Life and code.

The story is here.

Basically, this company will produce for you a “web pack” containing about 10,000 pages. There’s a couple of points to go with this.

The article makes an estimate of the amount of information on the internet:

As Husick explains: “Let’s say the HTML Web is 10 billion pages — it’s actually a little less than that — but at 10K per page that’s 1 million gigabytes, also known as a petabyte.

OK, that sounds simple enough. But he’s seriously underestimating the amount of space taken up by other forms of media. There’s years worth of movies, as well as enormous quantities pictures and lengthy sound recordings.

So their estimate is likely to be quite inaccurate. The other major loss is something which I’ve been talking about for a while. The major developments in the internet lately have all been about the ability of communities to create dynamic content. What this system does is “freeze” the internet at a particular point. Given that most of my browsing time is spent reading emails and blogs, this has no possible use for me. The power of the internet isn’t all about information; it’s also about connecting with others.

The other point which somebody made in the comments of the original post is about content monetization, basically adverts. Web advertisements make money for the website in two different ways. The website owner is paid for the number of page views, and the number of clicks on the advert itself. Now suppose this idea really takes off, and loads of people are downloading chunks of the internet onto their computers. How can website providers keep track of the number of hits? Every time someone reads their site from the downloaded source rather than online, the website loses a little money. This could conceivably result in many websites demanding people log in to see the content, which might be the only way round the problem. This won’t be a good step for the internet.

Well, we’ll see what happens.

Whenever a pressure group asks for an independent inquiry, it simply means that they want an appeal. The last inquiry didn’t produce a result they were happy with, so let’s have another one.

This idea came up in a blog post which, unfortunately, I forget. But it’s clearly affected me, as now I take any demands for an “independent inquiry” with a pinch of salt. Let’s look at the latest example.

Anthony Cox is a renowned pharmacologist. He blogs here. After reading much of his commentary, I confess I agree with pretty much all of what he says. He is intimately familiar with the subject matter, and argues clearly and passionately. Thus the quotes below are not to be taken in vain:

Paul Flynn MP (Newport West) said the report on the dangerous reaction to the drug’s trial is a predictable whitewash. It was an act of lamentable lack of care to give a drug, never before ingested by human beings, to six people virtually simultaneously.

There’s been much discussion about the said drugs trial on this blog. As a pharmacologist, Anthony has recorded pretty much every discussion around. Thus his comments are often much more relevant and pointed.

If people are trying to suggest the MHRA have learnt nothing from the TGN1412 trial, then I think they are wrong. The fact that all similar trials of biologicals will now require external expert review, is clear evidence that they have learnt something – and this is only an interim report. I personally think the term Whitewash is being thrown about for reasons only tangentially connected with the TGN1412 trial.

Please read the whole article. Also remember to vote “no” in the poll at the end. Media bias has been a particular theme for me, but this post reminds me that really media sensationalism is what really annoys me.

I’d just like to highlight this though:

“Every item on my blogroll to the right is read.”

That is, every blog I mention on the right hand column is read by me regularly. I read every post of each and every one of them.

This is powered by Bloglines, which is lucky. I like having a feed aggregator; it makes the whole process of reading things very simple (geddit?).

The thing I find important, is that I am immune to link-swapping. Many bloggers try to build traffic by linking to others, in an “if you link to me, I’ll link to you” sort of sense. But I can’t do that. Blogging isn’t about false building of traffic.

This post at Chronotron highlights part of the problem. It is a rant against certain sorts of sites; those sites which aren’t there to contribute, but just there to generate hits.

I’ve seen atleast 5-6 sites like this and damn all of them are the same, challenge with mother, friends @ College or money for charity due to hits (Hits use bandwidth and you only have to spend money!),blah, then suddently getting a domain and a Top Paid host, posting that he can’t support the site anymore and inviting corporate sponsors, and having Google Ads and donate via Paypal.

OK, I’ll admit there’s some serious ranting focus there. But there’s still a valid point. There are a large number of people who think that hits is all that matters. They go out there, stick the google ads on the page, and hope for the best. If they’re lucky, they might even get Dugg, and then end up on seriously high on Bloggers reading lists.

Thank goodness I don’t do that.

I wasn’t planning on posting much… but this is great stuff:

http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000890073633/

The picture:

So, who wants a coke cooled by PC? I think I do. Probably the best case mod I’ve seen.

Apologies for the posting dropoff, which is likely to continue. Hopefully normal service will be resumed after my exams, which finish in about the second week of May. Until then things might be intermittent, I’m afraid.

There’s a lot of good points in this post from NHS Blog Doctor.

The majority of consultants work hard, and work longer hours for the NHS than those for which they are contracted. The media may choose not to believe it. Alice Miles clearly does not believe it. Patricia Hewitt certainly did not believe it.

Nonetheless it is true.

And this is why the new NHS contract has cost the blessed Patricia so much money. She set the time and motion men on these lazy, skiving, golf-playing consultants. She knew what they were up to. You are paid for a forty hour week. Now we are actually going to measure what you do and that is what we will pay you for. Not a penny more, not a penny less. The measurements showed that the consultants were doing far more work than their contracted forty hour week. And so they all got pay rises. The blessed Patricia was hoisted by her own petard.

Read the whole thing.

Some time ago I came across this page and this picture.

Yesterday I decided to undertake an experiment. My favourite browser, Firefox, allows its users to add extensions. Currently 1102 extensions are available at Mozilla update. I decided to install 100 of the most popular extensions at the same time.

Meanwhile, over at Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood has a slightly different take on the amusing experiment.

Menus and Toolbars Don’t Scale
…
I’m now starting to question whether traditional menus and toolbars are even appropriate for small applications any more.

It’s an interesting thought, that toolbars have outgrown their usefulness, and that new software has far too many functions for them all to be represented.

A year or two ago, the House of Bishops or the General Synod or somebody like that decided to implement a new set of rules for dealing with children withing the church. They drafted a document entitled “Protecting All God’s Children,” which can be found here. One of the most contentious issues is that it requires practically anybody who is involved in the training or teaching of children to be checked by the Criminal Records Bureau, or “CRB Checked.”

This was also applied to bellringers. There’s been a discussion raging on the Change-Ringers email list, and I posted the following message. The “two adults per learner” rule referred to is the idea that there should always be two adults present when a young person arrives.

I find myself very amused by all the discussion about CRB checking. I first starting learning to ring at the age of 16 3/4. At this time I was also officially the Assistant Director of Music at the church, and was a keyholder in that capacity. Looking back, there were several practices at this age when I would be the first there and open the church up. I’m not sure how this was meant to tally with the idea of “two adults per learner.” Maybe the adults were meant to wait outside the church until there were two of them to come and meet me.

At about 17 2/3, I passed my driving test. This leaves four months during which time I’d be giving lifts to practices and outings. Just think of the risks I was taking, in my own car, driving round these people.

That’s why I’ll always find the whole concept silly. If, at age 17, I’m deemed responsible enough to drive a car, how is it that when I get in the tower I’m not allowed to be left alone with another adult, even if I’ve known them for years?
The most bizarre situations crop up when two people are in a relationship, one of whom being over 18 and the other just under. Presumably they aren’t allowed to be left unsupervised in a tower according to the rules. If the age of consent is set at 16, why are all the CRB rules set for 18?

Luckily many PCCs seem to have taken great advantage of common sense in this regard. Hopefully the trend will continue.

Of course the other great point is that CRB checking can only bring up information about a persons sins in the past, not in the future. Maybe every tower has a psychopathic paedophile in its ranks, but they haven’t acted on the impulse yet.

Many critics argue that the plan is less about protecting God’s children, and more about protecting his workers from spurious accusations of abuse.

The whole internet is full of absolute rubbish. I’ve hardly read anything sensible all day.

This list of online hoaxes may help you to avoid them.

I’ve just discovered this blog, called mediawatchwatch. It’s quite good, and I intend to follow it for a bit. Going through the archives I found this post.

Norwich vicar defends Springer
The Rev Peter Nokes of St Peter Mancroft Church in Norwich has been standing up for Jerry Springer: The Opera. He told the Norwich Evening News:

“The so-called blasphemy scenes are all portrayed as a kind of dream in Springer’s mind. I don’t think they are blasphemous because they are in a dream. The writers are saying that Jerry Springer is manipulative. It is not about God. It’s about the lack of dignity in which he treats people’s problems.”

He expressed his view that most mainstream church leaders and Christians in Norwich distanced themselves from the extremist anti-Springer activists.

Unlike most of the protestors, this Rev has actually seen the show – twice on DVD – and he intends to see it live in Norwich when it arrives in May. This places him at an advantage over the BNP/Christian Voice complainers, as he is in a position to understand what the show is about.

This falls coincidentally quite close to home, as I’ve just been up to St Peter Mancroft several times, as Oliver has said, and I also intend to go and see Jerry Springer: The Opera when it appears in Cambridge.

Our College Chaplain wrote a good discussion about the opera itself.

I searched for Leigh Simpson on MSN Search, and look what I found.

I’m not convinced that the search was working properly.

If you want to create a similar search which doesn’t seem to work properly, go to http://www.msnsearchspoof.com/.

I’ve ranted before about the proliferation of image verification systems. In my case, I was ranting about the fact that Yahoo! was making me fill in a box when I sent an email. Luckily that’s declined, I get a verification box about every hundred messages or so, which seems fair enough. The new problem is that bloggers everywhere are finding that the easiest way to prevent bots spamming their blogs is to turn on an image verification system for every comment.

Thankfully there’s somebody who agrees this is a bad thing.

Image Verification enrages users like me who block images in their browsers to save on downloads. Since I download lots of stuff, I block images and Flash, and everytime I see an image verification, I hate right clicking it (now without a mouse) and sometimes, when I press the back button, most of what I type goes away and this murders me. Another thing is that image verifications are a complete waste of time, 100% waste!

An argument in pictures…

From NHS Blog Doctor

Something Awful presents some of the best internet hate mail I’ve seen in a long time.

Cant do it? Oh, im not surprised, seeing as you are a zero-talent neanderthal who posesses the brains of a smashed eggshell dipped in acid resin. So next time you go to insult someone directly because they like a certain genre, kick yourself in your nearly nonexistant balls and masturbate your 2 1/2 penis to some more animal.

What is Web 2.0? I’ve discussed a lot without much idea of what’s going on. This site may help. It’s the Web 2.0 Awards, featuring lots of great sites. All the top names are in there, including flickr, facebook, myspace, del.icio.us, youtube, and many more.

Facebook is an online community-building website similar to MySpace. Both of these websites collect personal information. For me, my most jealously-guarded secret tends to be my email address. Thanks to a little bit of care (and another email address I use to sign up to crap) I’ve kept my spam down to an acceptable level.

Signing up to these things always bears a risk that your email address will be passed on. That’s why checking the privacy policy is important. The most important thing to check is that the policy remains valid in the event that the company is sold or collapses. I foresaw a possible situation in which the owners of facebook built up a database of several million email addresses, then sold the whole company to some spam-kings. Call me cynical if you will.

So with the news today that Facebook may be sold, I was a little worried. Luckily the privacy policy was there to save me:

If the ownership of all or substantially all of the Facebook business, or individual business units owned by Facebook, Inc., were to change, your user information may be transferred to the new owner so the service can continue operations. In any such transfer of information, your user information would remain subject to the promises made in any pre-existing Privacy Policy.

Hurrah! And what’s more, convincing evidence that the dotcom millionaires can still be made.

The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale, senior industry executives familiar with the matter say.

That may sound like a huge amount of money, especially when you consider that the company was launched just two years ago by a group of sophomores at Harvard University, led by Mark Zuckerberg

… who is now unlikely to need to do very much work again.

…doesn’t seem to have hit Blogger yet. As a test, this post is going out at 22:39 here in Cambridge. I’ll be intrigued to see what the timestamp says.

Or not, actually. It’s Ken, again.

The mayor of London criticised Robert Tuttle while bemoaning the US embassy’s insistence that its diplomatic staff should not pay the congestion charge because they view it as a tax. Embassies are exempt from all local tax under the 1961 Vienna convention.

Mr Livingstone told ITV’s London Today: “It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like some chiselling little crook.”

But as the article later points out,

Another 55 embassies are also refusing to pay.

So why do the Americans get singled out for special treatment?

His comments brought a fresh rebuke from opponents on the London assembly. The Conservative leader, Bob Neill, said: “This is the latest in a long line of offensive, offhand, irrational remarks. Despite his own personal opinions Livingstone needs to show respect for the office he holds. He is damaging the reputation of the mayoralty of London by his increasingly strange behaviour. He’s an embarrassment.

Couldn’t agree more.

… this makes quite a lot of sense.

Wherever people live in fear, with no prospect of advance, we should be on their side; in solidarity with them, whether in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma, North Korea; and where countries, and there are many in the Middle East today, are in the process of democratic development, we should extend a helping hand. This requires, across the board an active foreign policy of engagement not isolation.

This chap works for Microsoft. He works on the networking team.

This picture may give a sense of how complicated Vista is going to be:

Every single little square is a new feature for the networking stack. And people think making this stuff is easy?