Daily Archives:December 24th, 2005

God’s Keynote

Catholic Insider

I’m not normally a listener to the Catholic Insider podcast, but I think, at Christmas, if you know anything about Apple’s products, and especially if you’ve ever watched one of Steve Jobs’ keynotes, you will enjoy God’s Keynote Speech.

First heard on the MacCast.

My (new) mate, TextMate

I wrote about TextMate a couple of days ago. Giles Turnbull is also a new convert.

Follow that car!

According to The Independent, the UK police are going to be using number-plate (license-plate)-reading software with CCTV & traffic cameras around the country (of which there are many) to allow them to track the movements of all vehicles in the country, in the interests of crime prevention. They talk about big crimes like vehicle theft, though it could also be used to detect things like road-tax evasion. If they can get their act together with the insurance companies and use it to reduce the number of uninsured drivers on the roads, that would be a major benefit, though that may require a little too much competence on the part of the organisations concerned.

Anyway, no doubt conspiracy theorists civil liberties campaigners will be up in arms about this one, but I have other things on my mind, like the interesting algorithms you could come up with to detect license-plate duplication.

I’m anticipating a renaissance of James Bond’s rotating number plates, or, even better, highwaymen on horseback…

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser