May 2005 Entries
I'm outraged! Hot on the heels of my post to this journal last week, to the effect that:
... a recent referrer came from the google.com search results page for "mothkind". I take some pride in the fact that when you search for mothkind, the highest pageranked site on the internet is mine.
[Via James.ToString()]
Now, it has come to my attention today that if you click that link right there, or search for 'mothkind' on Google yourself, you'll find that Google have revoked my status as a global authority on mothkind. This sort of censorship is precisely the abuse of power which...
Polling day's been and gone, then, and I don't think I'm giving anything away if I tell you Labour won, gaining what I am required by law to refer to as "a 'historic' third term". Sorry if I spoilt that for anyone who was trying to avoid finding out the result until they got home and watched it on video...
Anyway, with a reduced majority and an even more reduced popular mandate, the landscape has definitely shifted, which will make for interesting times over the course of the term. Much has been made of how, with a majority of just 66, a small force...
Just read Dave's musings on his polling-day experiences and discovery of the tight regulations surrounding the conduct of polling-station volunteers:
... it makes you wonder how the politicians think of us if they worry we can be that easily swayed.
[Via writerus drivelus]
This reminds me of the story of a guy who turned up at a polling station, very late, quite drunk, demanding to be allowed to vote for Mrs Thatcher. A kind police officer attending the polling station explained to the gentleman that he could certainly vote, if he calmed down. However, the man grew more irate when he...
Made a couple of discoveries last night, which I thought would be worth sharing, about Mac OS X Tiger's Quartz Composer development tool (which I mentioned here earlier). Basically, I was having a look at the .qtz files it produces, determined to find something I can do with them other than make screensavers, and discovered:
They're binary-format PList files. You can open them in the PList Editor tool, which also means you can save them out as XML. The reverse transformation is also possible, which means that dynamically creating .qtz files should be possible by writing out or transforming XML data,...
One of the fun things about .Text (the engine running this blog) is that it captures referrer headers supplied by browsers who click through to pages on the site from elsewhere on the net (well, referer headers, if you prefer it the way it's actually spelt in the HTTP spec. Honestly. Wouldn't have taken much to run a spell check over the RFC before publishing it, now, would it?) . Anyway, in the admin pages, I can see just how people have been hyperlinked across to things I've written. For instance, a recent referrer came from the google.com search results...
... Meriadoc.
Naming computers is always tricky, especially when you acquire them as often as we do. So, the new mac mini got christened Meriadoc because he's small and he's surprisingly feisty. and 'Meriadoc' shares some alliterative properties with the word 'Mac', which is always pleasurable.
Dotted around our house, you'll find a tragically geeky theme pervades the majority of the computer names - there's Hal, Merovingian, Starbuck, Eowyn, and Marvin (a name which is suddenly en vogue once more after this weekend's spectacular box-office showing for The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie - it grossed 42 decimillion pounds in the...
The highlight of Friday night was definitely the bemused guy who walked up to me while I was waiting in the queue for the new Birmingham Bullring Apple Store. Understandably confused to see thousands of people in an orderly queue that snaked out of the centre, down the central mall towards St Martins, doubling back several times, before making its way all the way back up to the corner by Waterstones via a similar number of switchbacks, the guy asked me "Are they giving away free computers or something?"
"No, just T-shirts."
"T-shirts? Man, you guys are crazy!"
And, indeed, we probably were....