Rants and ramblings of a lecturer
With any luck you should be able to view this by clicking here.
I had to remove the inline version – it was causing my page to take forever to load.
There is a jpeg of it and some other panoramas that I took in Chicago and Indianapolis in the gallery.
I’ve just done my first industrial year visit, and I got a real doozie. I had to visit r0n1n, who is spending the year at CERN in Switzerland.
So whilst there I had a tour of some of the facilities on and off site, including ATLAS, ALICE and The Globe of Science and Innovation
As I was travelling light, I only took my 50mm F1.8 with me, which equates to a 75mm on the D70, so I had to take multiple photographs and then stitch them together with DoubleTake
I’ve just seen the “World Premier” of the trailer for Spiderman 3 on VH1, and boy does it look good, but really, do you have to trail the film now when it won’t be out until May next year – that’s a whole 6 months away! We’ll have got fed up with the hype, or forgotten about it by then.
If you want to see it yourself, then go to http://www.ifilm.com/ and download it in HD.
Cnet has a story on how the Eclipse IDE is now 5 years old, and has a huge impact on the development process as well as proving how successful open source can be.
Eclipse is my tool of choice, and I’ve been using it for a few years now, whilst I only use a few of the features I do find it to be an incredibly easy platform to use, and the fact that it lets me get on with coding without getting in the way of my coding just fits the way I like to work, like using MacOSX.
We had CBBC come and film us last Monday for a new series starting in the new year. Wonderful World of Weird features a number of reporters travelling around the UK looking for weird and wonderful things to add to the map of the weird.
You’ll have to watch the show to find out if we were judged weird enough, and apparently it airs in February in a 7:30am slot, so you’ll have to be up early.
I’ll put some photos up soon.
I’ve just upgraded this server from Dapper Drake LAMP server to Edgy Eft using apt-get dist-upgrade after changing all occurrences for dapper to edgy in /etc/apt/sources.list, and so far everything looks good.
There are some issues with the new release, but nothing that should affect this server – only things that might affect desktop systems.
It does have quite a lot of new features as standard including Firefox 2.0 and you can still download it unlike Fedora Core 6 which was avaiable for download for a massive 4 hours before it was pulled.
A couple of films to watch – the first pretty short, the second somewhat longer.
I’m reminded of Michael Moore going on record saying that it’s OK to download his movies and watch them as long as you don’t make a profit from them… A link to the blog on creative commons
This will be the last welly post for a while, but we’ve just had some more nice press coverage in the Times Good University Guide – You can look at the pdf of the two page spread here.
The photo was taken by a very nice freelancer called Tim Cuff who has a gallery of six different photos which you can purchase if you feel so inclined.
I do like the magic levitating wellies.
The US Dept of Homeland Security put together its wonderful threat level avisory system as a result of the undeniably horrific attacks 5 years ago.
As a result, we’re not allowed to take drinks onto planes, we are forced to use plastic cutlery, unless we’re in first class, and a tee shirt is a security risk!
Now, call me a radical thinker, but doesn’t this mean that the terrorists have actually won, they’ve managed to take away a lot of our freedom, certainly in air travel, but are you really going to die as a result of terrorism?
Some of the nice folks over at Wired News have put together a nice survey of the things that threaten ongoing life in the 11 year period 1995 to 2005 and have come up with the following nice little graphic – it really puts things into perspective – especially the fact that being shot by law enforcement is more likely to kill you than terrorism…
| S E V E R E Driving off the road: 254,419 Falling: 146,542 Accidental poisoning: 140,327 |
| H I G H Dying from work: 59,730 Walking down the street: 52,000. Accidentally drowning: 38,302 |
| E L E V A T E D Killed by the flu: 19,415 Dying from a hernia: 16,742 |
| G U A R D E D Accidental firing of a gun: 8,536 Electrocution: 5,171 |
| L O W Being shot by law enforcement: 3,949 Terrorism: 3147 Carbon monoxide in products: 1,554 |
It looks like the proposed new anti-hacking laws might do some good for prosecuting offenders – Denial of Service attacks are now classified as offences, but then it might also outlaw legal uses of hacking tools.
More on Spy blog and The Register
There’s a link to the text of the new bill here
Wikipedia has an article here