Geeky

Google Dribble

June 29, 2009

Nothing says “I’m excited” like a bouncing happy face emoticon. Wanna bet?

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A problem with angle brackets

April 11, 2009

After migrating I had this really bizarre problem where something seemed to be stripping out the angle brackets < > around HTML. At first I thought it might be ecto. Then I looked around at my host, and it seems that there is a problem with something or other that enabled ecto to post via [...]

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After the migration

April 11, 2009

I know there are readers who don’t care that what they see here is now being served by a delicious new all-singing, all-dancing, super-spiffy server — but they might give silent thanks when they (or so I am promised) receive far fewer error messages in the future. For them, then, which is probably everyone except [...]

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Migration test

April 5, 2009

Just a little post to see whether I have made the migration successfully. Later: Alas not. I thought I had followed the instructions to the letter, but when the time came to check, blank page blues. I did a ton of things short of actually slaughtering a large cock, but to no effect. So, we’re [...]

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I wouldn’t boast

March 30, 2009

John Gruber, a man whose opinions I value, thinks Stock Names “might be the cleverest promotion campaign I’ve ever seen“. It’s not bad, I agree, as a shill for something called Widgetfinger, a content management system. The claim is that the entire Stock Names page took less than 10 minutes from registering the domain name [...]

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A geeky Skype tip

March 26, 2009

Stupid, I know, to resume blogging with a nerdy Skype tip, but this is handy. I wanted to print a chat, but couldn’t find a way to do so. Then I read at the Skype forum that you just type /htmlhistory where you would normally type text into the chat, and it opens the chat [...]

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A postcard from Copenhagen

March 12, 2009

Boffins are worrying that when Australian farmers can sell carbon sequestration, they might prefer to earn more doing that than growing wheat. That will increase the world price of wheat. So the farmers will grow wheat. So what happens to the carbon? But we can do both; increase yield by increasing soil carbon “I don’t [...]

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Look at the teeth on this nag

February 20, 2009

I am deeply grateful to Darwin College Cambridge for organising a wonderful set of Darwin Lectures in this the year of Darwin excess. I’m even more grateful that they recorded them in reasonably high quality and made them available over the intertubes. And not just available, but easily available as a podcast that I can [...]

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Very mild disappointment

February 15, 2009

It has been hectic this past week, hence the lack of activity here. I took the time this weekend to upgrade to the new version of WordPress and for the first time ever felt let down. On another blog the entire process just stopped. I carried on and hand-rolled it, because I was in the [...]

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I hate Duncan Hull

February 6, 2009

Because he pointed me to this video. And now I’m being sucked into a vortex of appalling “scientific” music videos. Alas, the “making” video to accompany that wonderful effort above doesn’t give any of the details I truly want. are those all employees of the company? How many have PhDs. Is it a loving parody, [...]

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Micro-blogging

January 18, 2009

An insightful post by Tim Bray — to the effect that “Twitter [is] a venture-funded startup with no business model, and these are tough times. They might make it and they might get rich, but it would be totally unsurprising if, 24 months from now, Twitter were gone, or a zombie site, or its BigCo [...]

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Inspiring

December 21, 2008

RIP Poor Man’s Version, long live The Rosa Parks of Blogs. I’ll be back.

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It is indeed the digital input device, stupid

December 18, 2008

My friend the vombatovore and I have an ongoing thing about how utterly useless most (all?) netbooks are for people who touch type. Maybe people with long, slender digits are OK with small keyboards, but I’m not, and neither is he. In fact, I don’t really need the screen, except for reviewing. But I do [...]

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Lazy blogging: just one of the things I’ve done

December 4, 2008

I’ve got a bunch of things that I want to write scribbled as notes but haven’t had the luxury of uninterrupted time to do something with them. But I also wanted to get something done, so I took the lazy route of appropriating a meme. I saw this one over at Byzantium’s Shores, where Jaquandor [...]

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Sniff sniff? Ah! Tropical wetness, zesty freshness and bursting floralcy

November 21, 2008

It was, perhaps, the most inauspicious start to a TedTalk I’ve ever known. A shiny guy, wandering back and forth, telling the audience that soon they would be experiencing the top notes of a fragrance, Beyond Paradise, which had been split up by the perfumer who created it for Esteé Lauder into “successive bits”. Watching [...]

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Very stupid spam

October 17, 2008

I’m minded to collect, for a week, say, some of the comments that spammers leave on my web site in the faint hope that I’m feeble-minded enough not to spam them. The mystery abides … Comment: Not bad at all, but this topic is rather little of interest. Please do not disappoint your readership. Comment: [...]

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First, you need self-awareness

October 1, 2008

If only … presumably people do actually read their comments, just as they presumably do look at themselves in the mirror before they go out. Still, it is a nice thought, from xkcd.

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Super-geeky progress report and a warning

September 21, 2008

Spending a very pleasant afternoon building a new look and feel for the other place, and getting somewhere, slowly. First off, I managed to place one single post from one specific category in a sidebar. That’s good. But then, of course, I wanted to exclude that specific category from the main page. Not so easy. [...]

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So I know that. So what?

September 19, 2008

Why is it hotter in summer than in winter? That was one of four science-ish questions that Jonathan Drori put to TED in February 2007. As it happens I knew the answer to that one and to the other three. Drori said that it was surprising how few people, including — gasp — MIT students, [...]

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Green-eyed god strikes again

September 8, 2008

You probably don’t have time for coffee, whereas with a Microsoft installation you have time for dinner or a trip to the cinema. Oh no! I think I may have machine-envy. The Wombat has an Asus EEE PC 1000. But, how good is the keyboard? If it was an inch bigger I think I could [...]

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In which I attempt to trump Stephen J. Dubner and avoid a drubbing

July 9, 2008

This is really dangerous. I’m going way out on a limb here. Given the trouncing Dubner got yesterday, I really should be more circumspect. But hey, what the heck? There was a really silly mistake in The Economist last week. I am so glad I got that off my chest. In a book review, we [...]

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Minor tweakage

July 3, 2008

Just having a little play with the sidebar (which is down the bottom rather than to one side, but no matter). There’s a spiffy WordPress plugin called Comment Remix that lets you do good things, like display the latest comments at the top, rather than at the bottom, and makes it easier to reply to [...]

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Obliging as ever

July 3, 2008

It’s a scandal! Jonathan Eisen says that Hollywood is making a movie tentatively entitled Tree of Life. Plot summary? In a mystical world of folklore, several individuals embrace in a race to find the Tree of Life, said to give immortality, fertility, and other supernatural powers. Eisen wants to protect this holiest of holy phrases [...]

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You speak, I listen

July 1, 2008

The new design seems to be going down pretty well (although I need to tweak some more) but at least two people want to see recent posts, in case they’ve been away for a while. So there it is, down below on the right. Now, do I also need to put Recent comments down there [...]

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