Status-Q

Mike Zornek has produced a very nice screencast which introduces you to version control in general, and the Subversion system in particular.

My brother sent me a birthday card recently with a picture of a spider on it. Inside he had written:

Little Miss Muffet,
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And said, "What's a tuffet?"

If you thought the solving of Fermat's Last Theorem was a great achievement for British science, then how about this?

Professor John Brookfield of the University of Nottingham has answered the question of Which came first, the chicken or the egg?.

Ever wondered why your bags take so long to come through the baggage claim at Heathrow? Well, now we know!

I took this a couple of days ago while waiting for mine. The screen proudly announced that this carousel came with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Well, that's good to know.

Now come on, this must be a joke, surely? A high-frequency sound, audible only to teenagers, which keeps them away? It's an attractive idea...

Presumably it's audible to anybody younger than that as well, so if you're wondering why your baby is crying in the supermarket, or why your dog seems particularly restless outside, here's another possible reason!

Anyway, the teenagers are apparently getting their own back.

I think they're probably both hoaxes...

Tim Berners-Lee warns of the dangers of a two-tier internet.

The telecoms companies don't really have a leg to stand on here, I don't think. I've heard them complain that companies like Google and Skype are making lots of money from customers on their networks, and they're not getting a share of it. But they are, of course. The whole reason people want to buy their broadband services is that there are companies like Google and Skype out there.

And that's not counting the fact that those companies are already paying for their bandwidth at the other end. A recent estimate put YouTube's connection costs at $1M/month. So if service provider X is concerned, for example, that they failed to win YouTube's contract, but they're handling lots of traffic to and from YouTube's site, they should sort it out with the other service providers concerned, not simply try and aim at the people for whom they feel the most jealousy.

Hah! That's nothing. See Giles Turnbull's post on 'Fast OS Switching'. "Until very recently, this sort of thing was just a daydream..."

I've also been doing some fun experiments with virtual machines.

What do you get if you take a 5-minute exposure of the space shuttle launch? This.

You probably thought your monitor/TV was pretty cool. But I think you'll agree that it was only because you hadn't seen these...

I reserved an economy/compact car from Avis, but when I arrived at SFO yesterday, this was waiting for me:

I don't know what it is. A Chevy of some sort. But it's even bigger than it looks here - those are large wheels and large wing mirrors, so you don't get the sense of scale from the photo. Parking it is a bit of a pain, and as I cruise down El Camino Real it proudly tells me that I'm averaging 18.1 MPG. OK, so that would be nearly 23 miles per British gallon, but still....

Not quite what one had in mind.