January 2004 Entries
An example of taking an idea too far but could be the perfect gift for your fellow unmarried alpha geek. Check the pattern list.
I recently bought a second-hand copy of Battlefield 1942 from Amazon UK (list was £30 but second hand it was £15). I thought I'd give it a try after finding out how popular it was as a LAN Party game. I'm not big on First Person Shooters (FPS) as a genre; rarely played them until Halo came along. And I'm crap at Halo. I prefer real-time strategy (RTS) games. In an RTS, you essentially play god while in FPS, you're just a foot soldier. Maybe this implies something about one's personality....
Unfortunately my P4 1.6a is choking quite badly and I've had...
Cool tool from Microsoft Research providing an analysis of traffic on netnews.
I'm glad a few people are worried about this. I agree with Mr Jennings:
"We are going to see a churn in employment security, and a round of wage deflation, which is bound to result in a middle class backlash"
and
"Speaking at the World Economic Forum, Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach drew attention to the phenomenon of "global labour arbitrage", where what were high-wage jobs in developed world were transformed into low-wage jobs in the developing world."
I guess, theoretically, this increases productivity and overall wealth in the long term but the costs of the "structural adjustments" (unemployment) are very hard...
Welll, well, well. Interesting to see where Python gets to...
After about six hours of struggle, I finally managed to get .Text installed and running properly on my dev machine. What a royal pain! But it's looking pretty good. I compiled the .95 source code from build 102 and have taken a first perusal of how it all works. Not too bad; seems pretty straightforward. If you're having troubles too, best to read the .Text forum.
I'm trying to decide whether to move to either Movable Type (the popular choice) or go with .Text. .Text isn't so feature rich but it looks adequate and I like the idea of going with a...
It turns out that the Epson PIM technology (based on Exif 2.1) is essentially a proprietary hack and it's largely been replaced by the Exif 2.2 standard which is also evangelized as Exif Print.
Our old Nikon Coolpix 995 produced Exif 2.1 jpegs while our new camera, a Nikon Coolpix 5400, produces Exif 2.2 jpegs. The Epson PIM plug-in distributed by Epson UK only works with Exif 2.1 while the Epson PIM plug-in distributed by Epson US works with Exif 2.2. Think I can use the US version? The US Plug-in doesn't support our UK printer (an Epson Photo Stylus 950). Arrrggghhh!!!
I've...
Arghh! It turns out that when you rotate a jpeg using the Windows XP explorer, it corrupts certain exif tags.
I discovered this as I've been learning about the wonderful world of colour management and how to print digital photographs correctly. Turns out to be pretty complex. So I've recalibrated my monitor and created an ICC profile using the Adobe Gamma utility. I've downloaded and installed ICC profiles for our Epson Photo Stylus 950 - one for each type of paper. I've installed the Epson Print Image Matching Plug-in for Photoshop 6 so I can import jpegs and have them assigned...
I bought this radio for Jenny as a Christmas present. It's excellent. Didn't have to crack open a manual to get it to work which is always a good sign. It autoconfigured itself and easy to use. The reception is crystal clear and there's lots of stations to choose from. Good-bye FM; hello DAB!
The radio also includes digital output and you can upgrade the firmware via a USB connection. Turns out the product is based on the Frontier Silicon Chorus FS1010 processor. It's an entire platform on a chip with 150Mhz DSP, 384K RAM and a load of onchip peripherals. Kind of bizarre...
I'm impressed! Hotmail seems to be catching way more spam lately.
Got sent my first plaxogram today. Hmmm. I don't like this idea of being spammed with requests for contact information or having my contact details stored by a company I don't trust.
Trust and privacy are the key issues that needs to be solved with these kinds of centralized applications. I doubt any profit motivated company could be trusted in this role. It would be a great role for a public trust to take since the data protection could be be a core tenent of the founding charter. This could enable a slew of other applications that require the controlled sharing of personal information.
Meanwhile,...