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I am writing this post at a small cafe while my car is being serviced. I tried a local Red Rooster food store, a KFC, and a McDonalds but none of them had a power socket I could use. This seems quite perverse as McDonalds advertises free wifi net access to entice customers, but no […]
Mark Glossop has written about the best designs for offices to increase productivity and attract qualified staff [1]. He makes a lot of really good points and cites the Joel on Software blog post about “Bionic Offices” [2], it’s sequel “Updated Offices” [3], and Joel’s “Field Guide to Developers” [4]. Interestingly Joel disclaims a connection […]
Jonathan Drori gave an interesting TED talk about the Millenium Seed Bank [1]. The potential for discovering new uses of plants for food, medicine, and construction is obvious, so it also seems obvious to me that we should preserve as many varieties of plant as possible to allow for future uses. As well as those […]
A reasonably common feature in Internet debates is that of one party claiming to not care about the issue. Statements such as “I haven’t got time to debate this” or “I’m not interested” are used to try and disclaim any interest in the topic. Such claims are silly and rather amusing.
Outside the Internet it […]
After great pain I’ve got tc working on some Linux routers. The difficulty with limiting an ADSL link is that the ADSL modem has significant buffers and the link between the Linux machine and the modem is significantly faster than the ADSL upstream channel. This means that the transmission speed needs to be artificially limited, […]
Don Marti has written an amusing and informative little post about the way that ill-educated people use phrases in print [1]. The one example that didn’t fit with the tone of his post was the use of “half mast” to refer to a flag on land, that one is used often enough (both in print […]
Russ Allbery has written about the hostile reactions of sci-fi fans toward the delay of a book release [1]. Russ makes some good points regarding the issue of whether paying $100 for some books entitles a reader to have the rest of the series written (in summary – no, the author owes the fans nothing). […]
I have just got a LG U990 “Viewty” mobile phone [1]. It’s a 3G phone and came free on the $29 monthly cap plan from “Three” (minimum monthly spend is $29 – but this is free if you use $29 per month). My previous plan was the $29 cap but had a minimum spend […]
An interesting opinion post in the NY Times describes the research on early education and how it can affect IQ [1]. Among other things children from poor families who are adopted into upper middle-class families tend to end up with higher IQ scores. The article notes that half the population in 1917 would be regarded […]
There is currently some discussion about a talk which used pornographic imagery and jokes to illustrate points about Ruby programming [1]. A similar event happened in 2006 here is the description of the event from the author – which includes an unreserved apology [2].
It seems to me that the current discussion focusing on what […]
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