Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2007

  • Donut Robot 42

    One of the things that used to fascinate me as a small child was watching a doughnut-making machine go through its paces. It was in a local shop, and I would stand for long periods just marvelling at the mechanism and the process. When I was eight, I tried to do a deal with my parents that if I helped them during the summer season in their hotel, then I would be paid for my work in the form of a doughnut making-machine of my very own. Alas, they didn’t agree to the terms of the contract. So I never did get a machine of my own.
     
    However, such obstacles mean nothing to Derrick. Thanks to eBay, he now has a Donut Robot 42 of his very own.
     
    I’m insanely jealous.

  • mr. deity

    Thanks to Brent Rasmussen, over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable, I’ve now discovered mr. deity. It raises a smile or three with me, anyway, and Jesus sure is cute.

  • The IQ Bell Curve

    Here’s a fascinating article about an 11 year-old boy who happens to have an IQ of 170. He’s clearly much further to the right on the IQ bell curve than I am. Probably almost as far as it is possible to be…

  • Metadata Woes – Part II

    I mentioned some problems I was having with Microsoft’s Photo Info tool. I’m not the only one. The internal design of the tool appears to be a bit of a mess. Check out this thread, and then read the summary here. The phrase “don’t touch it with a ten foot bargepole” springs to mind.

    What appears to be even more dispiriting is that reading the Photo Info tool FAQ [Note: no longer available on the Microsoft site], I, and others far more knowledgable than I, get the distinct impression that the Microsoft developers are saying that they are right in their design, and the rest of the world is out of step.

    What’s the old joke? Q: How many Microsoft developers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None. Microsoft simply declares darkness to be the new standard.

    The thing that really concerns me is: how much of this mess of misinterpretation of metatdata standards is in the heart of Vista, rather than simply in an add-on tool? If it’s in Vista, we’ll probably never get it out, and we’ll just have to get used to darkness.

    Update 13 September 2007: It seems as though I owe Microsoft an apology. I’ve had some further communication with Robert Wlodarczyk of Microsoft, and we’ve got to the bottom of the issue. The problem lies, not with Photo Info, and the Windows Imaging Component, but with IDimager – the metadata tool I use. It produces an invalid XMP string. This is not picked up by any of the other metadata tools that I’ve used (Lightroom, Expression Media, PhotoShop Elements), but WIC is much stricter, and throws an error. The developer of IDimager will correct the issue, so everyone should be happy…

  • Picture of the Day

    This is probably the last time that I will mention comet McNaught (which I never did manage to see with the naked eye), but here’s a spectacular picture from Australia showing it caught between fireworks and lightning.

  • Inappropriate Professions

    The Angry Professor writes about a student, Hans. Read it, particularly the kicker at the end. Talk about the blind leading the blind…

  • Holiday With A Difference

    Pruned draws our attention to a somewhat bizarre holiday experience, and then riffs on how this might translate to other venues. Me, I thought Paintball was stupid. I’ll stay at home, thanks very much.

  • Punks In Niqabs

    Not Saussure illustrates his post on the recent Policy Exchange report on Islamism with a wonderful photograph – you must go and look at it. Punk rockers for the multicultural age. And while you’re there, read the rest of the post. As he says, the best thing to do is to keep a sense of perspective.

  • Office 2007

    I’ve been looking at the various versions of Microsoft’s Office 2007, trying to decide whether I can really justify an upgrade. I use Office 2003 Professional at the moment, but to upgrade to the 2007 equivalent would set me back a whopping 280 quid or 420 euros. And then I have three machines to upgrade. Frankly, that’s horrendous.
     
    But then I noticed something interesting about the Office 2007 Home and Student version. If you read the fine print of the license, it can be installed on up to three PCs (or licensed devices, as Microsoft’s lawyers want to call them). That then becomes about 100 quid or 150 euros to give a basic set of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote on the three machines. That, I think, can be justified.
     
    It’s interesting that this ability to install on up to three devices in the home doesn’t seem to be much trumpeted about – I couldn’t find any mention of it on the main Microsoft pages for the Home and Student version.
     
    OK, I don’t get Outlook 2007 in this version (Microsoft for some reason have substituted OneNote in its place), but I only use that on one machine, and I can soldier on with Outlook 2003 quite happily – I don’t think that Outlook 2007 is frankly much of an advance, certainly in my non-Exchange environment.
     
    If I subsequently move across to Windows Vista on that machine, then I can consider moving from Outlook 2003 with the Windows Mail and Windows Calendar applications that come with Vista. Although I’ve already discovered that Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to do that. There are no import and export functions covering that scenario. I will have to transfer all my contact information one by one – and even then the fields in Vista’s Contact Manager are not fully compatible with Outlook contacts, so I’ll have to re-create some information. It’s a similar story for the Outlook Calendar entries – I have to move them across one by one. Update: I found out how to do this; but the Contacts export still eludes me. Yet more evidence, if any was needed, that Microsoft product groups live in their own little worlds. 

  • The Sun in the Sky

    This is an excellent animation showing how the sun apparently moves through the sky during the changing seasons.
     
    (hat tip to Alun)

  • The Grand Unified Theory

    Someone is thinking… I just hope that, indeed, 2000 years from now someone will be making fun of us… Then it will have been all worth while…
     
    (hat tip to Pharyngula)

  • The French Dalek

    I’m sorry, but this is simply brilliant. Roger, this is for you…
     
     

  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali

    There’s an interview with Hirsi Ali in today’s Observer. It’s worth reading.

  • Clutter

    Another quiz. I seem to have absorbed more than is strictly relevant. Well, let me rephrase that. I treat it as having as much relevance as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Interesting as folklore, but unlikely to be strictly accurate.
     
    You know the Bible 92%!

     

    Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses – you know it all! You are fantastic!

    Ultimate Bible Quiz
    Create MySpace Quizzes

     

  • What’s Sauce For The Goose…

    Justin, over at Chicken Yoghurt, points out that New Labour only gets steamed up about dawn raids in certain cases… But somehow, unlike Justin, I don’t think that it will teach the people concerned to have a little humility – not when Tony clearly doesn’t understand it himself. 

  • The Exponential Function

    And in a related post to the maths underlying the report on global warming, here’s Dr. Albert Bartlett talking about Arithmetic, Population and Energy. As he says: I hope to be able to convince you that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

  • To Hell In A Handcart

    So, the first volume of the fourth IPCC assessment report has been published. And it doesn’t make for comfortable reading. As Oliver Burkeman nicely puts it:
    This is how the world ends: not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with a PowerPoint presentation. 
    It’s also sobering to learn that bribes of up to $10,000 each were offered to scientists to undermine the findings of the report. Frankly, I’m not confident that sufficient political action will be taken to head off even the worst case scenario of the report. Already, the US Administration is pulling back. In a way, I’m rather grateful that I won’t live to see the changes beyond the initial stages, but I do fear for what succeeding generations are going to have to face.

  • The Race Is On

    There’s been a project called the Knowledge Web going on for some time now. It’s a project driven by the James Burke Institute. All very worthy, but I can’t help feeling it’s doomed to fail. It seems to me that it is trying to put in place a semantic web of connections between knowledge facts. And it is doing this by starting from ground zero, and building up.
     
    This may turn out to be its failure.
     
    There is already a large collection of knowledge facts. It’s called Wikipedia. And what if there were a way of placing a semantic web over this that would be easily navigable? Is that not the same as what the Knowledge Web claims to be trying to do? If it is, then the Wikipedia Explorer may be something that has just overtaken the Knowledge Web with one bound. Standing on the shoulders of giants is usually more efficient than building everything from scratch.

  • A Deep Respect

    Once again, Tony Blair displays why it is that he deserves no respect. In an interview today he stated: 
    He had "a deep respect for the British people and it’s been an honour and privilege to lead them".
    Er, Tony, a true man of the people would have said "it’s been an honour and privilege to serve them". That’s what my father, a member of the Manx parliament, would have said. You have merely confirmed how wrong I was to put my trust in you.

  • Pomposity Pricked

    I mentioned a few days ago that I had read an attack by Pascal Bruckner on Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, whom he accused in turn of attacking Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I said at the time that I found Bruckner’s piece shrill and over the top.
     
    Well, via the editor of the New Humanist’s blog, I learn that Buruma and Garton Ash have both replied. And frankly, their replies confirm my original impression that Bruckner is a bit of a wanker. Well, quelle surprise…