beardyw

The "New" towns in the US make some sense in that they mean "Our" town of that name. Here in the UK we have towns like Newcastle where the newness has lost its novelty after a 1000…

Not as I understand it. A harmonic is an integer multiple of the original frequency. An octave is a power of two. So the second and fourth harmonics are octaves. The third is not, though still on a no…

I was surprised that they have 66% share in US since they have only about 11% worldwide. That means the average outside the US must be well below 11%.

Time was that a service was great if it gave you what you asked for. It is ironic that now RSS is great because it only gives you what you asked for.

I interviewed for a job at Elsevier near Camden Lock (London) years ago. I said the location was great if I decided to get a tattoo. Didn't get the job. Thank you Lord.

A stopped clock is right twice a day for a duration of 0 seconds. A correct digital clock showing seconds is right 86,400 times a day for a duration of 0 seconds. So it is 2 x 0 = 0 versus 86,400 x 0 …

Other than the start and zero the time remaining is in reality an irrational number which cannot be represented at all. So every representation ever is truncated. :)

"What If You Could Do It All Over?" - well without the benefit of hindsight it would be exactly the same of course. Free will exists up to the time we make a choice, but that is just the wei…

I fully agree. I ducked out of Windows when Win7 support ended early this year and loaded Ubuntu on my aged laptop. My experience was ok enough. When it finally died in the summer I bought a well spec…

I really enjoyed an episode of Mighty Ships (episode 1:7 -just looked it up) showing just how hard laying cables is. A surprise to me is they carry quite high voltage to power seabed repeaters. It sho…

Also I think those are sodium lights. More or less a single wavelength, hence the monochrome (yellow and black) look. Just about as far opposite to daylight as you can get! It was a semicircle against…

Ah, I have fond memories of that, a favourite for me too. I wish it was a permanent exhibit. His exhibition there last year was just great too with lots of light used in different ways.

These are great!

I was asked by a company to sort out complaints which were coming from recipients of their XML. The big win was doing validation against the schema on the outgoing XML!

I had forgotten webrings. Looking up on Wikipedia it reads like a very sad history of the web.

I have used the Petit version a lot and I love it. But it is not always very efficient because it does no caching. I've done a fix so that when I have 512 bytes to spare it will save the last sec…

I (unlike you) am lost for words.

I guess that's a quote. Where's it from?

Henning Mankell's Wallander books are just great. Made into a fantastic series starring Kenneth Branagh. I also enjoy Arnaldur Indridasson (Iceland) though many might find them a bit too slow and…

The world needs hover for touch screens. Someone sort it out.

Ha, I thought that must be true at the time. It convinced me not to persevere. Good to hear I was right.

I am now retired and have kept only 4 or 5 technical books. This is one of them. The elegance of this code is in the way it fulfills its role and fits in the space available.

My story: My very first job was as COBOL programmer aged 20. I was made team leader after a couple of years and found it was a great job for me. You are hands on but you get to be involved in more stu…

I think there is a general problem of fonts being treated as if they were all equivalent when in reality there are fonts which can only be sanely used as display fonts, and body text fonts which admit…

Is that a actual quote? If so it would be great if you could clarify where it is from.

>L over R, L over R would make a granny knot. Same in the UK.

You would enjoy Upstart Crow on BBC, a comedy series about Shakespeare. He is told by everyone his plays are way too long, the plots are often ridiculous, and the comedies are just not funny.

I have, since January, a "frozen" Windows 7 environment with WiFi/LAN switched off. I use it rarely, now on Ubuntu, but there is something about it that feels good where it didn't …

It would certainly run in a web page. It would be fantastic to interest children in chess. I'm in!

From the street, number 6 (Stamford Street) looks worse than the photo. To me it looks a bit like how I imagine a Las Vegas hotel. Whatever the building had before is lost anyway.