Sunshine of your Blog
28 Mar 2003
Seals, schmeals
12:38 This is frankly, amazing. How do they do that? From the BBC's War Diaries:
Sir Galahad :: Owen Bennett Jones :: 1109GMT
The port of Umm Qasr is being de-mined by dolphins attached to cameras. Apparently they go down and see something suspicious, then come back and tell their handler there's something suspicious. He then gives them an explosive charge, they take it down, put it next to the suspicious object, come back, it blows up, and then they go down and look at it again!
It sounds implausible, but the Australians are using them, and everyone around here - including a very senior American commander - says it works. I hope to see it for myself when the Sir Galahad gets to Umm Qasr.
20 Mar 2003
Lt Col. Tim Collins ++
13:48 Without comment.
20 Mar 2003
Signs of the apocalypse
10:22 Spotted this spoof of the US DHS's warning signs. It really is rather good.
19 Mar 2003
A sad tale with a happy ending
19:20 Along the lines of yesterday's rant, I posted the following to uk.comp.sys.mac this morning. I'd thought I'd post it here for y'all to Enjoy!
Newsgroups: uk.comp.sys.mac
Subject: I HATE, LOATHE and DESPISE Internet Explorer
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 09:10:13 +0000
Argh! Argh! Argh!
So I'm building this website, to HTML 4.1 strict with CSS, and y'know, it's looking pretty good. And Safari and Mozilla display what I'd expect. But 90% of the world is using that piece of SHIT from Redmond in some incarnation or another, and I have to deal with it. So I have a couple of hacks in my CSS and I *think* I know what to look out for. I create a new CSS element and it turns out I don't. But hey, you know, I'm mature enough to cope with that and think of a way around it.
Eventually it gets to the stage where I think, all right, I need a copy of IE to test this out on. So I download it, apologizing to my iMac all the time for messying its circuits with www.microsoft.com, and get the IE 5.5 for Mac installer. For OS X. Yes, I know it comes with OS X but I deleted it, dint I?
I run the installer.
Warning bells ring when I see it's a VISE installer.
Then the sodding thing insists I quit every application before it can continue?
What, I say, WHAT??!
This is OS X for goodness' sake! It's the most advanced desktop operating system in the world and you want me to quit my dozen or more running applications - including a number of logged-in telnet sessions - just to install one lousy stinking web so-called browser?
I gave up in disgust.
The thought occurs though; Kate has Virtual PC. IE is built into WindozeWhateverShe'sRunning, I guess. I do not need to sully this beautiful, gorgeous machine with That Product. (Doesn't count on the iBook because it's in an emulation environment and can crap everywhere without causing concern. It's like having a built-in, self-emptying sandbox. What's more, the server logs won't register YAFIE hit.)
I'm so pleased.
18 Mar 2003
A voice crying in the wilderness
15:13 Just what in the name of all that's holy is it with that misbegotten stinking pile of foetid dingo's kidneys called PowerPoint?
Yeah, I'm ticked off. Shall I tell you why? I'll tell you why. I'm designing and publishing a church website (it's not 'live' yet, but should be Real Soon Now, so there are still a number of incomplete pages). One item to go on the site is our 'Good Parking Guide' - detailing where to park on Sundays without causing congestion and general unpleasantness. Someone in the church has produced a very nice leaflet, in the aforementioned MSPoFDK, and I'm in the process of adapting this for the site. Fortunately the guy Possesses Clue and sent - not just the original, because I do not have MSPoFDK at home - but also a couple of PNGs with all the information I need. I take the MSPoFDK file to work, just to see if I can do anything with it, and all the composite images go wonky. Damn. At least I can get at the text. Select that, and the text also moves around and overlaps. Damn' good job I don't need the formatting, eh?
Out of curiosity, I drop the file onto BBEdit. Oh my. I can see that the file was actually produced on a fairly modern Mac - probably running the same version of MSPoFDK as I am at work. So why, why oh why oh why, did the formatting get screwed up on this Mac? And that's not all - poking around I can see the pathname of each of the images he used to make the file, and not just the date and time stamp of the photograph that's in there, oh no, but the make and model of his digital camera, too! I mean, WHY??? What ever possessed $MAKER_OF_MSPoFDK to bloat their file formats with all that crap? (I know, they're the ones who are responsible for making HTML email the de facto standard.) Are they really watching the every move of the people who (attempt to) use their so-called 'products'?
Postscript: I wonder what Keynote makes of it. . .
17 Mar 2003
Preach it!
15:57 Marc Zeedar tells it like it is, or at least echoes my thoughts exactly on the capitalization of 'Mac'. And yes, this usage is all over the shop, especially on usenet. Grr, grr and grr once more.
14 Mar 2003
God of War
15:00 A thought-provoking piece from the BBC - How does a chaplain reconcile his faith with serving in the armed forces?. Langston to me sounds like a man with his head screwed on. Some excerpts:
My job as a padre […] is not to oil the wheels of war but to help the humanity caught up in it. We do […] not carry weapons
A British soldier saw this padre […] and realised that was what he was fighting for - to be able to live in peace, to not have to carry a weapon.
Just as happened in build-up to the Falklands war, the Army chapels in the Gulf are getting fuller and fuller.
Some […] might even ask me to pray for help with their map-reading - I can relate to that one
14 Mar 2003
Denial of service?
14:57 The concept of artificial brains brings a whole new meaning to the concept 'blue screen/spinning beachball of death'.
14 Mar 2003
Life, explained
14:53 A lighter note. It's so true!
14 Mar 2003
Dear God, no
14:49 Charles sent a load of links that need propagating, to do with torture, fries and the French. I would like to remind my reader that this is the USA in the 21st Century. I say, do they remember the Resistance?: Charles says What's next, a Hollywood remake of Jud Suss, starring the French as the Jews? and I have to agree with the sentiment.
12 Mar 2003
Boom today?
16:36 Nigel writes Thought it was all about biochemistry ... how wrong ... Boom.
12 Mar 2003
Is it me?
16:32 'So, we know you've got these weapons - because we, or at least the Germans and the French, sold them to you -, and we can't find them so that means you must be hiding them, but tell you what, you come out and admit you're hiding them so we've got an excuse to come and bomb the shit of you, OK?' Isn't that what Blaish is saying?
11 Mar 2003
Tied up
14:42 What does the headline Man wins tie sex ruling say to you? Whatever, the point is serious: draconian dress codes are discriminatory. Which is good news for people like me, who come to work, in, um, t-shirt and jeans and boat shoes. Anyway, it's still a Good Thing™ in my book - the guy works at a job centre, furrfu.
11 Mar 2003
Cats
12:50 All right, so I don't like cats. And I don't like advertising. But I do like this.
10 Mar 2003
Wigan
15:55 I've been looking for this historical snippet for some while now. Whee!
06 Mar 2003
Trade names
13:00 With thanks to Lionel, I have a new tag line. Biologizing for fun and profit since 1991.
06 Mar 2003
Dumb shmucks
12:50
Richard Wintle writes
Years ago there was a study in the American Journal of Human Genetics demonstrating with statistics that there is a genetic predisposition to attending medical school (i.e. families with at least one doctor as a parent had a statistically higher probability of having at least one child in medical school).
The reference is McGuffin & Huckle, Am J Hum Genet 1990 May;46(5):994-9, Simulation of Mendelism revisited: the recessive gene for attending medical school.
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