I’ve decided I’m not getting enough exercise. This wasn’t a problem last summer, when was easy to finish work, eat, get the children off to bed and then take the dog for a long walk and still have daylight to spare. It got slightly harder in autumn, with one particularly memorable walk ending up with me stuck in the dark in the middle of some pitch black woods on account of having to go off-piste to avoid some cows that took exception to the dog.
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I wrote briefly about code_swarm last year – a tool to generate visualisations of a project’s commit history. Today, via Brenda Wallace, I found out about a new variation on the same theme – so new it hasn’t been released or even named yet. Apparently though the author, Andrew Caudwell, is planning to release the source in the very near future.
The following video, also courtesy of Brenda Wallace, shows the output generated from the StatusNet (formerly Laconica) git repository:
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I think this is really impressive stuff, and not just because I’m in it. There’s a better quality version on YouTube.
Yep, as of this morning, I consider Java as malware. Having put up with the JRE updater being used as an advertising platform for some time now, the final nail in the coffin came this morning with JRE 6 Update 5. This attempts to install a stinking “Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox/Mozilla”, and while there’s a checkbox to turn it off, it’s enabled by default.
As far as I’m concerned, this is totally unacceptable and Java and Sun just went down an awful long way in my estimation.
I’ve moaned about Dell at least once on here before and in real life I do it quite a lot, so it’s only fair to redress the balance when things go the other way.
Ok, I’ll start off by pointing out that it is far from being the first time I’ve done this, but hopefully it will be the last. I’ve cleaned up my email inbox (or rather inboxes, all 12 of them, but we’ll stick with the singular) and it has now been totally empty for a couple of days.
On (kind of) the same subject as my last post, is it just me that finds the whole Harry Potter circus rather depressing? While I’m sure the books are very good (from what I can tell, I’m the only person in the world, child or adult, not to have read one) can it be a good thing that such an excess of attention is focussed in one direction? There’s a whole world of literature out there.
My collection of pictures taken with digital cameras, which dates back to 1996, has recently got large enough to become an issue in its own right when it comes to storage and backups. I decided to investigate further, and used JDiskReport to create this graph:
This covers the entire 12GB of pictures, and shows that the majority of the data is contained within the last year. The cause is obviously higher resolution images, more memory on the camera and an increasing inclusion of video as well as still images. This means I can expect to be adding to this data at a rate of at least 11GB per year from now on, even if I only continue at the current rate. I seem to be doing ok with not losing it for the first decade, but I need to get a bulletproof backup system in place for this before it gets out of control.
According to BBC News, at least four million people (and possibly many more) suffer from the debilitating disease of Toilet Phobia. Needless to say, this is currently the ‘most read’ story on their site. Now, several times a day, at least, I find myself infuriated by the moronic mangling and regurgitating of press releases that seems to pass for journalism these days. This is no doubt evidence of some kind of disorder of my own, and this particular story isn’t an extreme example, but nonetheless I am moved to write about it because, if nothing else, it’s more interesting than doing the washing up.
I’m not suggesting that there aren’t people for whom this is a serious problem, but “Millions ‘hit by toilet phobia’” is just ridiculous.
What defines Toilet Phobia exactly? Well, from the article, it can “simply be manifest as a mild distaste for public loos.” Erm, hello? Is there anybody, other than George Michael and friends, who doesn’t have at least a mild distaste for them? I don’t like public toilets one little bit. If there’s something wrong with this, then somebody please let me know and I’ll go and receive the necessary therapy and counselling. Otherwise, I’ll happily persist in my belief that public toilets are unpleasant places, for a number of reasons.
The sensational story has a more down-to-earth sister story, which tells of the plight of a chap who struggles with “obsessive compulsive disorder and constantly worries about dirt, germs and contamination issues.” Despite the title of the story, “Toilet phobia makes life hard”, he evidently doesn’t have Toilet Phobia. He has far higher standards of hygiene than the rest of us, to the point where it impacts his life in a mostly negative way. I say mostly because I bet he doesn’t suffer from colds and other infectious diseases, or food poisoning, to the same extent as everybody else.
Anyway, needless to say, behind all this there is a book and DVD waiting to be purchased.
Here’s a great way to put old mobile phones to good use. This morning I dug seven of the blighters out of the loft, and a charity called Sri Lanka Child Care is sending some prepaid envelopes – all I have to do is stick the phones in, and they get recycled, with the proceeds going to the obvious good cause. What could be easier than that?
If you have any old phones, get in touch with me for contact details.
This evening, I stumbled upon Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), which is technique intended to let you read text at a much higher speed than would normally be possible. The concept is extremely simple – only one word is displayed at a time, moving through the text at a fast pace. Aside from the speed, the other obvious advantage is that it’s suitable for a device with limited screen space, e.g. a mobile phone.
