Author Archives: Leigh

Here’s a controversial thought for a sunny afternoon. George Bush is not a chimp. Not an idiot. Not an imbecile. But rather a reasonably intelligent, quite well-educated chap. So let’s start from the beginning: President Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up in Midland and Houston, Texas. He […]

Here at the Consumerist is a great post. It’s a recording of a guy’s attempts to cancel his AOL account. Listen to the whole thing, it’s great. One of the best moments is when the AOL call centre operator asks to speak to the caller’s father, despite the account and credit card being in his […]

It’s nice to know that even Wikipedia suffers from argument. Perhaps a year down the line we’ll remember the overriding feature of the web 2.0 world was the tendency for flame wars and arguments. Read all about it here.

David Aaronovitch, writing in the Times, makes some good points about the Afghan war. As I read Christina Lamb’s extraordinary account in The Sunday Times of being ambushed in Helmand my thought was not “too much”, but “not enough”. More helicopters, if they’re needed. More of everything, if that’s required. We should be doing it […]

1. Lesbian, a distribution of GNU/Linux2. Heatseek, a browser designed for looking at porn. Mind you, the internet is for porn.

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. […]

Dr. Crippen makes a really good point in this post. Unfortunately, it occurs half way down the page, so I reproduce it here: The journalists have just discovered (see the BBC report here) that no one knows the optimum treatment for patients with early prostate cancer. Doctors have been saying this for years but have […]

Point 1: The term “Web 2.0” was originally coined by O’Reilly – the computing book people – in this article. Since then, they’ve tried to obtain a “service mark” (trademark) on the term. Point 2: The term “Web 2.0” is used throughout the web. In this sense, it is clear that O’Reilly cannot pretend to […]

… but I think that this is interesting. Biased BBC are making a big fuss over this article in the Times. THE BBC has persuaded the creator of the 1970s television series M*A*S*H to turn his fire on the Bush Administration. President Hillary Clinton is in the White House, and George Bush is on trial […]

Thanks to PCWorld.com, the 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. AOL at the top, no surprises there. Interestingly, RealPlayer came second worst. I still wonder why the BBC insist on using RealPlayer for their online streaming service. Is it because they want us to break our computers?

Today I’ve had to turn on comment moderation. I didn’t want to, as I think it kills the conversation (not that there is much). But unfortunately, some f*cking spamming halfwitted tw*t has added 250 comments advertising his stupid product, which are going to take me about a week to remove. The worst part of it […]