good right now.

Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio?

2010-01-08T22:16:00.002Z

Has nobody else noticed this? The wife of Northern Ireland First Minister Gerry Robinson had an affair with a 19 year old. Presumably her name is Mrs Robinson. (Doo de doo de doo doo. Doo de doo de doo doo doo)

My holiday.

2009-09-23T20:14:00.003+01:00

Here's a video I took on the last day of my holiday.And here are some photographs.

Bad cover

2009-09-12T01:24:00.002+01:00

I think it's generally acknowledged that the worst cover of all time is William Shatner's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". it is a truly appalling recording and has to be heard at least once because otherwise you will not believe how badly a song can be destroyed.On a slightly related note (ha! geddit) there is Jezza's first law of music which is that any cover of a Beatles song is bound to be

Evil Google

2009-07-25T10:55:00.002+01:00

I've installed Google Earth 5 on my Mac and I found out that it has a wonderful piece of invisible software tht does automatic updates in the background. This is great except for two thingsIt's a security risk - if an update is compromised, there is nothing I can do to stop itI would not be impressed with Google trying to download a new Google Earth while I am connected to the Internet via a

40 years are go!

2009-07-22T22:50:00.002+01:00

I have a memory from when I was very young of being dragged out of my bed in the middle of the night by my parents and being sat in front of the telly. The telly was showing grainy pictures of a man in a space suit climbing down a ladder onto what looked like the Moon.Anyway, in honour of the first Moon landing here is some trivia on the subject:"Apollo" has got 11 in it separated by two

Fantasy Football League

2009-04-28T14:00:00.004+01:00

In an parallel Universe, Arsenal wins the league, FA Cup and Champions League. However, as the photo shows, the alternate Universe has opposite chirality.The photo comes from this article:Arsenal 'must triumph in Europe'.

Happy Saint Totteringham's Day

2009-04-11T19:21:00.003+01:00

It's happened. Arsenal's 4-1 win at Wigan means that Spurs can no longer catch them in the Premier League. There will be rejoicing in the streets tonight, but probably not as much rejoicing as when Aston Villa can no longer catch us, assuming that day happens at all.

The Best Web Site E-VAR!

2009-04-01T00:04:00.003+01:00

This web site is for all those people who get really annoyed at other people asking them questions that could easily be answered with a simple Google. For instance: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=jeremyp

St Totteringham's Say

2009-03-23T16:20:00.003Z

St Totteringham's Day will be on 11th April as long as Arsenal pick up two more points than Spurs in the next two games.

Creatives

2009-03-23T15:41:00.003Z

The image to the right is a screen capture from an advertisement on the Nat West Banking web site. Notice how creative types always use a picture of an Apple Macintosh when they need an image of a laptop. For the record, the computer in the picture is a Titanium Powerbook, a laptop that Apple haven't made for about six years.The Titanium Powerbook had a PowerPC G4 processor in it which meant

Conspiracy Theory

2009-03-08T13:44:00.003Z

How green is wind power? Well a British Gas have inadvertently let slip some embarrassing facts about wind turbines. It turns out that they don't work at all and the blades are actually driven by electric motors driven from the National Grid. Proof? Watch this advertisement and note who has the cable with the plug on it and who has the socket.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALSspMI6_rE

A lesson

2009-01-02T23:00:00.002Z

You know how you were always told to back up your important data? Well here's a salutary lesson. You see, journalspace.com thought that mirrored disks equals backups. They were wrong. Unfortunately, they failed to realise (for six years) that a mirrored disk will faithfully reproduce everything you or your software puts on it. That includes the command "delete database".

Saint Totteringham's Day Update

2008-12-12T10:53:00.002Z

It's a while since I've posted a blog and, as my brother recently posted a new blog of his own, I need to post something to show that I'm more active in the blogging community than he is.So here is the latest on Saint Totteringham's day. Sadly, it has moved into April thanks to some poor performances by Arsenal and some good ones by Spurs. With any luck things will improve now that Arsenal no

These Memories Can't Wait

2008-12-02T21:59:00.005Z

I'm doing a lot of work with Adobe LiveCycle at the moment. If you want to run it, you need 2 gigabytes of RAM which I have on my laptop, but then I can't do anything else. Specifically, I'd have to run Windows natively rather than as a VMWare image. So, I've bought a 4Gb RAM upgrade from Crucial (£42), not from Apple (£196) and I've installed it. 4Gb is as much RAM as you can put in a

Dilemma

2008-11-08T09:13:00.002Z

Aer Lingus is in trouble. They're losing money at an enormous rate and so they've decided to outsource much of their ground operations. Look at the following quote from the article:Aer Lingus has set a 15 December deadline for staff to accept voluntary severance or early retirement.Somebody should tell them that the word they are looking for is "compulsory".

Quality Software

2008-10-23T19:15:00.003+01:00

The image is a screen print of the properties dialog box of a workflow process in Adobe LiveCycle ES Workbench. It's good to know that they are looking after my welfare by making sure that I can't accidentally save my property changes by pressing "OK". Unfortunately, I also can't deliberately save my property changes either.Just in case you are wondering, if the process was open in an editor,

Saint Totteringham's day

2008-10-20T23:10:00.004+01:00

What, you may ask, is Saint Totteringham's Day? Well, Saint Totteringham's Day is the day on which Tottenham Hotspur can no longer catch Arsenal in the league, which is to say the day on which the total points available to Spurs is lower than the number of points Arsenal already have. It's entirely possible that the day doesn't happen in a particular year, if, for example Spurs actually finish

A Little Bit of Politics

2008-10-12T01:25:00.002+01:00

Alex Salmond, Scottish First Minister is claiming that the UK should make more money available to Scotland. For all I know, he is right. Perhaps the UK should release the money to stave off recession in Scotland. But Alex Salmond is also the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party and he wants independence for Scotland. Well Alex, independence includes independence from UK financial

Oops

2008-10-11T00:56:00.001+01:00

It looks like In Our Time has moved away from Radio 4.

How cool is this!

2008-10-06T21:35:00.001+01:00

Naturally, I'm downloading it as we speak. I'll post some screenshots when I have it working.

Forgery!

2008-09-28T00:42:00.003+01:00

Last week the Radio 4 Today programme ran a story on the forgery of One Pound coins. Apparently, two percent of the one pond coins in circulation are forged. They also gave some tips on how to spot a fake. At the time, I had five one pound coins in my loose change, so I thought Ha! there's a possibility I have got one (in fact the chance is about 10%). So I checked the coins in my possession

Poetry Please

2008-09-23T19:05:00.002+01:00

Inspired by a conversation I overheard between two security officers at Heathrow.My big sisterLives in Bicester,Played some Twister,With a MisterMan.Thank you.

Punishment

2008-06-12T15:04:00.002+01:00

I read the following on another site today:I wanted to see if a large quantity of puns would make people laugh, so I assembled a group of victims subjects. Then I read out a number of puns to see if they would laugh, but no pun in ten did.I made this one up on a similar theme:I wanted to see if the fathers of my friends like video games, so I lined a few of them up with a Wii to see if any of

Progress through technology

2008-03-31T23:29:00.002+01:00

...as they don't say at Audi.This photograph should be titled "A gigabyte through the ages". It's a 1 Gigabyte drive from the 80's and a 1 Gigabyte drive from today.

The Seventh Book Revisited (Spoilers!)

2008-03-22T19:31:00.002Z

During my recent excursion to Les Arcs, I read Harry Potter and the Final Moneyspinner. It's only fair to my readers that I evaluate my performance in guessing a synopsis to the last book.First of all, my main premise that it would be a rip off of Star Wars turned out to be completely false. Had I gone with my second choice rip off, i.e. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, I would have been

Tee hee

2007-11-13T16:02:00.000Z

Why QED

2007-10-11T17:56:00.000+01:00

""Not a proof" so why the "QED"?" says Rich.Well actually, it is not far off a proof as it happens. Consider the number 0.11111... (= 1/9). What does this mean? Well, 0.1111... is shorthand for 1/10 + 1/102 + 1/103 + .... = 1/9Clearly 9 . (1/10 + 1/102 + 1/103 + ....) = 9/9and therefore by the distributive law9/10 + 9/102 + 9/103 + .... = 9/9or 0.999.... = 9/9.QEDWell not quite. I have

1 = 1

2007-09-27T18:43:00.000+01:00

Two forums I read regularly have recently had threads on the subject of 0.999999.... = 1. Amazingly, lots of people still seem to believe it's not true, or not quite true or that maybe it only approaches one. Sadly for them, as soon as you admit that an infinite series can sum to a finite number (which it can) 0.9999... = 1 follows immediately.ProofLet x = 0.9999....Then 10x = 9.9999.... 10x -

End of Life

2007-07-31T18:06:00.000+01:00

Here's an idea I had the other day. It's probably been had before, but who cares.We were discussing Microsoft operating systems and the consensus was that Microsoft have released one very good operating system which was Windows 2000. Windows XP is also not too bad, but represents a step back from Win2K in that it introduces a few new features at the expense of considerable cruft such that the

Phone a friend

2007-05-01T19:38:00.000+01:00

This is an American going for the million on the US version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEi23IomMNAIt'll bring a smile to your face.

You're fired!

2007-04-18T23:42:00.001+01:00

Alan Sugar fired a Phd physicist tonight. She's one of the few people in the world who can do quantum mechanics. The main lesson she learned was that she wouldn't have enjoyed it in Alan Sugar's world and was quite happy to be sacked in the end. How she failed to learn that lesson by watching the previous two series is beyond me. I figured out the same thing after series one programme one and

The Amphitheatre

2007-04-17T22:17:00.000+01:00

The Romans made a spectator sport of throwing Christians to lions. What have we got to rival that? Nothing?No, in fact I happened to tune in to a programme called "Get Your Act Together". This is Harvey Goldsmith doing the entertainment equivalent of Kitchen Nightmares. This week he did The Big L (don't bother, the server is in meltdown) radio station. The people running it are obviously a

Breaking News

2007-04-15T00:27:00.000+01:00

Prince William has split up with his girlfriend. This is such devastating news that the BBC led with it on all their Radio 4 news bulletins right up till at least lunch time and it's still the headline on their web site. Somewhat ironically, the media is speculating that the split was caused by media pressure. Message to the BBC: this is not news. News is people dying in Iraq because our

Band Aid

2007-03-16T22:24:00.000Z

At my brother's last weekend we watched the Live Aid and Live 8 DVDs. That reminded me of a game we used to play on sailing holidays which was name the bands you'd like to see live but never have and never can now. For instance, Queen would be at number one for me because Freddy Mercury is dead now. However, the Police and Genesis must be disqualified (because a) they've reformed, b) I've

The Plot of the Seventh Book

2007-03-10T01:57:00.000Z

To save you having to read the seventh book because it'll probably be as bad as Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (don't ask me how it gets 4.5 stars, nobody I know rated it at all) I have provided the following synopsis of the final book. This synopsis is based only on shrewd guesses and not on any leakages from J K Rowlings' publishers.Harry is told that Voldemort is, in fact, his father.

Hello Mum

2007-01-07T00:25:00.000Z

The Bad Astronomer's number 1 photo of the year is the first one at this site. It's taken from some spacecraft looking back at Saturn with the Sun behind (an image never seen on Earth). The Sun is just peaking out from behind Saturn in the lower left quadrant.In the upper left quadrant just outside the bright rings is a small dot. If you look carefully at the dot, you can see me holding up a

A warning for parents

2006-12-23T01:40:00.000Z

A true story I read on a forum:There's a nine year old boy and he has a seven year old sister. This is a boy of the world which means he is growing up and, specifically, doesn't believe in Father Christmas any more. His seven year old sister won't believe him when he tells her that Santa Claus is not real and points out that the sherry, mince pie and carrot they put out on Christmas Eve always

A link and a rant

2006-12-07T10:51:00.000Z

LinkA mundane story about an auction leads to an unfortunate headline.RantThere's new software at Blogger.com in beta. I'm not using it yet, becausea) I'd need to get a Google account - they don't seem to be able to use my existing credentials.b) It's in beta. As an IT person, I know that means that it's not production quality. I have no intention of trusting my blog to beta software. In fact

Googlewack

2006-11-02T21:33:00.000Z

It is cheating a bit because both words are proper names, but hayter jeremyp only leads to one page.UpdateThat's so annoying, it worked yesterday.

Lame Claim to Fame

2006-11-01T20:00:00.000Z

This is mainly for my nephew's grandma's benefit. It's always nice when you realise you know somebody who you have just heard on the radio.Click Wednesday's "listen again" to hear the interview which was the last item on the programme.

Pot, Kettle Black

2006-10-28T01:53:00.000+01:00

I see from comments on a recent post that my nephew's Grandma is criticising me for having a go at the England football manager.When I was much younger, as a treat, my parents (one of whom is my nephew's grandma) would take me up to the Festival Hall to listen to classical music. In spite of the fact that there wasn't a Marshall amp or a Strat in sight and I had to dress up smart, I quite

Bullying

2006-10-28T01:37:00.000+01:00

I haven't posted for ages. This is because some of the other people in my company have admitted to reading my blog. That kind of dampens one's creativity because I should be spending every waking hour furthering the cause of Apto Solutions (note to Jeremy and Peter: the more links to a web site, the higher its rank in Google, so start your own blogs linking Apto Solutions as often as possible).

I Told You So

2006-10-11T22:52:00.000+01:00

Well I didn't actually. However, when McLaren took over I did voice my concerns. After all, he was in the management team in the last World Cup, so why would we expect England to suddenly be different?McLaren dumped Beckham possibly rightly, possibly only to keep the ravening horde of the press sweet. The main reason to keep him out was because both Gerrard and Lennon play in more or less the

Extras Extras, read all about it

2006-09-30T01:08:00.000+01:00

Spoiler alertThe wonders of modern technology allow me to record television on to my laptop computer which is what I've been doing for the current series of Extras. The reason for this is it clashes with the BBC Romans series. This morning I had two episoes of Extras to watch, so I thought I'd catch up on my way to Bristol on the train. This is the first time I've tried out my digital

Who's Martin Sheen?

2006-09-25T22:39:00.000+01:00

Well really, fancy not knowing who Martin Sheen is. With reference to Earthquiz2, this is the relevant link.

Another Earth Quiz

2006-09-24T20:22:00.000+01:00

Following the success of my first quiz, I've put together another one.

Kwik Kwizz

2006-09-10T18:36:00.000+01:00

Try my new Picture Quiz.

More TV detectives

2006-09-04T21:34:00.000+01:00

Dalziel and Pascoe have got a confession from the daughter of the victim with half an hour still to go. So we can eliminate her from our enquiries.

Ferrari update

2006-09-04T21:26:00.000+01:00

I can confirm that Andy was driving his new Ferrari home from the garage for the very first time when he crashed it.Apparently, somebody in front of him had an accident and he hit some of the debris.

Off the Rails

2006-08-24T16:33:00.000+01:00

I accidentally bought a first class ticket for my trip home from Bristol yesterday. I did this by buying it on line at First Great Western's web site. If you look for a return ticket, it'll list the prices and provide you with a link to a list of the various single ticket options which are often much cheaper because they restrict you to travelling on reserved seats on specific trains. I

It's just not cricket

2006-08-23T00:34:00.000+01:00

The Fourth Test ended disastrously and everybody seems to be blaming the umpires. I'm going to stick up for them.Fact: in the context of a cricket match, the umpire is always right. They may, in reality, get things wrong, and matches have turned on wrong decisions, but it is almost unprecedented for them to be questioned on the field of play.Fact: in the umpires' opinion the ball was tampered

Crash 2

2006-08-19T23:09:00.000+01:00

I was proceeding along the A33 in a Northerly direction. It was dark with no street lights. In the headlights of an on coming car I thought I saw what looked like people silhouetted in the road. Next thing I knew, there was a flock of five or six horses galloping towards me. I did my best to push the brake pedal through the floor of the car and miraculously I failed to hit any of the

Crash!

2006-08-18T19:49:00.000+01:00

I managed to hose my laptop today. Following a failed security update, it failed to restart except in Windows mode. Fortunately, I was able to track down an operating system CD and reinstall it (thank god Apple software does not require activation).My day could have been far worse though. Andy, my ex-employer picked up his new Ferrari 360 today. Here's one of the pictures he took. As you can

Buses

2006-08-16T23:34:00.000+01:00

My blog is like buses. I have nothing to say for months, and then loads of things come up at once.Airport Security (again)I see there have been a number of security lapses on aeroplanes since the clamp down.a mobile phone goes off on a BA flight forcing it to turn backa 12 year old boy sneaks on to a flight without any documentationa 60 year old woman causes a flight to be diverted and a major

Airport Security

2006-08-13T22:18:00.000+01:00

Many years ago I went skiing with my Dad and our luggage was X-rayed for security purposes. Unfortunately, there was a problem with one of the bags in that it had a suspicious package inside it. "What's that?" said the security guard lady turning the screen so that we could see the X-ray picture. It showed an X-ray of the bag, in which could be discerned the shape of clothing and toiletries

More e-cards

2006-08-09T09:46:00.000+01:00

It seems that there are a lot of people in Apto Solutions that know this Cynthia:

Cynthia, your card is missing

2006-08-09T00:08:00.000+01:00

I received an e-card today from Cynthia. "Who is Cynthia?" you ask. (Hmmm, as an aside, how should that sentence be punctuated? Having a question mark and a full stop seems wrong, but so does putting the question mark right at the end.) The answer is "dunno". Anyway, as you can see from the text of the e-mail:------------06F1A6C9E59C735Content-Type: text/htmlContent-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit<

33%

2006-08-07T21:49:00.000+01:00

Well, I was sort of right, turns out she was in a three way Strangers on a Train scenario.

Leo is rubbish too

2006-08-07T21:06:00.000+01:00

I have to be quick because the second episode of Silent Witness has already startedI can't believe Leo hasn't figured it out. The son of the murder victim was being protected by the wife but it turns out he has a cast iron alibi, so twisty-wisty, it's obviously his sister wot did it.I'm writing this as the episode has just started, so we'll see if I'm right in 54 minutes.

Laptops passing in the Night

2006-08-07T19:32:00.000+01:00

I sat oppposite a woman on the train tonight who had a MacBook. Since I had my MacBook Pro we struck up a conversation. There aren't many laptops other you could own that are worthy of starting a conversation with a complete stranger.Addendum to Integration HellMy brother pointed out that many combined PDA/phone/MP3 players have a safe mode which switches off the transmitter and renders them

Integration Hell

2006-08-06T00:13:00.000+01:00

Well WWDC is coming up and as usual there are lots of rumours flying around about what Apple is going to announce there. One of these rumours involves the iPhone. The iPhone is an iPos that is also a mobile phone that Apple is supposed to be developing, although, of course, nobody actually knows, they are just guessing.Call me a luddite, but I am absolutely against the ridiculous trend towards

Warning

2006-08-04T20:44:00.000+01:00

Just below the recipe list on the Baxters Spring Vegetable Soup I had for my tea tonight, there is a warning:CONTAINS CELERYI didn't know celery was dangerous, except that, as it has net negative calories (it takes more energy to digest than there is in it), you could die of exhaustion from eating too much.

Disadvantage cards

2006-08-04T20:11:00.000+01:00

When I'm working in Aldershot, I often get my lunch at Boots. Every time I buy anything there, the cashier asks me if I have "an Advantage Card". The answer is "no, and please stop asking me", however, I always stop after the "no" part for some reason.The stupidity of the whole situation was brought home today when I overheard the following while standing in the queue:Cashier to shopper: "

Inspector Linley is rubbish

2006-08-03T21:39:00.000+01:00

He was well off his game tonight. I figured out out miles before he did.For a start, the murder victim had a wound shaped like a hooked spikey implement. I immediately thought "ice axe". That put the lawyer right in the frame, since he was a keen rock climber and had successfully assaulted Mount Everest. Linley had to wait for the pathologist to produce a suspiciously accurate cast of the

Technical Support

2006-07-23T23:56:00.000+01:00

My internet link has been very intermittant recently, a problem I have putr down to the weather. It would suddenly just go off for a few houres and then come back. The link got so unreliable, in fact, that I started going to the office instead of working from home. My theory was that something was malfunctioning in the heat.Eventually, it went down last Thursday and didn't come back at all on

Sporting Matters

2006-07-01T23:18:00.000+01:00

My surname is Portugese, but fortunately that is my only connection with that country. I am totally gutted because, over the whole match including extra time, England played better. I think Ronaldo's behaviour was despicable and if Rooney gives him a good kicking when they get back into Man U training, it's only what he deserves. Whatever happens in training, Ronaldo is in for a hard time with

Another Rant

2006-06-25T01:47:00.000+01:00

My brother is one of those people who keeps fiddling wityh things to try and make them better. This is obviously really annoying because you have to try to keep up. For instance, there was a time when his mobile phone number changed every 10 minutes just because he's found a better provider or a better phone or whatever.Now he's upgraded his blogging software which has broken all the permalinks.

Rant

2006-06-25T01:30:00.000+01:00

I listen to The Archers.Now you have got over that, let me tell you about something that annoyed me in Friday's episode. Shula's husband has been battling with a gambling addiction over the last few weeks, an addiction that has put them in debt to the tune of £100,000. Fallon, meanwhile, has just had her 21st birthday party. The said party took place in her mother's pub and took the form of a

Station X

2006-06-19T21:17:00.000+01:00

On Saturday, Sara and I visited Bletchley Park as a birthday treat for me. It was a fun day out and worth £10 of anybody's money.Highlights of the day were viewing the Colossus rebuild, meeting Tony Sale who rebuilt it and being given a tour by Jean Valentine who was a bombe operator at Bletchley Park during the War. There was also a computer museum full of old microcomputers and stuff

Sixth of July

2006-06-16T17:02:00.000+01:00

The most important date of the year, at least in movie terms is 6th July. I have to admit to some nervousness because sequels are rarely as good as the originals.

Spinal Tap is wrong

2006-06-04T01:02:00.000+01:00

This is Spinal Tap, the "rockumentary" is tragically wrong. Spinal Tap is a band that is famous for having amps that go up to eleven and for having drummers that go up nearly that far. Sadly, it appears that for one band, The Grateful Dead, it is not drummers that have a truncated life expectancy, but keyboard players. In fact, their fourth keyboard player has played his last Earthly chord.

Exploding eye balls

2006-06-02T00:31:00.000+01:00

My brother once blogged on how his eyeball has extra high pressure and might explode. I can't be bothered to search his blog for the permalink, so you'll have to take my word for it.Mindful of this, I approached today's eye test with some trepidation. Optician: Is there any history of glaucoma in your family?Me: what is glaucoma?Optician: It's when your eyeball has too high pressure and

Now that's what I call irony

2006-05-31T23:06:00.000+01:00

It was Debbie's birthday the other day so I sent here an e-mail with a picture in it wot I took. Apparently, the person who she was trying to say happy birthday to when she accidentally texted me has so far failed to send her any kind of happy birthday message in return.

Toys

2006-05-24T20:34:00.000+01:00

The following are true:1. My company paid me a four figure dividend2. My Macintosh laptop is four years old3. One of the hinges on my Macintosh laptop broke.4. World of Warcraft is available as a Universal Binary.5. The battery on my Macintosh laptop holds its charge for about 10 minutes.Can you guess what TNT delivered me today?

Hotel Cat-afornia

2006-05-19T14:00:00.000+01:00

Sara's flight back from India is delayed so I have to go and pick up Sparky from the cattery. I've had a look at the web page so that I know the opening times and where it is. I see it has a note on the bottom "Please note that the cattery is exclusively for cats!" What else would you put in a cattery?

Safety in the Home

2006-05-18T01:03:00.000+01:00

Do not read this if you are one of my parents.I'm waiting for my Japanese customer to come on line. They are nine hours ahead and so at midnight it is 9 in the morning for them. While I am waiting I decide to have a cup of coffee, so I go down to the kitchen.The kitchen is dark; the light bulb has blown. I have spare light bulbs but they are upstairs, so I decide to make do with the light in

Talk Radio

2006-05-10T11:36:00.000+01:00

Radio 4's Down the Line has to be the funniest thing I've heard for ages. It's supposed to be a radio phone in show, but I think it may be a spoof.

Under the Wire

2006-05-07T18:05:00.000+01:00

Thanks to West Ham we have scraped into the Champions League for next year.However, there appears to have been some skulldugery.

A vegemite sandwich

2006-02-25T12:52:00.000Z

Debbie called me today. Unfortunately, I missed her call, but it was OK because she later texted me, as follows:Hey there! HAPPY BIRTHDAY from all your friends 'down under' We all miss u heaps & hope u r celebrating the proper Aussie way!! Just tried calling u, but couldn't get thru... give me a call soon. Take care! Luv xxx Debbie.It was so nice to hear from Debbie particularly as it is not

Google bomb

2006-02-22T23:43:00.000Z

On a whim today, and because the question of recruiting statisticians came up on a forum, I decided to google for my little brother who is a statistician. I knew he'd be on there somewhere, but it appears he gets the top four hits.I think that counts as reflected fame. I would have been more impressed with his presentation to Age Concern if whoever had converted it to PDF had managed to get the

Ejucashun

2005-12-03T10:38:00.000Z

Somebody posted the following to an earlier blog of mine:Cromwell was the best, he brought order out of the chaos of royalist britain, and smashed the tyranncical dictatiors preparing to0 kill , and despo0ikll britainm, Queen elizabeth and charl;es 1 caused each a third of ireland to0 lose their lives, anas did victopria and the 1740s and 1300s kings and 1810s killed someI don't know whether to

101 things to do with an iPod - part 1

2005-12-02T01:11:00.000Z

I'm in the middle of a heavy debugging session, and just having a bit of "stay sane" time. A couple of days ago I managed to upgrade my Mac laptop to OS X 10.4 even though its DVD drive is broken. How did I do it I hear you say?Macintoshes have the ability to boot from an external Firewire drive. This is just one of the many ways in which they are superior to PCs. Instead of a BIOS they have

Marketing speak

2005-11-19T15:45:00.000Z

I saw an advert on the telly last night, from PC World. The advert was pushing their latest PC bargain which had a Pentium "P4 with HT technology" apparently. They seemed very pleased with themselves that they could offer HT technology at £899 or whatever.So, hands up any non techy who knows what HT technology is. Keep your hand up if you have any idea at all how it might make your computer

Kings and Cabbages

2005-11-15T21:09:00.000Z

The rumours are false. I don't really know all of the Kings and Queens of England, only the ones since William the Conqueror, and thinking about it, the previous two to that.In order we have:Edward the ConfessorHarold Godwinson (who won the Battle of Stamford Bridge which stopped the best lager in the World from being brewed in England)William the Conqueror (also known as William the Bastard

Cabbages and Kings

2005-11-13T19:08:00.000Z

Today I edited a Wikipedia page for the first time ever. It was a small but fundamental change as I'm sure you'll agree.

Don't buy CDs from Sony.

2005-11-01T10:27:00.000Z

This is a cautionary tale. To summarise the article: if you buy a copy protected CD from Sony and play it in your computer, it will install "root kit" software i.e. software that hides itself and the DRM software. furthermore there is no way to uninstall this software easily and it also takes up a small percentage of your CPU all the time.Sony should be sued to death for this.

word verification

2005-10-30T00:05:00.000+01:00

I've recently turned on word verification because I got one piece of spam e-mail. I'm kind of regretting it because I tried to post a response on my own blog tonight and the whirly whirly word verification made me feel a bit ill. It was also quite hard to read which had nothing to do with the enormous Laphroig I had just consumed.

Installation Art

2005-10-29T10:27:00.000+01:00

My Dad has bought a new whizzy PC with a 3GHz P4 and 1Gb RAM (still not as good as the PowerMac I have on order). This has left him with a spare PC not doing anything but coincidentally his old PC was infested with some internet worm. So the plan was to reinstall Windows (I'd rather he used Linux, but never mind) thus wiping said worm into oblivion.The first problem was that the install CD was

Visual Studio

2005-10-27T10:12:00.000+01:00

This article should be read by anybody who aspires to writing applications for the .Net environment. It never occurred to me before that it is even possible to write a Windows Forms app from scratch without using the inbuilt VS.Net wizards.As a professional programmer, I can tell you that VS.Net is one of the best - if not the best - programming tools there is. However, it encourages amateurs

New Toy

2005-10-26T10:13:00.000+01:00

For my current project, I need a dual processor Macintosh. When I say "need" I really do actually need because I have to test my device driver on multi processor kernels. It's a trial, I know. So I've just put my order in for a twin core G5 Powermac - yum.I don't really know what I'll use it for after the project's over though - Warcraft 3 maybe.

Don't panic Captain Mainwaring

2005-10-22T18:35:00.000+01:00

What is it with this bird flu? A parrot with it gets found out in quarantine and the whole media is going beserk. The infected bird was caught by the measure designed to catch it. What is the problem?This is another case where the media is working up a story just so that they can have a story. Bah humbug!

Did the Earth move for you?

2005-10-19T18:28:00.000+01:00

I got to the hotel at around 1pm. My room was on the 6th floor. I was pretty tired, so I decided to stop in my room for the rest of the day. So I lay on my bed watching the Chinese Grand Prix and suddenly I got this bizarre sensation that the room was moving. I'm tired, I thought, it's that whirley sensation you sometimes get after coming off a long flight, perhaps as a result of deep vein

Tokyo

2005-10-19T01:30:00.000+01:00

This message comes to you from Japan where I am in the airport internet lounge awaiting my flight home.I've just finished a 3 day whirlwind tour of a hotel and the Memory Tech office and several restaurants. As I have limited time for my 100 yen, I'll save most of the stuff I'm going to write until later. Suffice it to say, the earthquake was the highlight.

Diving in to challenge 4

2005-10-09T23:28:00.000+01:00

The fourth challenge, the Vigenere cipher was pretty straight forward to solve. Using Singh's (well Babbage's) method on character sequences of four and five letters, I figured out the key length fairly quickly. Then, a frequency analysis of each group of letters encoded by the same key letter revealed the letter "E" in each case and from there I quckly worked out the key.Probably the most time

Que?

2005-10-09T13:53:00.000+01:00

Ha! Well I figured out "q" pretty easily and from there cipher 3 fell. Well, actually, I haven't got all of it but the important keyword dropped out pretty quickly.I expect cipher 4 will be quite easy if I follow the rules given in Somon Singh's book. My betting (before I even start) is that it is written in French.

Cracking cheese Grommit

2005-10-08T15:04:00.000+01:00

I'm making a bit of a leap in my code cracking challenge. I've decided to assume for the moment that text 3 is in Italian. Google says that Italian has five letters that are not used (JKWXY). This would fit nicely with a cipher alphabet in which all of the vowels have two cipher text equivalents. Italian also fits nicely in that virtually all words end in vowels or an "L". This fits with my

Milk Monster's Mum said...

2005-10-05T10:08:00.000+01:00

In response to my last blog MMM saidYou're not making the dangerous assumption that there's a one to one mapping between plaintext and cipher are you?so I thought I'd better explain some of my reasoning for being where I am.In the book we are given the clue that the cipher is monoalphabetic with homophones which means that several symbols in the cipher text mean one letter. This is usually done