Category: Uncategorized

My PowerBook is borked.

It’s a little over three years old, and it’s seen ridiculously hard use; moved around pretty much daily, it’s recently eaten its second battery (down to about 40 mins life), and the keyboard reflects the half-million-or-so words I’ve bashed out on it. It’s been amazingly solid and reliable, having crashed probably less than a dozen times since I bought it – I think it locked on me in late January, when I hadn’t restarted it since early December, but I don’t recall the time before that. The LCD panel is showing the dreaded White Splotches of Doom, but unfortunately it doesn’t fall within the serial number range that’s supposed to be affected. Huh.

However, I fear its days are numbered, for the display has started glitching. Badly. I’ll be working away then it’ll suddenly freak out, displaying an overlay of little blue or red rectangles. When both come together, it looks like a tartan filter. If I whack the right-hand palmrest just right, it goes away again – or I can sometimes correct it by wiggling the lid, or refreshing the screen.

So, my first thought was that the display connection through the hinge is fatiguing, a common problem with heavily-used laptops. But get this – I can take screen captures of the problem. No, really. And it shows up on an external display, hooked up over a DVI->VGA adaptor. Which means the corruption is in the frame buffer, not the screen itself. Also, the problem shows up less when the machine’s running hot.

Loose VRAM, do you think? I’m not even sure it’s socketed on this machine, and I know it’s a bastard to get into, but… there’s hope. Maybe.

When I get back to Glasgow my friendly local Mac repair shop are going to have a new customer, and if I’m very lucky they’ll be able to peel poor Quern apart and wiggle a cable. If I’m unlucky… I’ll be exploring these options, none of which I can really afford. Ouchie.

(Incidentally, the last time there were that many refurb MacBook Pros around, the range was refreshed a couple of weeks later. Not that I want The Daily Grind to turn into a rumours site, you understand.)

For all the hype about Rocketboom, I’ve always found it overly-long and pretty much unwatchable. ‘The Show’ with Ze Frank, however, was much more palatable, even if he never seemed to blink. Short, direct, and pithily witty, it was compulsive viewing. Or at least, it was when he wasn’t heading off into bits of Americana that went over my head.

Sadly, however, it’s all past tense: Ze’s called it quits after a year, and he’s been having meetings in LA with all the big-wigs. He has an audience, he has talent, and I hope good things happen. I’m only concerned that, in a few years time, we might realise that what Ze did was perfect the one-man-and-his-vlog format, but that three minutes of him was about right for any one sitting. We’ll see.

If you want to catch the teary-eyed final show, it’s here.

Munching on some Emmental tonight, I found myself wondering if the holes are exactly spherical, or elongated. I suspect X-ray or MRI analysis would be tricky, since the cheese itself is moderately soft (and, one presumes, low contrast), but slicing the cheese sufficiently thinly should allow one to reconstruct the hole profile.

That led to my considering automating the slicing process, and feeding the slices into a scanner of some description, eventually allowing a three-dimensional digital reconstruction of the cheese. Invert for density, and one would be left with a number of holes hanging in void space, whereupon their spheralicity should be readily discernible.

With reference to the Visible Human Project (Wikipedia), I name this the ‘Visible Cheese Project.”

Future developments will involve an exploration of the vein structure in various blue cheeses.

[For the record, I’m assuming the holes are predominantly spherical, given the nature of their formation as bubbles of carbon dioxide. But I could be wrong.]

Attention hostees! Dreamhost are moving the mail server we’re on, tomorrow night. Downtime should be 2 hours. Figure on more.

[note: no email should be lost, blah blah blah]

“I’m the Urban Spaceman” on a kazoo. Played through a wah-wah pedal. No kidding. Also: the Doctor Who and Rainbow themes, ditto.

The full name of the my country of birth and normal residence is complex. More complex, indeed, than seems reasonable for what is – functionally – an oddly-crinkly splat of land off the West coast of Europe.

See, until the Acts of Union 1707, we had the Kingdom of England, and the Kingdom of Scotland (don’t ask about Wales right now, just roll with it). The Acts styled the new, single state thus, in article III:

III. That the United Kingdom of Great Britain be represented by one and the same Parliament, to be styled the Parliament of Great Britain.

But here’s the thing; at this point in history, capitalisation rules were not the same as they are now, and the word ‘United’ is commonly held to have been descriptive. Thus, the long-form name of the country created by the Acts was the ‘Kingdom of Great Britain,’ or – for short – ‘Great Britain.’ These are the forms used in legislation post-1707.

This does not, of course, tally with the opinion of many Britons, who think of their country as ‘The United Kingdom’. Now, that form came into use with the Act of Union 1800, enacted at the start of 1801. Wikipedia is quite clear and consistent on the issue:

1707-1800: “Kingdom of Great Britain”

1801-1927: “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland”

1927-: “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland“

(Note that it took five years from 1922 to change the country name. There’s a natural inertia to such things, apparently).

However, clarity and consistency do not imply a lack of dissent, and the Discussion page for the Kingdom of Great Britain article becomes a knock-down, drag-out, even (bizarrely self-styled, by one participant) gladiatorial contest. It’s a cracking read, if only to gain an insight into what rational people have to go through to make Wikipedia what it is.

Personally:

1. I’m persuaded by the argument therein that the current (protected) Wikipedia stylings are reasonable.
2. The distinction between the state from 1707 and from 1801 seems rational and useful.
3. I’m glad I’m currently in (the Republic of) Ireland, and don’t have to worry about this stuff so much.
4. Let’s not mention the name of the national flag, eh?

I’m in London Tuesday and Wednesday this coming week, sorting out a bunch of SciCast stuff. On Tuesday evening I’m at a NESTA networking event; Wednesday hopefully at a preview of Sunshine. Anyone else in town?

I’m slightly appalled that none of the Robot Wars gang appear to have built this, since it’s rather neat: self-balancing scooter board thingy. In Norwich. With QVC piss-take end to the video.

[Hat tip to the good Dr. Bartos, erstwhile of this parish’s comments]

[update: link to the builder’s own site]

Lawrence Livermore National Labs have won the contract to build America’s first new nuclear warheads in 20 years. Damn, I should have pitched for that work, if only to get the rejection letter.

(via Kottke)

Legend has it that one of the ways things worked on Tomorrow’s World was that a researcher, when they thought they might have a story, would immediately write a script. Only when that was done would they start making calls and trying to work out what the story was. At which point they’d update the script. Iterate until done.

While borderline barking, one of the points of working like that was that, at any given stage, there was a script that a director could pick up and go and shoot. Early in the process it was likely to be nonsense, but at least there was something workable – and it helped focus the iterations. It’s a dangerous approach, because it’s easy to get trapped in a blind alley, but nevertheless it’s still sometimes a good way of working.

This article about Adobe’s development model for Photoshop CS3 sounds remarkably similar. Interesting.