Year: 2006
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Birthday Girl
Pavlov’s Cat looks sidewise at the world and comes up with this somewhat uncomfortable thought. -
Tasteless, Crass, Stupid and Cheap…
… that is PZ Myers’ consummate summation of Left Behind: Eternal Forces – a new video game. The objective of the game is to convert or kill (with extreme prejudice) Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of Church and State. Charming. -
Live Long Enough…
…to find the right one. The Sugar Babe Love Campaign – a safe-sex cartoon about growing up and finding true love. Frissons galore. Hat tip to Inquietudes for the link.Update: apparently, the animation is by Wilfred Brimo, and part of a French AIDS-awareness campaign. Brimo did a similar cartoon for the same campaign in 2005, where many of the ideas first came through. I love the scene in the ski lodge, with the polar bear getting in on the act… -
Which Country Should You Be Living In?
According to this quiz, I should be in:Which country should you REALLY be living in? Russia
A vast terrain filled with beautiful scenery and interesting characters. You don’t trust the world. You feel they are always up to no good. Which is why you’d make a great Russian. You want life to be simple and have no desire for riches, fame or wealth – and thats the only way your government would have it.
Click Here to Take This Quiz
Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.Not quite the answer I was expecting… 🙂 And in view of Russia’s attitudes to gay people, somehow I don’t think I’ll be applying to move there anytime soon… -
Stripping the Enamel
I know that poking fun at Disneyworld is a soft target, but it gives me enormous satisfaction – particularly when it is done so satisfyingly as in Tim Adams’ column in The Observer today. There’s something about the place that I found creepy, while at the same time I confess that I did enjoy some of the rides. I think it’s the constant artificial cheeriness of the place that made me feel as though the enamel was being stripped from my teeth. -
And Lo, It Shall Come To Pass…
Sam Harris points out why the bible is a product of its time, and not a very good one at that. There were clearly no mathematicians involved… -
Cosmic View
I think I’ve mentioned Cosmic View by Kees Boeke before. There was a copy in my local library when I was growing up that I came across and was immediately intrigued by. The online version of the book is here.In similar vein – but with seemingly an infinite capacity to zoom in – here is the 10 ways interpretation of the same idea. Stunning.(hat tip to Neatorama) -
Who Is This Stanley Kurtz?
As he admits himself, he appears to have a bee in his bonnet about gay marriage. Frankly, he should just keep taking the tablets, because he appears not to be talking any sense whatsoever. I’ve categorised this post under "Society", but perhaps I should just define a new category: Wingnuttery. -
Windows Photo Gallery on Vista Beta 2
When the build 5308 of Windows Vista came out I took a look at the bundled Windows Photo Gallery application and was not too impressed. Now that beta 2 of Vista is out, I thought I’d look again to see what has changed in Windows Photo Gallery. As far as I can see, from my standpoint of wanting an application to manage image metadata, the answer appears to be: nothing.
Windows Photo Gallery does appear to expose the Keywords metadata of the legacy IPTC/IIM specification in image files. These are exposed as “Tags” in the Photo Gallery application. But nothing of the rest of the legacy specification appears to be supported, and nothing of IPTC Core seems to be supported. Well, OK, it’s still only beta, but it would have been nice to have seen a step or two forward being taken.
And while I’m being a grumpy old man, I might as well rant on about the way in which Microsoft have implemented searching by tags in Windows Photo Gallery. To my way of thinking, searching through a collection using multiple tags is an “AND” function. That is, if I search on a collection using the tags: “restaurant” and “London”, I would think that the result would be a set of images that contains only pictures of restaurants in London. Nope, not according to the good people in Microsoft. What I get is a huge set containing all pictures having the “London” tag and all pictures having the “restaurant” tag. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, <grumpy old man> bloody useless, you bunch of idiots </grumpy old man>. Lord knows, I’ve ranted on about Adobe developers in the past, but at least they managed to implement tag search as an “AND” function in the Organizer of PhotoShop Elements, as well as giving an effective “OR” function into the bargain.
Microsoft developers also seem to have a totally different brain pattern to me when it comes to selecting images by using the Rating criterion in Windows Photo Gallery. I would have thought that if I select the “three-star” rating, I would see all photos that have a “three-star” rating… Er, no, what I see is all photos that have a “three-star”, a “four-star” or a “five-star” rating. If I want to see just “three-star” photos, I have to explicity CNTRL-Click on the “four-star” and “five-star” rating. Now maybe it’s just me, but this seems totally counter-intuitive. I’ve spent 20 years with Windows saying that CNTRL-Click is used to first add additional objects to a selection. Now, Windows Photo Gallery is trying to tell me that it’s used to first subtract additional objects from a selection… I think I’m getting too old for this.
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What If…
… during World War II, the US military had decided to continue investing in Project X-Ray, instead of the Manhattan Project? Would the world have ended up any differently?
What was Project X-Ray? Here’s the entry in Wikipedia…
(hat tip to the always fascinating Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society for this)
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El Chaltén
Maciej Ceglowski, over at Idle Words, offers a fascinating slice of history about borders, Bailey’s and ice, illustrated with some glorious photographs. -
The End of the Hunt for HIV?
News comes today that scientists believe they have tracked down the original source of the HIV pandemic – two colonies of chimpanzees in Cameroon. Striking to think that a virus that originated there now infects over 40 million people worldwide. One hopes that the search for the cure will also produce results.Meanwhile, in related news, the power of delusion remains strong in some – but the sad fact is that it kills needlessly. -
The Joys of Software Support
This week’s Technobile column in the Guardian has Kieren McCarthy delivering a few well-aimed barbs at the so-called "support" offered by computer companies. He also takes some hefty swipes at the "support" forums inhabited by geeks who either dismiss queries with irrelevant opinion ("using Windows? What a loser, you should get a Mac") or who reply with technobabble that confuses the poor questioner even more.I have to say that sometimes I have found a workable reply to one of my questions in these forums, but often searches are fruitless. Part of that is down to the fact that I’m often to be found trying out beta software. And despite what some commenters have said here recently, I do understand that beta usually means bug-ridden. But when the bugs are so obvious, one sometimes wonders why the software isn’t called an alpha release…I’ll leave you with an example of a bug I came across yesterday when I decided to try out the RSS capabilities in the beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 7. I imported my list of RSS feeds from my trusty news aggregator (RSS Bandit) into IE7, and sure enough, all the feeds were present and correct. Well, my hierarchy of categories was lost and I just had an alphabetical list of 300 feeds – not very useful (hint to the IE7 developers). But when I tried to access any of the feeds, I got a file download security warning, so in effect, the RSS capability is useless. I see I’m not the only one who has this problem, but so far I haven’t found a solution to this. Oh well, time to delete the feeds (which I have to do one by one, on 300 feeds – another hint to the IE7 developers: batch is your friend). Back to RSS Bandit… -
Microsoft: Open Mouth – Change Feet
Sometimes I think that Microsoft is its own worst enemy.Today, Microsoft has announced the availability of Beta 2 of Office 2007. So off I go to the web site to register and download the beta. First of all I get presented with a new file download manager- SmartSource – yet another one in a long line of download managers from Microsoft. This one uses the .NET version 1.1 framework. Er, excuse me, but Windows Vista comes with .NET version 2.0. So immediately, there is a problem.OK, so I finally get the software downloaded. And I manage to install Office 2007 Beta 2.But then the fun starts. The Beta insists on having a new (beta) version of Windows Desktop Search installed. OK, but after installation, I discover that my MSN Search Toolbar in Internet Explorer has been hosed. Sigh – did I really expect Microsoft product groups to talk to one another?OK, I then want to install the next beta from the Office 2007 suite. So I start up the SmartSource application again. What’s this? "The email address specified is invalid! Please contact customer support or try again."Er, no, my email address is perfectly valid – it’s your software that is a pile of fucking crap. Oh, and what’s that about "contact customer support"? You provide no bloody means of contacting your bloody customer support. Try again? I don’t think so. Linux is starting to look awfully attractive right now. -
Information Management in the Oil Industry
So, here I am, sitting at my PC and watching the Bill Gates keynote at this year’s WinHEC (yep, I know that I’m a sad case). And here’s Alan Nunns of Chevron, talking about information management in the oil industry. That brought back memories. One of the challenges the oil industry has is dealing with the torrent of information – for example, an oil refinery can generate up to a terabyte of data per day. Nunns was touting what Chevron and Microsoft had done together in information management and introducing a standardised desktop infrastructure for Chevron’s decision makers. Hmm, that reminds me of the sterling work done by folks such as David and Johan in my old company… -
Sita Sings the Blues
I’ve mentioned this charming animated series made by Nina Paley before. I’ve just found that she has released a fourth episode in the series – the Battle of Lanka. Highly stylised cartoon violence set to a jaunty tune – but don’ let that put you off. Take a look. -
“God Made The World…
… But the Dutch made The Netherlands". So runs a saying here in The Netherlands. For 500 years the Dutch have been engaged in reclaiming land from the sea. But now there is a sea-change, as it were. In the light of global warming and rising sea levels, the Dutch water engineers are preparing to give back land to the sea.There’s an article by Elizabeth Kolbert in today’s Observer that gives the background. Well worth reading. -
Hirsi Ali and the Crabs
My father used to tell a story – a Manx parable. He used to say that if you went to a fishing harbour in England, you’d see creels (fishermen’s baskets) full of crabs. Crabs would be sorted, with crabs of the same size put into each creel. Occasionally, you’d see a small crab laboriously struggle out of its creel, and try its best to get into a creel containing larger crabs. Nothing unusual in that, my father would say. However, he would continue, if you go to the harbour in Douglas, and look at the creels of Manx crabs, you’d notice something different. There would be the creel of little crabs, and yes, there would be a crab trying to pull itself out. The difference was that all the other little crabs would be doing their damndest to pull it back…I am reminded of that story when I look at the Hirsi Ali affair. The nastier side of the Dutch character is currently on display in many people and it is not a pleasant sight. This article by Okke Ornstein – the Stoning of Hirsi Ali describes the situation well. And Hirsi Ali’s own press release from yesterday is a dignified response to the recent sorry events.It seems to me that some people in Dutch society are confusing the letter of the law with the spirit of the law. They do not have the wisdom of Solomon, and would be all too willing to split a baby in two to follow the letter of the law. -
Fungal Madness
A recurring nightmare of mine is to realise that, bit by bit, the society around me is changing to become something that is dangerous to my very survival. Fortunately for me (at least so far), that scenario is thankfully relegated to my paranoid subconscious. When I wake in the morning, the sunlight can drive it away and I can relax.Unfortunately for many, it can literally be how daily life is to be experienced. Take, for example, Salam Pax’s latest post. I would find it terrifying to live in today’s Iraq.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 