Myself, Coding, Ranting, and Madness

More on the DEA

Good News! Hopefully! BT and TalkTalk are planning to appeal the Judicial Review.

Digital Economy Act: Judicial Review Revisited

Well, today's news is looking somewhat grim. Mr. Justice Kenneth Parker has ruled against British Telecom PLC's and Talk Talk PLC's objections to the Digital Economy Act after a four day hearing and spending, judging by the length of it, most of the intervening month typing up the response, which was published yesterday

One Night to Breathe With You, One Night of CO2

At least, that's what the poster proclaimed. It shouldn't have, I have since realised, having found a similar one on council website which had the very important phrase 'for a year' in it, but that was all after I'd written this post.

Now, i doubt normally give much thought to what's on posters on my way to work, but this did give me pause. As a computing person, I regularly have multiple machines on for a large amount of time. I even have my own always on server (Eliza, for those of you who remember my machines). So, I did begin to wonder how much CO₂ I might be pumping into the atmosphere

Snorlaxiser

Finally! It is here!

The Snorlaxiser, a concept derived from a silly conversation in the Imperial College Science Fiction Library, is an applet which translates text from English (or, to some extent, any language using a similar vowel set) into the language of the Pokémon Snorlax, is now available as a Google Chrome plug-in.

The Parliamentary Voting System Bill Lords' Review Stage

The last few weeks have highlighted some of the best and the worst of British legislative system in rapid succession. Although we're yet to start hurling dynamite at our leaders, there is a lot going in Parliament. The Lord's Committee stage for this bill began at the end of November, and finished at the beginning of February. The report stage began a couple of days later, and the Lords' Third Reading was yesterday (14th), allowing the 'ping-pong' stage of considering the amendments to begin this morning.

News? What News?

Ugh. I really dislike being ill. It saps too much energy. I don't entirely recall why I missed writing a post last weekend (there was a party on Saturday, but that doesn't really account for Sunday). And I missed my normal Wednesday evening slot to a combination of headaches, a New Year's Eve party (which included our attempt at doing an interpretative dance version of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody"), and large amount of Go.

State of the Bureaucracy

Then there's my favorite example: The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they're in saltwater.

I hear it gets even more complicated once they're smoked.

Barack Obama's quip on complex red tape was one of the few points to really stick in my mind from the State of the Union address, aside from the unnecessary number of ovations. The promise of ‘cutting the red tape&lrquo; is such a common one from elected (or electable) officials that Wikipedia takes a special note of it.

Definitions Rage

This post is was provoked by the (in places) poorly written article about consciousness formation in classical AI from the University of California, San Deigo. Most of my points about the article have or will be merged into my draft of almost the same title. However, the lack of Comp Sci expertise on the paper was extremely apparent, and really got to me when they went on to butcher some of the most basic terms in the field.

1000 Views!

Woo! The 1000 views marker has now been passed (apparently).

In celebration of this momentous event, there will be no proper blog post today. I was going to write one, but the combination of two different Total War games and reorganising my home folder distracted me rather too much. Oh, and at some point, I started messing around with class introspection in Java. Fun times for all...

A New Member of the Crowd

Some people think I'm weird because I name my computers. Others think I'm weird for giving them 'given names'. The correct people just know I'm weird, and think that naming computers may, or may not, be related.

Regardless, I've spent the day messing with computer equipment in a lot more physical way than I have done in a number of years, with a lot of help from one of my flat mates, who knows the layout of both of the boxes I was working on. There've been ups and downs, but 36 hours into the install, I appear to have a set of roughly working machines.