Author: Rory

I don’t hold out much hope for the education of the rest of my class. They’re learning multimedia from someone who thinks the GIF patent is held by Unicef.

I’m not sure whether or not it’s a good thing that the heart failure that eventually killed Christopher Reeve was directly related to his spinal injuries. On the one hand I think I would have liked for him to survive that completely, to have something else get him in the end. But on the other hand I think it would just be too bitterly ironic for him to get taken out by something else after all this time. I have to say that I genuinely thought he would walk again. My only consolation is that, thanks to him, other people probably will. Of course the sentiment that Christopher Reeve was the real super man is a popular one, and I have to agree with it. I liked the comment on Fark, that:

All we have to do is fly around the world a few times really really fast, right? Right?

I’m pleased that he made it through nine years of complete paralysis without, as one commenter put it, "whimpering to some magic invisible man in the sky". He died with dignity and nobility. Now I’m going to rent Superman.

I happen to have the Wikipedia article on QI in my watchlist, so an edit earlier today tipped me off to the fact that the new series (it’s the BBC so it’s a "series", not a "season") starts tomorrow on BBC TWO at 10.00. As an added bonus, one of the guests is Bill Bailey, who, coincidentally, uses Wikipedia.

I’m posting this from my home computer, on the wireless LAN, with Konqueror under Mandrake. w00t.

I’ve had disk images of Mandrake sitting on my desktop for a few weeks, waiting for me to get off my ass (proverbially and literally) to get some CDs. This has now happened, according to the exorbitant pricing of the UCD Students’ Union science shop of €1.50 per CD. I got home and eagerly (I had a slow day) launched into the process of burning these images. But I was thwarted by the dull ineptitude of Nero which utterly failed to behave in a sensible fashion. A quick Googling turned up a neat little program which does what I want, properly and without hassle. Score one more for the people writing software for free.

The kindergarten continues, with my first multimedia practical being an exercise in searching the web. Unfortunately Google seems to be broken in one very particular respect, which just happens to be needed to complete the assignment. The question reads:

Find websites for the following:

An irish[sic] site that links to Microsoft.com

The most obvious search is link:microsoft.com with the radio button for search pages in Ireland checked. This fails to find Irish pages; it returns the same results as with the entire Web button selected. I tried link:microsoft.com site:ie. This gives sites in the top level domain ie, which is a reasonable approximation to Irish sites. No dice. It finds examples of the text "link microsoft.com" in Irish sites, rather than links to that domain.

At this stage I was running out of ideas so I settled for microsoft.ie which has a soft redirect to the main site so is technically correct but a bit of a cheat. It’s not quite the cheat it would have been if I simply gave the URL for this post as my answer. If anyone has any other suggestions I’d like to hear them.

I’ve regained the ability to type so I’m replacing the entry that was here. There’s a Slashdot story about the new series of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I guess it should be called Fit the Thirteenth. It’s only available in Real or Windows Media streaming formats. A little voodoo with MPlayer got me a raw wave-audio file which I’ve converted to mp3. If Netsoc get their act together I’ll have it available online soon.

I can live with a course where I know all of the material (so far) before it starts. I can live with lecturers being a little inaccurate when they simply want the noobs to understand. I can live with doing programming assignments that are about 100,000 times simpler than code I’ve done for other projects. I am struggling to live with the many lecturers who know not the difference between forward-slash and backslash. For you convenience:

Forward-slash

Sometimes simply ‘slash’; the directory seperator in UNIX and on the web; the symbol for division in most languages; positioned below the question mark on an Irish keyboard; looks like this: /

Backslash

The directory seperator on Windows; sometimes used as the ‘modulo’ operator; positioned below the vertical pipe on an Irish keyboard; looks like this: \

I’m prone to refering to things as "my favourite fact", probably after
reading Douglas Adams’ hillarious list which included the fact that the
trans-siberian railroad has a several-hundred-kilometer detour because the
czar had a nick in his ruler when he designated where to build it. As I just
passed my 1000^th edit to
Wikipedia, I’ve started to list my
favourite facts that I discover on the site. I started with the fact that
the Duke of Wellington’s full title was

Field Marshal The Most Noble Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, Marquess of Wellington, Marquess Douro, Earl of Wellington, Viscount Wellington of Talavera and of Wellington, Baron Douro of Wellesley, Prince of Waterloo, Duke of Brunoy, Duke of Vittoria, Marquis of Torres Vedras, Conde de Vimiero, Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo, Grandee of the First Class, Knight of the Garter, Knight of St Patrick, Knight Grand Cross of the Bath, Knight of the Golden Fleece, Knight Grand Cross of Hanover, Knight of the Sword of Sweden, Knight of the Annunciado of Sardinia, Knight of St Andrew of Russia, Knight of St George of Russia, Knight of Maria Teresa, Knight of the Crown of Rue Saxony, Knight of St Hermenegilda of Spain, Knight of the Red Eagle of Brandenburg, Knight of the Golden Lion of Hesse-Kassel, Lord of the Privy Council, Fellow of the Royal Society

That’s a bit better than Rory Parle, BSc.

Getting up early stops my brain from working. Posting from college stops my font-smoothing and my browser from working. No bookmarks, no saved passwords, no skins and extensions. That’s something I’ll have to fix.

I’ve just come out of my first computer science lecture in three years, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. A big deal was made about it being only an introduction, so no genetic algorithms or the like. Unless I get bored and decide to do some learning on my own… which I almost certainly will.

I have Introduction to Programming at 3.00, which should be good for a laugh. Apparently they still consider Java to be a good learning language. I’d rather do Python, but I suppose I could go and do that myself too.