The Darth Side: Blog of the day

It may have survived being slashdotted, but I will now attempt to crush this site with the countless referrals from my own pangalactic blog. Go there and use your force for evil. Hwah Hwah Hwah !!!

A sign of things to come?

I got the following in an email disclaimer that foreshadows interesting times ahead: This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. Sounds like humans are only part of the game these days, and "entities" will be asserting their rights more forcefully in future. Perhaps such entities represent affiliated groups of humans, but perhaps they represent other semi-sentient information agregates such as software agents or epi-phenomena growing out there on the web as viruses or telephone exchanges? One Question - How many of you reading this fall into the non-human category?

Thanks to GlennD for this signpost to the future

Here's what's gracing my desktop today:

Straw Poll

I'm thinking of getting myself a new machine. If it was you and you were going to buy a tablet PC... which would it be? And if it was a plain old laptop (desktop replacement)? And workstation? Hmmmm. Let me know, cos I'm stumped!

Gross quote of the day

Your baby is now nearly 3 inches long - about the size of a jumbo shrimp - and weighs nearly an ounce. Kerry must a have her own little rock pool developing... ...so long as there's no crabs everything is OK.

More photographic family history

My dad and his dad before him (well - behind him really)

Behold - my firstborn (both of them)

Well, not quite firstborn yet - but we are now into the second trimester so things are going to be more stable from now on! First official diagnosis on the status of the twins indicates that they are in fact - jumping beans... You can tell that baby 2 takes after her mother. Codenamed baby 1 and baby 2 prior to launch. Baby 1 Baby 2

Deviation of the day - Power Hungry

 

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour -4
Conservative -28
	Liberal Democrat 46
UK Independence Party -7
	Green 33

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Quote of the day

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

Edsger Dijkstra

Cowardly Manouver #1

Well, EDS seemed grim-in-the-extreme, they want someone to spend two months writing some godawful burocratic change request document for some Telstra billing department. I think that my facial expression may have hinted at the miasmic feeling of despondency and depression I felt at the prospect of having to wade neck-deep through so much pointless paper. I doubt I'll hear back from them, especially after asking to see one of their documents to check the level of design they wanted from me - only to discover that there was none!!! So, anyway, I decided to extend my contract for another month here at Telstra. Was that a true cowardly manouver, or just a trouble and dull-learning-curve avoidance manouver?

Wikipedia's come a long way

I just followed a link from slashdot to take a glance at Wikipedia. This is a public domain, publicly editable, peer-reviewed encyclopedia. And goddam is it good these days. It's been a while since I last went therre, and it was good at the time, but since then it has grown and grown, and edged past some of the other similar projects. It has around 533,000 entries, and if this is representative, then I think that Brittanica and Encarta are soon to be out of business.

Wish Me Luck

I have an interview with EDS, a large consultancy company for a Telstra-inspired short term project. I was beginning to wonder whether all I was ever going to get was phone calls from strangers wanting to be my best mate, or prove to me that they are wankers. Why do they always want to meet me... ...I can't make out whether they are play-acting business, or whether they believe that knowing what I look like might make my resume more believable than it is. Perhaps it is a kind of bonding process that they think will make me a more nutritious parasitic host. If money is the lubricant of the economy and recruitment agents are the lubricants of structural unemployment, then the people I have been dealing with are the loose pocket change of economic churn. As for EDS - I suspect a short term contract would be better than signing up for a full time job with a company like ThoughtWorks, even though ThoughtWorks seem to set a higher standard than normal and may be fun to work for. What do you think? Should I go for another contract or take a good permie job that pays a lot less?

Linguistic Development

Derek's kittens are displaying behaviour that seems to be hard wired. There is a huge range of examples of linguistic capabilities seeming to follow a strict developmental schedule -- use of verbs, tenses or telegraphic speach all arrive at about the same age in children. Chomsky is the most famous linguist to claim that language, or core parts of it, are inate. His justification was that there appears to be a poverty of input in a child's linguistic environment. Also he contended that there are syntactic regularities between far-flung languages. What it is that is inate was subject to debate though, and his proposal was that there was a deep structure to language that forms a syntactic/semantic foundation to all languages. While this is very likely true, there is not a poverty of input -- far from it. It is just not linguistic input. Reality itself is the input. This is not so far fetched as it seems. Languages are only useful if they are "representative". They can only be that if they represent at some level the regularities that we can observe in nature. A simple example is that there is a flow of time in nature and in language. Causal structures are embedded in language, as they are in activities such as grasping and stepping. Since almost everything that we are and do must reflect the nature of reality I would guess that the deepest thing that must come hardwired is mechanism to test learned skills and capabilities against reality. I think that there is a selective pressure on "representativeness" that applies at the core of all learning processes both physical and psychological. A good book to read about this is Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. My undergraduate dissertation was on linguistic development A topic I find quite fascinating. And if your willing to wade through some horrifically turgid prose, I also wrote a dissertation on evolution in linguistic development. I'm looking forward to the arrival of The Three to observe it first-hand.

Dig (in My Pictures) for Victory

It truly is war when retaliations escalate...   ...but surely this goes beyond the strictures of the geneva convention?

Derek Unveiled

First compromising output of my new scanner :-

I think you'll all agree - he hasn't changed that much. Expect more weird and ancient pieces of family history to follow...

Buster at dogster.com

Buster is a dog. Buster has a blog. Naturally it would be on dogster.com. Buster is very eloquent though, and I like his approach to life. (click on the title to visit him)

New section of the DBC blog uploaded

A new section (slightly less interesting than before) of the blog has gone up. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Lost Weekends?

Yes - the number of posts does indicate a weekend almost completely devoid of important tasks that must be completed before the end of the weekend. But I think that is the very definition of a good weekend.

First round results are in...

... and in the first heats, Andrew won a resounding victory in the world tiddly-winks championships. The sad part was it was Andrew Patocs, not Andrew Matthews, who wears the laurel wreath this evening. Andrew Matthews has spent the day in a darkened room wondering why he didn't admit defeat earlier. Next time I will try harder, cos that so-called bourbon tasted like cheap rum, especially when you have to down 5 shots glasses in 2 minutes cos some chizzling bugger has been practicing...

For the budding author...

Let us go then you and I while the night is laid out against the sky like a smear of mustard on an old pork pie. "Nice poem Tom. I have ideas for changes though, why not come over?" -- Ezra

FORTUNE'S RULES TO LIVE BY: #2.1

Never goose a wolverinewombat.

CF and The Three

We went to the genetics department the other day to get the doctors opinion on our likelihood of having a baby with Cystic Fibrosis. We are glad (very glad) to announce that the chances of us having a child with CF is something in the region of 1 in 22,000. Compare that to the odds that two strangers would conceive a child with CF which is something like 1 in 625. So all in all we just have to worry about the cummulative effect of all those years sitting in front of VDUs talking on mobile phones, drinking coffee to cope with hangovers in tight jeans and Y-fronts. Did I say Y-fronts? I meant Armani briefs of course.

I saw a wombat...

The wombat lives across the seas, Among the far Antipodes. He may exist on nuts and berries, Or then again, on missionaries; His distant habitat precludes Conclusive knowledge of his moods. But I would not engage the wombat In any form of mortal combat. -- "The Wombat"

I saw something streak past my driveway the other night. It ran in a manner not unlike a chimp, or baboon - on all fours with a two-by-two gait. It was moving fast enough that it couldn't have been an escaping dwarf or baby. It had no tail, and was kind of compact. Needless to say I abstained from leaping after it into the dark, preferring to remain ignorant of the capabilities of your wombat in a fair fight.

I could tell you some stories

A new 'chutist had just jumped from the plane at 10,000 feet, and soon discovered that all his lines were hopelessly tangled. At about 5,000 feet, still struggling, he noticed someone coming up from the ground at about the same speed as he was going towards the ground. As they passed each other at 3,000 feet, the 'chutist yells, "HEY! DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT PARACHUTES?" The reply came, fading towards the end, "NO! DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT COLEMAN STOVES?"

Contractual Contraction

Well, then end of another contract looms. Telstra have been my "hosts" for the last few months. I would like to believe that it has not been a parasitic relationship. A parasite is "an organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host". Sadly though, I must admit that, try as I might, I was able to contribute little more than a few (beautifully typeset) documents that were promptly applauded then ignored. I did not grow. If anything I shrank during this contract. Ah well, if all goes according to plan, I shall join the evil empire.

Patently Absurd!

Derek bemoans the obscurity of his patent description on the ESO(?) web site, and the consequent lack of generated income as a result. I say - tosh! Unfortunately I can't say it in his blog, because it keeps crashing, so I'll say it here. Tosh! If the patent site page is obscure, you should make it come out at the top of the google listings... by doing that you raise it's profile without relying on passing traffic on the ESO site. The best way I can think of doing that is to try and get the link slashdotted, and included in Eurekalert and the KurtzweilAI newsletters. The number of cross links will then explode. Failing that - you need to get loads of other pages linking to your page to up its rankings. If it ranks in google, it doesn't matter how crap the ESO search engine is, right?

A Nocturnal Visitor - Saturday

We had a visitor the other night. A Ring-tailed Possum. This little fellow has been creeping around on our roof lately. That wouldn't bother me too much except for the fact that we have a tin roof, and he has sharp clicky little claws.

Beautiful looking creatures though. And we shall have to keep a supply of bananas around the house. Maybe we can domesticate him...

LaTeX2e

I have been entertaining myself (not others) by writing all my technical docs in LaTeX2e lately. The problem is that there is a dearth of quality documentation on the web. I get the impression that because LaTeX2e is geared towards producing beautiful print output the people who work with it are loath to produce documentation for it that is at once compendious, and in HTML. Come on guys! The typesetting language is IMHO unparalleled, and I absolutely love to use it. But using it day-to-day is often tiresome unless you keep a reference book around to give details of every package that you need to use. Finding reference documents in a hurry can be a pain because there is no definitive place for them (that I've heard of). I know the funding is pretty tight so this probably a vain request, but a full specification of every definition in TeX and LaTeX would be hugely useful, especially if they were categorised!

Not Exactly Whacked

But I do come at the top of a search for my own name (provided I narrow the field a little). This is yet another of the desperate attempts by people like me to "get connected". What that means is adding my personal details to yet another site that will sell them to a spam-bot company as they go down the tubes in a year or two. Why Do I Do It? You'd think I'd know by now? Sheeeesh!

Current Lyric

This what I'm hearing as I work: "It must have emerged on the far side of the galaxy!" Network received: 174552186 bytes Server: SHOUTcast Distributed Network Audio Server/Linux v1.9.2 Content-Type: audio/mpeg Metadata received: 21752 bytes Metadata interval: 8192 bytes Stream name: HBR1.com - I.D.M. Tranceponder Current title: KahFau in the Mix - The Stars Within Us - CD 2

New Toy

Somehow, my Samsung laser printer went missing while we were traveling. Doubtless it will be one of those situations I get myself into where I savagely accuse a waiter of over-charging or under-changing me, only to find that I have had too much to drink and can't count. Or to put it another way, it's in a box somewhere. Anyway - to hell with all that!! I'm gonna git me some o' dat super-groovy, pict-bridge, multi-card reading, printing, scanning, copying, OCRing, contact sheet printing multi-function, picture-editing action. And I'm gonna git me dat in about half an hour ago. go here Yep I got one! An HP PSC 2355 All-in-one Printer, Scanner, Copier. Can't wait to get home. My favourite feature is the multichoice contact sheet feature. You print it out, then mark in the tick boxes what pictures you like. You then scan the contact sheet back in. It checks what you selected, and prints them at high quality for you. Another great feature is that it creates a DPOF from your annotated contact sheet. That's a Digital Print Order Format file, that it writes onto you memory card. You then just give the card to the photo-lab and they print what you selected on the contact sheet! That sounds seamless! GOD I love technology!

Wanky statement of the day

"... for the purposes of future proofing this system within a complex software ecology such as is found in ..."

Sorry Telstra, but I felt the need to upscale my vocalisatory paradigms to include a post-intellectual referent pertaining to edge-type biological phenomena within a pseudo-ecological metaphor scenario.

The highlight of my week

Has been teetering over the brow of the hill into the second half of my life. Yes, now I am officially middle aged. I am in my late 30's. No longer am I a thirty something. Ahhhh. [sigh] Anyone for a game of canasta?