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http://findingada.com/" gives error 404, unsurprisingly.
Posts by Evan Essence
282 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Dec 2010
Geek girls lauded on Ada Lovelace Day
NASA: 'Asteroid armageddon less likely than we feared'
Monday 3rd October 2011 11:25 GMT
The Planetary Society
> Have we done any of the preliminary engineering to accomplish such a thing?
I don't know about government-funded work, but The Planetary Society has helped with some research. Reg readers might be interested in the Mirror Bees study at the University of Glasgow, for instance. Of course, as an organisation of amateurs and volunteers, the Society's resources are limited. (Disclosure: I'm proud to be a member.)
See here: http://planetary.org/programs/projects/targetearth/
Reebok used 'very fit woman' in buttock-related deception
BBC website ditches modules in facelift
Wednesday 21st September 2011 11:31 GMT
Podcasts
«sick&tired of 90% of programme pages linking straight to iPlayer *instead of giving information*.»
Information such as a link to the podcast (for radio programmes). These days if you want to download a one-off podcast it seems you have to go to the "podcast" home page or use Google. Maybe the BBC thinks everyone uses iTunes? Well, they bloody well don't.
Wednesday 21st September 2011 11:09 GMT 
Meh
I like the fact that the page bloody well stays still unless you click on something. I hate those slides/carousels that change by themselves all the time. It's like giving someone a newspaper and saying "here, read this", then a second later whipping it away and shoving something else in their hands and saying "no, read this instead!" Sites such as, er... <cough>.
Apart from that: meh.
Ultrabook makers turn to fibreglass to cut costs
UK.gov coder defines open standards: 'A lot like porn'
Thursday 8th September 2011 16:29 GMT 
«O'Neill, who is not shy of referring to taxpayers as "customers"»
How 1980s. Transport for London constantly do this in their announcements, calling passengers "customers", and it really pisses me off. As if the most important thing to them is getting money out of people, more important than providing a decent service.
Oh, much like HMRC, in fact...
All WikiLeaks' secret US cables are on BitTorrent in full
Big pharma discredited by Twitter drug-pushing: Official
Microsoft, McDonald's absolved of tracking cookie abuse
ANU plasma thruster gets research boost
European Council: Creating hacking tools should be criminal across EU
NASA's asteroid hunter creeps up on Vesta
White van men swipe British black bees
Intel debuts '3D transistors' with 22nm chip recipe
Calling all readers: Want some new icons?
FTP celebrates ruby anniversary
Friday 15th April 2011 15:39 GMT
Re: Still used here
Less checking gives less overhead, so reliability suffers. IME, it's always necessary to bolt on your own check of the file lengths as transmitted and received to ensure the file hasn't been truncated. Maybe a checksum instead of/as well as. Pretty silly, really, much easier to use a reliable transfer method in the first place.
Traffic-light plague sweeps UK: Safety culture strangles Blighty
Monday 28th February 2011 16:35 GMT 
Buttons at junctions are fake, anyway
"In London full pedestrian crossing stages generally happen only if a traffic-light button is pushed, but this isn't very helpful at busy junctions except in the middle of the night."
I can't remember the last time I actually bothered to press a button at a junction (I don't mean a pelican), because they're all fake. Whether they're pressed or not, the traffic lights just carry out their cycle.
That includes full pedestrian crossing stages, unless I've been very unlucky driving around in the early hours. I don't get "generally": I think you mean "never". Yes, 24 hours round the clock the lights stop all traffic from all directions, regardless of how many pedestrians are around. In the early hours that can average out to as near as dammit zero...
How to make power conversion less sucky
Cold call scareware scammers aim to bring Mac fans into the fold
Hansard to pulp paper processes
Google algorithm change squashes code geek 'webspam'
BBC Trust says no to kit-specific iPlayer apps
Saturday 15th January 2011 06:18 GMT
And offline listening
I want to listen to radio programmes of my choice in the gym and in my car, and I don't want to dick about with streaming -- my little media player works fine. There are podcasts to be had from the BBC, but music podcasts are right out. The Paul Jones blues programme fades out tracks after 30 seconds, so you have an interview with the artist and then 30 seconds from their latest album, or whatever. The podcast version is cut down to about ⅓ the length of the broadcast version -- utterly ridiculous. The back catalogue of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg is very welcome, but officially (cough) it's unavailable to me in my preferred listening environments (above).
In practice I (a BBC licence fee payer) listen to more music from non-British podcasts than I do live from the BBC. If I could be bothered, I could get the programmes onto my media player through various means, as I've done before, but actually I couldn't be bothered.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
