Everything is blogged
25 Apr 2005
You da MAN, Dave!
10:05 After a little bit of drama in the wee hours (the large hours in Rightpondia), Dave Hyatt has won the Acid2 Test. What a star - Safari rocks! Now we just have to wait for a public fix. . .
25 Apr 2005
content.inc
22:42 Heads up. The Science Board has asked me to contribute some thoughts on life science suppliers and supplies. I'm one of a motley crüe wibbling away - go and look. And if you're a life scientist, do join up.
25 Apr 2005
Politic schmolitik
22:27 I am never more faithless than when praying for the government. Meh. Sorry.
25 Apr 2005
Hoots mon
19:35 A Scots language bible? Okayy . . . but the real gem is da Hawaii Pidgin Bible. I thought this was a joke when Frossie posted the link on bofhnet, but after further reading I'm come to the conclusion it's a bloody good idea.
But den God wen show how plenny love an aloha he get fo us, cuz same time we was doing bad kine stuff, Christ still yet wen go mahke fo us - Fo da Rome Peopo 5:8
25 Apr 2005
Mouths of babes
19:25 Cameron, apparently, is Sophie's boyfriend. They're going to get married because they make each other laugh.
You know, there are lot worse reasons.
25 Apr 2005
The big ship sailed . . .
21:47 There was a wooden deck-type chair in the house when we arrived. It was a bit knackered to be honest, and rotten in places and generally falling apart. On Friday evening I started chopping it up to light the barbecue, and this was good, when I noticed a plaque, that read BUILT FROM TIMBER EX. HMS DEFIANCE 1860 - 1932, which made me stop and google. Turns out the Defiance, the tenth (possibly) of that name, was a second rate ship of the line that never saw action, being immediately obsoleted by the ironclads. She became the Royal Navy's Torpedo and Submarine Mining School for a number of years before being broken up.
So I have a lump of wood in my study with a not unreasonable history. I'm only glad that the chair wasn't made of a valorous ship, because then I'd have been somewhat dischuffed.
20 Apr 2005
Redemption
21:30 I meant to do some writing tonight. But I got sidetracked into adding to my Heretics Anonymous site; a little piece about the new Pope, and why it ultimately doesn't matter that he was in the Hitler Youth.
20 Apr 2005
Progeny
17:19 Sophie (5.5) came in just now and said, apropos nothing in particular, I finished my painting of irises that van Gogh did. Heh.
20 Apr 2005
l33t haxx0r 5k!ll5
09:55 One thing that particularly annoyed me was that Safari 1.3 broke feed:// handling, telling you that you had to upgrade to Tiger. Hmm, useful. Dave Hyatt admitted this was simply a bug, but it still annoyed me after having been through the whole RSS thing and changing the link up there on the right. For once I actually read the comments and guess what? There's an easy fix. Sandy McArthur writes that all you have to do is change the first instance of feed in the binary (/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari - make a backup first!) to something like xeed.
You should end up with something that looks like %@^@^@^@^@xeed^@^@^@^@feeds^@^@^@feedsearch. Do that and RSS works again. Woohoo.
PS. First time I've edited my .css file in 2 years. Whee!
18 Apr 2005
Emergent argh!
14:32 Incredibly frustrating. I scored 2222 on a not-quite-symmetrical starting grid.
14 Apr 2005
Houston, we have a slayer. . .
15:05 Thanks to the wonders of ucsm and zoara, I discovered that I share my birthday with Ritchie Blackmore (1945) and Sarah Michelle Gellar (1977)! And on this day in 1970 Apollo 13 had its famous problem! Hot damn, I think I just broke my coolometer!
13 Apr 2005
Syndicate this!
09:25 Those of you who are awake this morning may notice something new about this site. Look up there on the right. I've implemented an RSS feed. This is mainly due to Sanderson's nagging me, and I've been putting it off because as you both know this site is completely handrolled and I had the (mistaken, as it turned out) impression that you needed some kind of cgi or other wizardry (as part of a 'blogging' package, presumably) to make syndication work. Well, if you want to do it automagically you obviously do, but until I get around to writing my own perl to do it properly (because I'm a control freak, right?) to do it that's not going to happen.
On a whim I googled for roll your own RSS yesterday and the first hit was a Wiki site that referenced a very useful article by Stephen Downes. And five minutes after reading that I had a working syndication feed, unfortunately without the beer. Thanks and much kudos to Stephen. This got me thinking about RSS (etc.) and I realized that I really should get NetNewsWire to keep track of news, cartoons, etc., and of course to check out my own feed. And it's cool and froody and you should use it now.
Just for reference, the BioLOG's feed is at http://www.rg-d.com/BioLOG/biolog.xml. If you have NetNewsWire (Lite) or similar, and are running a proper OS (which reminds me, I also want a new Mac so I can get Tiger) then you can click on the BioRSS feed:// URI (here or up in the navbar) and it'll subscribe you automagically.
Clever, huh?
13 Apr 2005
Honey still for tea
09:15 Despite my love of poetry, I've never actually read Brooke's The Old Vicarage, Grantchester all the way through. I had cause to remedy that defect this morning, and literally laughed out loud. It's brilliant! The lines about Madingley on Christmas Eve and the twisted lips and twisted hearts of my neighbours are classic. Read it, read it now.
12 Apr 2005
Flightgear revisited
10:52 Let's just say I want a new Mac.
12 Apr 2005
Identity crisis
10:08 Given the success of ID cards in preventing a terrorist attack on the London Underground (and, incidentally, on a train in Madrid), the BOfH makes a serious point.
11 Apr 2005
Buy British
14:14 There's been a lot of crap from all sides of the argument, but I found an interesting snippet just now:
In Italy 50% of new cars sold are Fiats. This is despite the fact that many Fiats are not as good as their MG Rover equivalents. Only the new Panda is a truly good car, the Punto is v. poor, nowhere near what MGR produced in the 1990s. . . FIAT survive because of National Pride. Police Vehicle are Fiats, ministers drive Fiats, people buy Fiats.
This doesn't work in the UK because any sort of Patriotism is considered racist by many, and this is a disgrace. People have holidays for St Andrew's Day, and St Patrick's Day. . . but nothing is mentioned of St George. . .
So,
08 Apr 2005
Dagenham
11:21 Two stops past Barking.
08 Apr 2005
MG Rover
09:34 David Blunkett, Tony Blair, Charles Clarke, journalists, Patricia Hewitt. Good Lord, don't we have enough morons already?
06 Apr 2005
Fly me to the moon, and back
17:29 A little News in Brief article in last week's Nature that I've been meaning to bring to your attention could have been easily overlooked. I know some readers will be interested to see that NASA are following in the footsteps (jetwash?) of Ansari X and in conjunction with the Spaceward Foundation are offering a prize to anyone who can design and build a space elevator. Well, not exactly, but near enough.
06 Apr 2005
Fly me to the moon
09:13 Those of you who know me apart from the Bio- side of things will know that I have an interest in aviation and flight sims (FS). The contemporary FS scene on the Mac is pretty shaky, being limited to things like Warbirds III (which crashes every bloody time!), X-Plane (with its massive system requirements and completely idiotic user interface), Hornet OIF (which I haven't seen yet) and . . . that's about it. There's a fair amount of stuff that runs under OS9, including Falcon, Hornet in its various incarnations, the incredibly realistic and sophisticated Virtual Wings Pro, A10 Attack! and Cuba, and of course Warbirds/DoA. But I have to boot into 9 to run those, which really screws up my uptimes.
So when Paul Russell on comp.mac.games.flight-sim brought to our attention the existence of FlightGear my interest was piqued. It's multi-platform and open source, so I'm going to try to remember to give it a go, and see if my aging iMac can deal with it. Watch this airspace.
05 Apr 2005
Don't try this at home
11:08 'I accept no responsibility for the destruction of Earth or any other celestial body'. Thanks to Jim for the link, which itself points to all sorts of interesting places, including the Evil Overlord list. Wheee!
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