tonym0603

Sunday, June 15, 2003

Friday way busy as expected, and weekend equally. Signing off now to go to the Drome. Pblogging from here ...

Thursday, June 10, 2003

We have truly entered the post-post-modernist world, where irony is so ironic it's sincere, with the advent of competitive air guitar.

Suicide chicken terrorizes New Zealand. 'Nuff said.

Wednesday, June 9, 2003

According to KL, Nick Leeson, Mr. Rogue Trader himself, has settled down in Galway with an Irish lass. Awwwww ....

Tuesday, June 9, 2003

Spotted on Instapundit: An American's Statement to the World: simplistic stuff, but to be fair, a lot of ordinary decent Americans hold these views - and they're not all unjustified views either. Now if the reality matched ....

QuickTime VT is used to make this stunning diorama of the Lost City of Petra.

Experts fear that cursive hand-writing is on the way out, victim to e-mail and text messaging. Reminds me that I'll probably be off the air blogwise for last two weeks of this month as the little town of Die doesn't have an Internet cafe. It'll be back to pencil and paper - and cursive hand-writing.

Monday, June 8, 2003

In Baghdad, it's getting too hot to blog. Raed is wilting, and points us to a friends blog, G in Baghdad. It's quite good.

And from boom to doom. They're talking about the death of Bluetooth, which looks like knuckling under to the more popular WiFi standard.

Friday, June 5, 2003

From SF to reality for quantum crypto. When I first read the Simon Singh book, "Code", on this subject, it was pitched at "20 years out": and that was five years ago. Now these guys have demoed quantum crypto over 100 km. and predict commercial apps in 3 years.

"It's hard to know where it will all end. Is there a country were people will work for free?". India gets gazumped by the likes of Vietnam in the outsourcing game.

How the ?*&^ did this lot become cool again. It sparked the following discussion between me and herself:

To: TMulqueen@electricpaper.ie ("Tony Mulqueen")
cc:
Subject: RE: Guardian Unlimited Arts Friday Review Dorian Lynskey on 1980s revivalmania

oh my Gawd, Garry Numan!!! oh dear :( mind you we all have our moments, the call Simple Minds risable and I used to absolutely LOVE them. I think I probobly would still like them. And some of the cure early stuff is pure Joy Division or if you like pre Radiohead, in fact some early Cure stuff is v. like Radiohead. hmmm will Radiohead be scoffed at in a decade or so!? We'll see....

Remember we went to see the Cure and they were v. good? So there! Woof!
...

A

Hi hon
Extremely good points here ... I thoroughly enjoyed the Cure concert and found them to be - whatever their working-class roots - a quintessentially English college rock band: thoughtful, inventive, psychedelic, creative, mournful in a life-affirming sort of way - in other words, exactly like Radiohead, who are English college rock for the new millenium.
I can't wait to hear the new album. Getting critically roasted doesn't deter me.
I don't think they'll be scoffed at in a decade either.
BTW, I see there's a new Eels album out (after how long!? what a bunch of surly under-achievers). Normally, I wouldn't be rushing out to buy Mr. bushy-beard-and-wooly-hat-with-lots-of-negative-attitude, but I read that George W. Bush loathes Eels with a particular passion, so just maybe, just maybe ...
Best
/tonym

A nice piece about Mr. Nice. Good to see the old geezer settle down.

Here's an interesting blogging ecosystem maintained by some Kiwis. Link city.

The blognoise issue is debated at the Reg. Collars are heating up. Personally, I think it should be possible to search globally, minus blogs, and just in blogs. Just do it, Google - and keep everyone happy.

Don't have the time to look at it now but there's an audio filesharing scene at http://www.etree.org/ that's worth investigation. They include a lot of Phish and Grateful Dead stuff.

Can't link to the Times, it's a sub site, so here's an excerpt describing how BitTorrent, a new file-sharing protocol, works.

"Here's how the program, called BitTorrent, works. Instead of putting your masterwork on your website, you put up a much, much smaller "torrent" file instead. Torrent files can only be understood by Cohen's client program, itself a small (and free) download.

When a visitor clicks on the torrent file, the client program on their computer locates other visitors who are currently downloading the same file. Like eager fans at a swapmeet, those other downloaders can trade data with you. So, if another "bittorrenter" has the last few megabytes of the file, they can send you that chunk. And, in return, you send whatever chunks you've located from other downloaders. After the initial "seeding" by the original author, BitTorrent downloads rarely need to return to the main provider to get their data. Instead, they mostly trade the data between themselves on the edges of the Net.

The bandwidth cost of providing the file is, effectively, spread out among all those who are attempting to download it. And because most home and business bandwidth is free below certain limits, the distributed cost of the file drops to zero (for the downloaders and provider, at least)."

Thursday, June 4, 2003

Amazing what a lump of foam can do at 540 mph. Some of the background to the Columbia crash is covered here. Kinetic energy = 1/2 mv 2 rules OK.

An interesting point is made here about e-mail as the death of history. It describes how e-mails and PowerPoint presentations are driving out the paper flow of memoranda and minutes that are the fodder of historians. Post-Gulf Two, for example, there will be no paper trail of military decision making for historians to analyse. And what about Raed's blogs - and others?? Probably all up in digital smoke too ...

The canonical list of Bushisms is well worth a browse. Sample entry:

"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children thinking."

Wednesday, June 3, 2003

Palm and Handspring have merged. It looks like Handspring (which was set up by Palm's founders post the 3Com acquisition of Palm) was about to go down the tubes until Palm decided to rescue its errant offspring.

Ever feel you're being driven up the walls? Check out this nanotech project which is aiming to clone the hair on geckos' legs, which is what enables them to do all that cool skittering across the ceiling. The ultimate aim is a fabric that would allow humans to do the same. Hmmmmmm ....

The European Space Agency is back in the space game with some new funding. Along with the news of the Galileo project (a European alternative to the US-controlled GPS system), this gives a good feeling that we won't be totally reliant on the US for space tech.

Trip to the doc this morning to get the results: negative, just a little ole naevus. Happy to get the niggle out of the back of my mind.
Dropped by the Murrough Enviromental Centre on the way home to get a second compost bin. The young lady there told me it takes 24 buckets of compostables to make 1 bucket of compost.

Tuesday, June 2, 2003

Feeling a tingle as the hiking trip draws closer. Just under two weeks now ... Feel I've gotten in very little training at the walking, but hopefully all the barrow work will stand to me ... Anyway, the hills usually break you in after the first couple of hard days.

Monday, June 1, 2003

Betook ourselves down to Kilkenny to see Lucy and famille. As ever, a warm reception and lovely food, and the sun came out and shone, as it often does for Lucy. Had a bit of fun with boules, though a naughty Pippin ran off with the petanque. Scooby had a great day out.

posted by A Seeker after Knowledge 7:20 AM