Monthly Archives: June 2006

Recently I did a project on Image Compression. One of our test images was a picture of a woman’s head. This picture. We joked a little that this must be a particularly male subject to study, since it’d be hard to justify using a picture of a woman if there were lots of female students […]

I’ve been reading some fiction books for a change. It’s quite exciting. I read the following tomes: 1984 – George Orwell (full text online)Brave New World – Aldous Huxley I was struck by the different techniques used to control the population in each book, and, in particular, the different attitudes of each author towards sexual […]

I’ve not updated properly for a while, but this kicked me into action. It references a post by Asa Dotzler with the exciting title “microsoft security manager calls users stupid.” A couple of months ago, Mike Danseglio, the Program Manager for the Security Solutions group at Microsoft blamed users for the Windows security nightmare, saying […]

The new MS Office Ribbon is reviewed here, one of the best descriptions I’ve seen.

Here’s an interesting theory. Although opinions vary on the reliability of browser market share figures, a quick scan through all the data reveals one interesting commonality across all the data sources: IE6 market share peaked at around 95 percent sometime in mid-2004. If 95% of the world is browsing with IE 6, pursuing browser independence […]

Peer-review is the process by which scientific papers get to be published. The papers are first reviewed by a group of “peers.” There’s usually three of them, and they’ll be experts in the relevant field. Thus the nonsense is weeded out, and only papers deemed worthy enough will be published. Nature, however, have got bored […]

Who said this: Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, […]

This article seems to think so. Standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from “niche” open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said. The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation. And there’s the rub. Open-source software suffers greatly from it’s lack of […]

When you buy software off the shelf, you’ll use it for a number of years, and then decide that it’s too old. It’ll get creaky and slow, and the formats it uses will become obselete. It won’t be supported on newer computers, and newer versions will become available. Eventually you’ll upgrade. The great thing is […]

This is my limited memory of the post which Blogger lost. Google have just launched an online spreadsheet application, Google Spreadsheets. It’s all over the Blogosphere, so I thought I’d add my two penn’orth of limited viewpoints.My first problem with the application is right there in the middle: Formulas. Is that a word? Formulae, please. […]