Archive for the 'Internet' Category

wikipedia considered harmful

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

I am increasingly of the opinion that Wikipedia has rather undermined Google’s usefulness as a search engine.
Once upon a time, you could rely upon Google to have the most relevant and useful results appear right at the very top of your search results. I can remember the feeling of astonishment when I first discovered […]

open government

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Taken from an occasional series of amusing google searches:
site:*.gov.uk “strictly private and confidential”
It’s nice to see that open government is proceeding apace in the UK.

akismet

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

It’s been almost three months since I installed the Akismet plugin to deal with comment spam. In that time it has caught 6,716 spam comments!
If we assume about 5KB per comment, which seems a reasonable estimate, that would equate to nearly 33MB of wasted bandwidth. It’s a good thing that I’m allowed up to […]

browser bug

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

I had a frustrating day at work today, writing javascript to do fancy things with XML documents and running into annoying bugs with various web browsers. I’ve come to expect bugs in Internet Explorer, but I was surprised today to find a bug in Opera’s implementation of the LSSerializer interface.
Considering that Opera seems to be […]

ominous error messages

Friday, June 9th, 2006

When our web server fails to deliver an email, it bounces a copy of the message to me. These message failures get filed away in a quiet little corner and I look over them from time to time, to watch for any problems with the mail service. There was one message today, nothing alarming, just […]

i am art garfunkel

Sunday, February 26th, 2006

An excellent link for you. Upload a photo of yourself and MyHeritage.com’s fancy facial recognition software will process your image and tell you which celebrity you most resemble!
Apparently I most resemble Art Garfunkel (58% likeness).

Then Mark Hamill (54% likeness).

Then, er, Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese Prime Minister (53% likeness).

Hm. I’m beginning to suspect this “advanced facial […]

back to gmt

Sunday, October 30th, 2005

I am one person living in a one bedroomed flat, yet I still managed to find eleven different clocks to set back to GMT this morning. Eleven! The only thing I didn’t have to change was my computer. I synchronise it automatically with an NTP (network time protocol) server on the internet, so it’s always […]

home

Monday, June 27th, 2005

I see that Google Maps’ satellite coverage of the UK is improving. You can actually see my town now, though it doesn’t offer sufficient zoom to pick out my house. And yes, it really is that green around here.
When you zoom out it makes you realise just how much of England is still green and […]