Robert Synnott

Telegraph blogger being particularly absurd

2009-11-29T20:13:00.001Z

Here's a Telegraph blog entry on the whole Climategate (the publishing of some stolen emails and other documents on climate change, which can be interpreted as implying a conspiracy if taken out of context) thing. A wonderful, wonderful, very special quote from the article:

Here’s a blog entry by Robin Horbury from Biased BBC. Most believers in AGW (who I accept include the majority of scientists in this field) acknowledge the significance of the Climategate scandal, breaking as it has on the eve of the Copenhagen summit.

Emphasis mine. ('AGW' is an acronym, generally used by climate changed deniers, for Anthropogenic Global Warming).

So these people acknowledge that actual scientists generally accept human-influenced global warming! Grudgingly, but still. So what's their excuse now? "Oh, well, real scientists accept it, but it confuses people who write angry notes in BBC Have Your Say, so it must be part of an evil conspiracy!"?

Stephen Fry Podcasts coming true!

2009-11-28T23:13:00.001Z

In May 2009, Stephen Fry released the first of a series of podcasts, comprising an audio book, a work of fiction. Amongst other things, he mentioned a visit to a cocktail tea-shop, where he had various tea-based cocktails.

In November 2009, A A Gill, noted hilarious restaurant reviewer, reviewed a new restaurant. Here is an extract from that review:

The barman mixed me the best nonalcoholic cocktail I’ve had. Normally, they’re hideously fruity Calpol concoctions. This one was based on green tea and lime.

Eeek! Stephen Fry is accurately predicting the latest stupid fads a few months in advance!

Oh dear, more recession humour

2009-11-28T17:52:00.001Z

From this cartoon:

Cocktail Tip

The alcohol content of your drinks should always match the unemployment rate. Use the effective unemployment rate if you want to get fucked-up.

We live in depressing times when you can have a decent drink based on the unemployment rate....

A Froggy Evening

2009-11-28T16:58:00.001Z

When I was a young child, it was foggy one day. We were near the sea, so we could hear fog-horns. My parents were talking about the fog, and I heard them as saying 'frog'. So I thought there were enormous frogs outside. This worried me for some time.

Anyway, it's extremely cold and foggy in Dublin at the moment; can barely see the next building. It's quite nice, really, but I'm glad I don't have to go anywhere...

Lying child-raping liars; Catholic Church's new innovations in lying

2009-11-26T22:13:00.001Z

Look at this ridiculous argument from the Catholic Church. They're talking about how they can lie with a clear conscience because they don't define their lying as lying. Lying bloody liars.

And look at the bloody cheek of them:

In May 1995, Cardinal Connell denied that diocesan funds were used in paying compensation to abuse victims. When it emerged on RTÉ in September that year that Ivan Payne was loaned €30,000 by the archdiocese to pay compensation to Mr Madden, Cardinal Connell still insisted this was not compensation by the archdiocese. He threatened to sue RTÉ, but did not do so.

I mean, for real, Cardinal Connell? Really? You threatened to sue them over reporting on your lies?

I'm sick of these people, and of the government's pathetic approach to them. Bring criminal charges against them where-ever possible, and confiscate all their assets to compensate victims.

I wonder is the lying about HIV in Africa another example of the Church's highly advanced non-lie-related lying techniques? We call it mental reservation, apparently.

Fucking amoral liars.

World Cup Qualifier Thingy

2009-11-22T18:22:00.001Z

Can everyone stop going on about this now, please? It's getting a bit boring.

Thanks in advance.

Ron Paul spotted writing in real proper newspaper

2009-11-19T01:30:00.001Z

Ron Paul, famed 'libertarian' (in America, a euphemism for 'fuck poor people'), beloved by the Internet stupid set, and most certainly not a homophobic racist, but simply doesn't feel it's the place of the US to tell its states not to be complete bigots about blacks and gays. How we all love Ron Paul.

Anyway, some idiot has allowed him to write an article in the Wall Street Journal. About how the Federal Reserve should be transparent.

This is not a good idea! Look, the only reason that the economy works at all is that we all prefer to believe that these banks and government bodies are vaguely competent, and are not just burning huge piles of money or whatever. Looking at what, exactly, the Federal Reserve might be doing sounds like asking for trouble.

The comments are as wonderful as one might expect; do you know that the Federal Reserve is a Marxist organisation? It's true! Highly sophisticated WSJ readers say so!

Jury Duty - the aftermath

2009-11-19T01:08:00.001Z

I just realised I never told you strange people who read this old nonsense what happened with my jury duty. So, went to central criminal court, was put on jury, as I was sitting down the defence said they didn't want me. How very dare they!

So not all that exciting in the end, then.

MacOS Accessibility System Settings a lesson in stunning hideousness

2009-11-19T01:02:00.001Z

So, I installed this nice tool which picks up on multi-touch gestures on my laptop's trackpad, for Apple trackpads are fancy and support multitouch. Now I can minimise windows simply through complex finger movements! Yay!

Anyway, this all works via pretending to be some sort of accessibility device, so to make it work at all one has to venture into the accessibility System Settings pane. Given that Apple is good at UI design, this will no doubt be a lovely, stunning-looking page, right?

Eeeek!

But, okay, it's easy to read. That's good, I suppose... I'm sure that the other tabs will be easy to read, too, right?

Er, no. What's going on here? Part of the pane is in huge text, part in normal. Maybe it's because the first one is the 'seeing' section; MacOS users may either have sight problems or have difficulty pressing more than one key at a time, but not both.

Well, anyway, I'm sure that the subsections of the 'seeing' tab are also easy to read, right?

Argh! THIS MAKES NO SENSE. Stupid accessibility panel.

Over £1 billion profit a year? Nah, you only need a working CMS at the £5 billion mark

2009-11-19T00:53:00.001Z

Marks and Spencer is a vast retailing company, which sells uninspiring clothes and nice food. Hundreds of stores, vast profits, and so on. You might expect that such a big company would take some care over their website. And you'd be wrong! In fact, they have revealed lots of old crap which is presumably meant to be internal testing stuff there!

Here is its 'Lunch to Go' web page, linked off the front page of the site. Now, look at the side bar.

Looks reasonable, right? Nothing out of the ordinary?

Okay, things are getting weirder. 'The Lions'? Not sure what it's meant to mean, but it's a broken link. 'Site Stripe - DO NOT DELETE'? Erm, okay... URL1 through 10? Facebook T&C's? Actually, this one is a real page, indicating that M&S may have a Facebook game or something; a terrifying prospect. 'Our Favourites Page 1'? '125', suprisingly, is a real page.

Colin and Delia. Both broken links; I half-expected Delia to be something to do with the chef. myunusualfriends?! Is M&S a niche dating site or something, now?

Yeah, more weirdness. Testing Flash?

Really. Does no-one who works there ever look at this site?

Soviet space programme; now 30% bleaker

2009-11-11T01:04:00.001Z

From an article on the development of the Soviet Energia rocket:

In the 1960's Glushko had favored use of toxic but storable chemical propellants in launch vehicles and had fought bitterly against Korolev over the issue. It is surprising that he now accepted use of Lox/Kerosene. But Korolev was dead, and the N1 a failure. Glushko's position had been vindicated, perhaps he now had to agree objectively that use of the expensive and toxic propellants in a launch vehicle of this size was not rational.

So remember, when your rival dies and then his project fails due to you being awkward and refusing to design appropriate engines, that's vindication.

The weird and wacky world of nuclear vehicles

2009-11-08T19:56:00.001Z

Can you name a nuclear powered vehicle? Now, most people asked this would be aware that a lot of military submarines are nuclear powered; most Russian, French and British, and all American submarines, are. Some might also know that there are nuclear aircraft carriers; American and French carriers are nuclear. A few might be aware of smaller nuclear naval ships; the US has nuclear cruisers and the odd destroyer, and Russia has a few enormous nuclear-powered missile cruisers. But this is just scraping the iceberg of the world of nuclear vehicles.

This is a nuclear ship which scrapes icebergs! It's the NS 50 лет Победы, or NS 50 Years Since Victory. As it was launched two years ago, we may assume that the Soviet Union had some great military victory that they didn't tell us about in 1957. Really, if course, the name is wrong due to bad timing; it was meant to launch in 1995. But there are about ten of these things in circulation; they're used for clearing paths for normal ships through Arctic ice, and increasingly also for tourist excursions to the North Pole. Yes, it can sail to the North Pole.

Then there are the nuclear merchant vessels. These have generally been less successful than nuclear icebreakers and naval vessels; icebreakers use vast amounts of energy (the Arktika class icebreakers produce more energy than the largest of cruise ships or oil tankers) and submarines are expected to operate autonomously for long periods of time. Neither of these apply to standard merchant vessels, so the nuclear reactor has historically been rather expensive compared to normal propulsion.

Anyway, the above is the NS Savannah, built in 1962, with a reactor from Babcock and Wilcox of Three Mile Island fame, as a showcase for 'Atoms for Peace'. It operated for ten years. There was also the Otto Hahn, a German ship which operated for eleven years, and the Mutsu, a Japanese ship which operated for twenty years. Finally, there's the Sevmorput, a Russian ship which is the only one till operating. It's a bit of a marginal case; it's used in the Arctic and has some icebreaking abilities.

This is a nuclear aircraft! It's a (or indeed the; only one was ever built) Tupolev Tu-119, a bomber. The bump on the top is the reactor, protruding a bit. It's unclear whether it ever flew under nuclear power, though it certainly flew with the engines operating. Its flight time was limited only by the radiation dose received by the crew. The US had something similar, the Convair X-6; again, it was tested in flight. All of this madness was obsoleted before it was ever finished, when the Soviet Union and then the US demonstrated ICBMs in the 50s.

Nuclear ramjet cruise missle! This was an unshielded nuclear-heated ramjet actually ground-tested by the US under Project Pluto. Temperature margins were very tight; it operated at about 100 degrees below the ignition points of some components. It produced over 500 MW thermal power, at the time easily the largest reactor ever operated. This is one of the few crazy vehicles not also developed on the Soviet side; the Soviet Union was then ahead in ICBM technology, and Project Pluto was abandoned when US ICBM technology made it obsolete around the time of the ground-testing.

Project Orion, a spacecraft propelled by actual nuclear explosions. It was developed in the 50s, and conventional explosion tests with scaled-down models were made. The largest variant considered would have been capable of launching over a million tonnes into orbit at once, and it remains the only vaguely plausible starship technology which has been developed at all thus far; it could potentially achieve a speed of up to 10% the speed of light. The Russians also developed something along the same lines to some extent; all such projects were killed off by test-ban treaties.

NERVA, a nuclear thermal rocket. The large bulge in the middle is a reactor; the spheres are hydrogen tanks. The hydrogen would be super-heated by the reactor, and expelled. It operated at about 1500MW thermal, and would in principle have had about twice the thrust of an equivalent chemical rocket, though in ground tests it only ever achieved about 40% of this. The immediate goal was to use it as an upper stage for an enhanced Saturn V rocket, and so it died with the scrapping of all Saturn/Apollo enhancement projects. The Soviet RD-0410 was an equivalent, and a similar role was envisaged for it. Both countries effectively dropped nuclear thermal rockets in favour of nuclear-electric.

This is a Soviet US/A active radar surveillance satellite. The black bit is a nuclear reactor (not a radiothermic generator, a device which produces electricity through decay of Pu-240 or other isotope used in interplanetary probes). At end of life, the reactor was boosted into a high storage orbit. In one case, this failed, and the reactor hit Canada, causing the Canadian government to claim compensation from the USSR. About thirty were launched from 1970 to 1988. Some apparently had ion drives for station keeping, making them nuclear-electric propelled. The US also launched one reactor, SNAP10A.

Work on nuclear reactors for space never ended; after the fall of the Soviet Union the US acquired plans and samples of TOPAZ II, a larger version of the reactor used aboard US/A. NASA's Project Prometheus works on space reactors, though its budget was decimated when NASA had to abandon a lot of long-term R&D to pay for Project Constellation (the new manned spacecraft). The cancelled JIMO Jupiter probe would have used a reactor, allowing it to use ion engines for powered flight.

The Ford Nucleon, a concept car presented by Ford in 1958. The space at the back would hold a reactor. At the time, small enough reactors didn't exist, of course, and while they now do (TOPAZ I reactors would fit) shielding and so on would still be an insurmountable problem. The only nuclear cars we're likely to see are electric cars charged with nuclear power.

A subterrene, an underground vehicle which melts its way through rock! The picture is of a conventionally powered model, but nuclear models were tested in the US and Soviet Union. The idea may seem ridiculous, but the idea is being revisited for space exploration applications, along with the related cryobot, a similar device to melt through ice on icy moons.

And that's it. Take a vehicle type, and the chances are that someone has at least considered nuclear power for it. Except for bicycles, obviously.

Peculiar Pictures, early November edition

2009-11-08T18:33:00.001Z

As you know, from time to time I like to post some stupid pictures, complete with snide comments. Here are some I've collected over the last month or so. So, here we go...

Argh! I can sort of see why Apple's sync thingy has this dialog for syncing contacts, but for syncing notes? Really? The thing is, I'd need to have at least 20 notes (which would be ridiculous) before I'd even be allowed modify one without getting this stupid message next time I sync.

The logo of Russia's space administration, apparently ripped off from Star Trek. This is the real logo, by the way.

And here is one of their communication devices. No, it's really the 'Inventor of the Soviet Union' medal. Introduced in 1981, so that gives you an idea of in which direction the rip-off was. Quite frankly, I'm surprised that Paramount hasn't sued. Here's a space programme medal:

Note that it is given for riding the space airliner over Pangea.

And this is a medal given to test pilots. Quite frankly anyone who flew the golden bomber with the insane tailfins over the enormous flying shards of glass, as depicted, deserves a medal.

A meta one here; I just noticed that MacOS seems to have some sort of shared webcache thing, under '/var/folders'. Right. Wonderfully descriptive naming, there.

A filler image in one of Apple iWeb's default templates. Unpleasant visual effect, really; the guy second from the left, in particular, looks quite disturbing with that reflection.

Wonderfully appropriate YouTube advertising.

Wonderfully bizarre YouTube advertising; note the URL. This is a US government website about Mars, for some reason.

More weird and horrifying advertising from the US government.

Disgusting advertising from a US health insurance company. Ugh. Possibly placed by Obama to discredit them.

This ad is bothersome in many ways! 1 rule to a flat Stomach: Obey... Eek! And I think you lost a tad more than 24 pounds, dear.

Interwebs fast! Yay!

Goat topiary! Ahahahah!

From an Apple-hosted blog. Why am I doing this? How philosophical of you, Mr. iWeb!

Jury Duty!

2009-11-01T00:43:00.001Z

So, I have jury duty this week, in the Central Criminal Court. The way it works, apparently, is that I go in every day, and if they don't need me by 12 or so, I can go back to work. In ways, I'm looking forward to it; it could at least potentially be reasonably interesting, especially given that it's the Central Criminal, rather than some regional, court.

On the other hand, it's horrible timing with work; to an extent, any time would be, but next week is unusually bad. This is the trouble with working for a small company; you're not as replaceable when you have to be missing for a bit.

Still, at least it's not some regional court in the middle of nowhere, with no doubt terribly boring cases...

Unsettling automated objections

2009-10-26T23:01:00.001Z

Apple's built-in grammar checker:

Oh, erm, well, fine then, I suppose...

Bizarre cake-oriented quote of the day

2009-10-26T23:00:00.001Z

From The Apprentice (the Irish one):

I don't mind being fired; I've got fingers in lots of cakes.

Fingers in lots of cakes! A chocolate sponge? A swiss roll? A ginger cake? It sounds awfully messy, and altogether rather unpleasant. Are these full cakes, or just slices?

Anyway, the phrase didn't exist on the Internet at all, before; now it is. Yay!

Microsoft appeals to the stupid and proud of it demographic

2009-10-26T18:53:00.001Z

I just saw his rather amazing ad for Windows 7:

Now, make no mistake. While large software corporations do sometimes incorporate feature suggestions from users, they are not in the habit of making major user interface decisions based on the diktats of random idiots in London taxis. Really, they are not.

This has been a common theme in Microsoft's advertising of late; something along the lines of "Sure, those Macs are better, but they're designed by fancy elitist experts with decades of experience, and used by clever designers and people. Isn't that intimidating! Windows is designed for normal people, by normal people!" I can imagine it actually works rather well, but it's a little off-putting to me.

Wasn't that task bar window preview thing in Vista, anyway?

Argh! Stupid bloody NTL!

2009-10-25T23:45:00.001Z

So, I mentioned yesterday that UPC (nee NTL and Chorus) were doing a terrible DNS hijack thing. That's annoying and rude, but doesn't have that much impact on most people.

What's considerably worse is when their blood DNS servers go down, as has happened now. I had to locate some alternatives on the Interwebs, using Edge (don't get 3G in apartment) on an iPhone. Bah. Idiots.

Really, if you must fuck with your DNS servers, please ensure that you know what you're doing. As a minor plus, Internet is lovely and fast now, presumably because none of their users can use it because their DNS is not working. Argh.

A mini-review of MarsEdit, a desktop blogging tool

2009-10-25T01:45:00.001Z

Generally, I write blog posts using one of Blogger's web-based editors. It actually has two; there's the 'new', beta, Blogger In Draft one, which has only been the same for the last few years:

And there's the older standard Blogger one, which has been there since around about the invention of, say, the cat:

These are, well, okay, but they have their quirks. First and foremost, uploading images is a serious pain, and tends to arbitrarily go horribly wrong. Although there are shortcut keys for bold and italic text, these are, on a Mac, non-standard (CTRL-B, CTRL-I), and sometimes just fail to work entirely. If you paste something from another site, weird things will happen; it'll try to drag along its existing formatting, which may or may not work properly. Too clever by half.

So, I decided to give a desktop blogging tool a go. It's called MarsEdit, is available for the Mac only, which I can live with as I only ever write blog posts on the Mac, and costs 30 dollars, with a 30 day free period. Here it is:

It's relatively simple, but really does seem to work well. All the usual suspects are supported; Wordpress, LiveJournal, Movable Type, TypePad, Tumblr, and of course my own beloved Blogger. It's not WYSIWYG, which is quite frankly probably a good thing; WYSIWYG HTML editing has never, despite the best intention of editor vendors, worked that well. It does, however, have keyboard shortcuts for basic HTML formatting, which work very nicely. This strikes me as a decent compromise.

Possibly the nicest bit is the upload facility. To put an image in your post, you just drag it in, and this comes up:

This is far more convenient than the Blogger upload thing, and just pops some HTML into your post; it doesn't make a weird sorta-movable image box thingy, like the Blogger upload does.

It's also, for some reason, just really nice to write posts in a desktop application; it feels far less irritating than using the Blogger webapp.

The preview tool is also rather nice; you get a live preview of your post in another window. You can give it the HTML template from your blog, and it shows you what your post will look like as you type it. Very nice.

There's offline draft saving, and support for tagging/categories, and support for that icky 'enclosure' thing that makes podcasts work, and, well, that's really about it. It's simple, but somehow very good. I couldn't tell you exactly why I like it so much, but I do.

Highly recommended, and I'm pretty sure I'll end up paying the 30 dollars (roughly seven euro cents at today's rate of exchange) when my trial period runs out. This is irritating; the only time I've spent money on software lately was for a few bits and pieces to make my (Windows) work machine a little more tolerable, but it can't be helped.

Eek! UPC doing awful DNS hijack thing!

2009-10-24T20:24:00.001+01:00

UPC (formerly NTL Ireland and Chorus) is an Irish cable TV and Internet access provider. They're generally okay. They've just done something slightly irritating, though; if you ask their DNS to resolve an non-existent hostname, it does not, as you might reasonably expect, tell you it doesn't exist; instead, it says it does exist, and resolves it to a UPC search page, searching through Google or something for the domain name, with ads and so on.

Observe. A normal DNS server dealing with a non-existent domain:

UPC's DNS server dealing with a non-existent domain:

... And the awful consequences:

This isn't just irritating money-grubbing on UPC's part; it also has the potential to be a real problem for some people. In particular, some VPN systems use various DNS tricks to figure out when they should activate; this could break them. Various other issues exist. There is also no clear way to turn it off. Ugh, what's next, inserting their own ads into webpages viewed? One US ISP actually does this.

Fun with Cross-platform Interfaces

2009-10-24T20:11:00.001+01:00

One interesting, really relatively recent development in computer software is the rise of the large, widely-used, truly cross-platform GUI application.

There are a few approaches to writing these. The first, and certainly historically most common, is to separate application logic from presentation, and build separate interfaces in each client operating system, sharing application logic. This is how things like Photoshop have been built, although Adobe seems to be trying to replace the existing native UI used in Photoshop, Flash et al with some sort of awful Flash-based thing; as you can see here, results are, at best, mixed. The advantage of this approach (separate interface development, not the scary Flash thing) is that you tend to get something which looks like it fits in; the big disadvantage is that it's an extremely expensive, labour-intensive task.

Then, there's the approach, notably favoured by Microsoft, of writing completely separate applications sharing branding, file format compatibility and some application logic on each platform. IE for Mac, for instance, used a completely different rendering engine to IE for Windows, and each had features that the other didn't; the same sort of thing has happened with Office applications. Microsoft Entourage is a particularly weird case; it's part of Office, like Outlook, and serves the same purpose as Outlook, but is branded differently and looks different.

Emulation and simulation is another approach. This is really common for games; most commercial games for MacOS and Linux are actually Windows games, with DirectX calls being translated by WINE or a piece of software derived from WINE. This works quite well for games; it works less well for normal desktop applications, where it has to deal with translating Win32 UI elements into something workable. Normally this is accomplished by just drawing fake Win32 UI elements, as using native widgets would cause sizing problems. This approach is rare for generally distributed commercial apps (an example is Google Picasa), though it's quite common for in-house apps. A related but not identical case is the use of X11 on platforms where X11 is not normally used; some development tools have MacOS versions which just use X11. This generally creates usability problems.

The final category, and the one which is currently seeing most growth, is the use of cross-platform UI APIs. When writing a desktop application with one of these, you don't make Win32 calls, or calls to the MacOS UI kit, or whatever, at all; you use a cross-platform UI API, which will figure out how to display things on each platform. Success rates are variable.

Here's a screenshot from the Eclipse IDE, which uses the SWT Java cross-platform UI library.

It looks really quite MacOS like. This is partly because SWT was really created primarily as a UI toolkit for Eclipse initially, and it really is quite polished at this point. Here's one from NetBeans, another Java IDE. This uses Swing, Sun's Java cross-platform UI toolkit.

Doesn't look too bad, does it? Let's look at another.

Not bad as such, but certainly unusual. You won't often see the little icons in MacOS apps, though they're common on Windows. Eclipse also has these, but to my mind they look a little less obtrusive; they're not out in the empty area on the left:

This one is very weird; note the incorrectly-aligned 'Help' thing at the bottom:

This is just bad UI design, and I think it does this on Windows too; it should really change the size of the options window rather than doing some mad internal scrollbar thing, though, and in any case this is an options pane for a built-in plugin and should really fit properly in the first place:

And finally, HORRIBLE FONT MADNESS. This just looks terribly broken, and I don't understand why they've deliberately changed the default font to an unpleasant Serif one for this window, but no-where else:

Now, to be clear, none of this is a huge issue. These applications are perfectly usable, if a bit funny-looking. However, I think it is something that developers will have to concentrate on more and more as Windows' absolute dominance on the desktop wanes, and Linux and MacOS versions of software become more relevant. It'll be interesting to see where all this goes.

Poor little Nick, the tubbiest Fascist!

2009-10-23T00:31:00.000+01:00

The nasty, cruel leftist BBC was mean to him! Horrible David Dimbleby taunted him with his hideous green tie and his Bic pen! Foreign, immigrant Bic pen, from France! Nick writes only with quill feathers plucked from PROPER BRITISH SWANS! Terrible people in the audience asking difficult questions, some of them not even white! Nothing for him to do but to go back to the survivalist compound and have a good wank in front of the lifesize portrait of Adolf!

Really, it was a quite fascinating show. I was vaguely against it to start with, on the basis that he's the head of an illegal organisation (or was; they have supposedly bowed to official pressure and will allow the awful foreigners to defile the BNP meeting halls with their funny clothes and their strange cooking, speaking foreign). But he has destroyed any credibility he might have had. He was really, really terrible. His only comment on his Holocaust denial was that he wasn't allowed talk about it due to imaginary EU laws. He tried to deny giving a speech to some American Neo-Nazis, with a head of the KKK, about how he's going to weasel his way into credibility, and one day will be able to say "every single one must go", then gave in and said, in his defence, that it was a mostly non-violent branch of the KKK.

And then he had a good rant about the gays, the awful, awful gays, who should either be wiped out or be allowed do what they do in private as long as they don't mention their existence, depending on whether the Thatcher or the Hitler part of his split personality was showing. Nice to know he (probably) doesn't necessarily want to send us to the camps.

Really, it was an amazing show, and I would recommend that you watch it if you possibly can. Not only was he unmasked as a disgusting racist (as if any more unmasking was needed), he was unmasked as a rather dim and ineffectual disgusting racist.

Oh, also, according to Dimbleby, more information on Griffin can be found on YouTube. I look forward to the inevitable Downfall parody; until then, this will have to do.

The hybrid lightbulb

2009-10-21T01:16:00.001+01:00

As you will no doubt have gathered by now, the evil EU has demanded that we switch to using CFL lightbulbs. People are outraged, of course; while increases in police powers, software patents and so forth can get through without anyone really knowing or caring, the government had better not mess with our beloved lightbulbs. I'm reasonably certain that more fuss was made over the CFLs than has been made over NAMA.

Why are people so annoyed? First, some people don't like to be told to do sensible things. They can take responsibility for their own actions, and it is none of the government's business if they want to drive their SUV at 200 miles an hour while smoking a cigar, drinking gin, talking on a mobile phone and updating their Facebook. This is their right as an irritating person, and it is their duty as an irritating person to lecture everyone else on how the nasty politicians are taking away their freedoms. There is nothing to be done for these people. Except possibly a government ban on suicide.

Then there are those who fear that if they drop a CFL their house will be the next Chernobyl. For whatever reason, mercury is the scary substance de jour; any amount of mercury, no matter how small (as long as it's not from fish, which may safely be ignored unless you're really paranoid), will immediately kill you and/or give your children autism.

The third group have more of a point. These are the people who are concerned by the way CFLs switch on. CFLs don't come on like those large old fluorescent tubes, with lots of flickering and clicking followed by full light; rather, they start off dim and smoothly get brighter. This is actually pretty unpleasant if you're used to normal lightbulbs.

So, here is my idea. Take a CFL. Add a small, powerful incandescent bulb, or LED bulb, or something else with a low lifespan and/or high power consumption. When the whole assembly is first turned on, both will come on such that the sum total output is equivalent to the light output of a 100W incandescent. As the CFL bit heats up, the other bit dims, until eventually it's operating on CFL alone. Light output doesn't change over the whole process. It might be tricky to match colours acceptably, and it'd add some cost, but I think people would pay a premium; the current setup really is quite annoying. I'm actually very surprised no-one has done this yet, and I can't find much reference to anyone even suggesting it.

Not a good week for Microsoft

2009-10-11T19:00:00.000+01:00

Beyond embarrassing possible leaks about less-than-stellar Pink project (Microsoft's own smartphone) progress, and rumours of Windows Mobile 7 being delayed til the end of next year, well, Microsoft has apparently managed to lose most or all user data for their T-Mobile Sidekick service. Sidekicks are a type of early smart-phone which store all user data on the server-side; client-side storage is transient. So millions of people have lost all their contacts, emails, text messages, etc. Predictably, they aren't happy.

Given that Microsoft is currently trying to get into the 'Cloud' data service and storage market, with a similar sync product for Windows Mobile 6.5, Office Live and so forth, well, this isn't going to help their image in that space. It will be most interesting to see what happens to their stock price tomorrow...

Wireless! On a bus!

2009-10-07T09:54:00.000+01:00

I'm writing this from a bus to Dundalk (work trip). There is wireless. Wonders of the modern age, eh?