What’s your British Blog worth?
This service has now been retired. If you’ve ever wondered if your ‘blog is actually worth anything, then this may be your cup of tea.
Why do I work better at night?
I find I work better at night: not just a bit better; a lot better. My code output seems to skyrocket between the hours of 23:00 and 04:00. Can anybody tell me, why? There must be a reason.
iPenguin
Penguin Books have come up with a rather neat little hook to get people off their iPods and curled up with a book, an open fire, and a comforting mug of brownian motion this winter; they’ve started a regular podcast in which they hope to include the latest news and extracts from Penguin Books.
Terms of Reference
This is an an everyday lesson that I shall try to remember next time I’m at the requirements gathering phase of system design, or the next time I’m explaining to someone why common terms of reference are such an important part of Software Engineering.
Browser Forensics
I just read the most wonderful news article ever: it’s about Web Browsers, and Forensic Science. It’s wonderful for two reasons: it gets the whole “telling a story” thing wrong by totally misinterpreting the status quo and being technically confused, then it gives an example that is so under-inspired that I had to come up …
Discovery Launches
I just watched the Discovery launch. It’s easy to be over-familiar with images of a Shuttle launch, there have been so many; but this one was different. This launch was important because it’s the first since Columbia broke up on re-entry, which affects not only NASA, but the entire scientific research community.
Goodbye CRT
My big and very high resolution screen just made a very bad burning smell and went blank. I was ready to hoik it out of the window in case it decided to catch fire, but an acrid smouldering was the best it managed.
Ex-Mozilla Group on LinkedIn
There’s now an Ex-Mozilla group on LinkedIn (in fact it’s been there for a while and is growing slowly by word of mouth). The group is associated with Alex Totic’s ex-mozilla website, and run in the same spirit, for all the employees that used to work at Netscape, from Mosaic Communication Corporation to AOL.
Got NTL Broadband?
Do you have NTL 750Kbps Broadband? I have. Today I just noticed something rather dubious about it.
Approaching Silence
With the fans on my PC forever silenced in the wake of my successful water cooling experiment, the sound made by my hard disk is surprisingly grating – like a geiger counter going off as each radioactive file is read or written.
Water Cooling Installation
Rich installs water cooling in his PC.
Water-Cooling
I’m a little excited and apprehensive because my boss (who is me, incidentally) today decided to roll out a new silent-computer initiative throughout our corporate offices (i.e. my little back room). To whit, I have today ordered a water-cooing kit for the Dual Xeon 2.8GHz machine on which I perform my daily feats of technical …
The Nazca Manos
One very interesting use of World Wind (version 1.3 released today) is to de-mystify a lot of the pseudo-scientific conjecture regarding the Aztec civilization.
Web Architecture 101
After only nine working drafts, and more than two years in the writing, the W3C today published what I’m certain will become a must-read for all computing students who want to write about the web using more than vague hand waving gestures.
Hijacking the WWW
A short piece describing a little about the Internet's cambrian phase betweem 1994-98, the formation of the W3C and why, even though they tried to snuff out Netscape's air supply, Microsoft still deserve credit for their contribution to the web.
Firefox 1.0
Today, November 9th, sees the official release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0. Firefox is a highly sophisticated and (above all) safe web browser which is available for most commonly used computing platforms.
learning java?
If you’re going to learn java, it helps to have a well written reference book;
effective java
Make this your first serious Java book after you're comfortable with the basics. It's deeply technical, and an enjoyable read, a real rareity.
firefox almost 1.0
firefox 1.0 has advanced to the Preview Release (PR) stage, and it’s a significant improvement over 0.9.3 (which was already very good).
n-heads?
for those with more than one monitor, a good backdrop can further enhance the feng shui of your machine. today i found a site which produces wallpaper for all kinds of many headed configurations.