I’m smart enough to appreciate just how much smarter than me my friends are. As I always say, talent recognizes genius. Talent should also recognize its own limits. I’ve reached that stage in my life when I’ve had to accept that I won’t be able to do the things I dreamt of doing when I […]
Read MoreOne of the discussions I had at Jackie’s party was about government incompetence in IT procurement and management. Gazillions of pounds of our money goes to buy BMWs for “consultants” who I wouldn’t trust to format a floppy disk and the results are exactly as you would expect. Of course poorly thought out and chronically […]
Read More[via The (normally very geeky) Daily WTF]
Read MoreIn an ad in Sound On Sound, Pete Townshend is quoted as saying: “I’m a huge fan of Ivory. It amazes me every time I use it.” Ivory is, according to the reviews I’ve read, superb software for obtaining grand piano sounds that are indistinguishable from the real thing (they are the real thing), but […]
Read MoreCher can sing, but it’s commonly thought that the warbly electronic effect applied to her voice on her multi-platinum hit Believe was achieved with an infamous piece of pitch-correction software called Auto-Tune. Recording nerds debate whether it was that program or a less interesting vocoder-type gadget (Digitech Talker) that really did the business, but Auto-Tune […]
Read MoreOh, the inevitability! Five hours ago they released a security upgrade for WordPress 2.01, taking it to version 2.02. Hang on to your mouses. Here I go again.
Read MoreUPDATE 2: Would you believe I’m trying to fix all this while builders are fixing a broken pipe that’s flooded my flat? UPDATE: PooterGeek now looks strange to all of you. I hope normal service will be resumed soon. It has come to my attention that PooterGeek suddenly looks strange to those of you reading […]
Read MoreIf any of you have been forced to look at the old, purple, Movable Type version of PooterGeek lately it’s because my hosts, who claimed they would have finished their upgrades by Friday, decided to move all my data to a new server this weekend. The first I knew about it was a note in […]
Read Moredoctorvee’s ‘Blog is looking rather slick these days. He also has a link to “thinking chess” [you need to have Java installed, but it’s worth it] which is even slicker, so slick that it’s got me thinking about doing something I swore off years ago: learning another programming language. Also via doctorvee, this pleasing tally […]
Read MoreJackie is of course right to be disgusted with Alastair Campbell admitting that both he and the Prime Minister are clueless about computers. She is wrong to make any connection between this and their being employees of the state. Many senior managers in large UK organisations, both public and private sector, are incompetent because once […]
Read MoreOne of my correspondents—quite possibly someone in Canada—has a dose of I-Worm/Mytob.HL. Please could you do something about it because I’m getting bored of the infected spam your machine is sending me. Thank you.
Read MoreIf you’ve got the bandwidth, this sharp computer-animated film from Taiwan is worth the download.
Read MoreI occasionally use a cheap-and-cheerful piece of computer music software called “FLStudio“. Its publishers changed the package’s name from “FruityLoops” a few years ago. Today was the first time I read the explanation for the name change given on the Website of Image-Line Software, the German company that produces FLStudio. The company offers three reasons: […]
Read MoreDont you just hate the way when you are googling for someone and you type in, say, “Laurence.Rittenour”, Google thinks for a microsecond, comes back with no hits, and asks “Did you mean: ‘Laurence.Ritenour‘? And you think, “Yeah, I probably did”, and you click on the corrected link that Google so helpfully provides. Then Google […]
Read MoreThis is a stunning image. Was it Photoshopped to get like that? Does it matter if it was? If the image was shot onto an electronic sensor rather than film is it really a photograph anyway? And how many “genuinely” photographic images are created with filters and artificial light and darkroom dodging-and-burning? Whatever its provenance, […]
Read MoreThe breadth and depth of Noam Chomsky’s wrongness must be marvelled at. Within and without his professed area of expertise he is so skilled a sponsor of untruth that, in some future world, whole virtual shelves will be devoted to studies of how it happened that so many of his peers were willing to stir […]
Read MoreBecause of a bug in the “Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem”, an extremely obscure site called Blogesque (2 944 978 citations) became the biggest ‘Blog on the planet yesterday, one day after registering with the Ecosystem. I’d have paid good money to see the look on Instapundit‘s (5 451 citations) face when he saw that one appear out of […]
Read MoreI have been banging on about the advantages of open source software for schools for years, giving talks, writing green ink letters to civil servants, even (thanks to Patricia Hewitt) meeting some senior mandarins. Sadly, most politicians’ and bureaucrats’ understanding of information technology barely extends to email. This last fact, incidentally, might have something to […]
Read MorePerhaps you have heard those George Gershwin player piano recordings, rendered from rolls of his original performances. Much as I admire Gershwin, his showy, overworked playing hasn’t, to my ears, dated well, even when recreated live by modern human mimics who are a more sensitive to contemporary tastes. It’s like listening to a blousey old […]
Read MoreI’d often wondered what computer people meant when they referred to one of their kind as a “systems architect”. This UNIX ‘Blog has the answer. There’ll be so many unused monitors left at our place when we shut down we’ll be able to build “Screenhenge”. [Thanks to Peter Tribble]
Read MoreI wanted to comment on a ‘Blog yesterday, but I couldn’t read the distorted characters on the security image clearly enough to type them in. Does this mean that I am really an artificial intelligence?
Read MoreIf you had developed an amazing new technique to see through your laptop, what would you do with that power? Set up a flickr gallery to show off your handiwork. [via Slashdot] cat scan [UPDATE: After you’ve browsed a few to get the idea, you should check out this one—truly the work of a geek […]
Read MoreWhat happens when inflation on goods goes negative and inflation on services stays positive? You get a free computer for signing up with a mobile phone network.
Read MoreReading a ‘Blog on the Web is like watching a swan on the water: you have no idea of the furious activity that’s going on under the surface. Within hours of my upgrading this thing, 57 varieties of annoying spamming scum and devious abusive snotbag converged on pootergeek.com probing and testing for weaknesses. Every five […]
Read MoreLast weekend, as I regarded the wreckage from my most recent computer system balls-up (again), I decided that I should at least squeeze some good from the bad and upgrade PooterGeek’s software to the latest version of WordPress. I stayed up late on Sunday night carefully moving my modifications from 1.1 to 1.2, and also […]
Read MoreJust over a week ago, Duncan Grisby, one of this city’s many alpha geeks, invited readers of the legendary “cam.misc” discussion board to pop along to his Website to examine his action shots of a burglar. The thief had been filmed by the video Webcam that was sitting on top of the four thousand pounds’ […]
Read MoreI am quiet because I am busy fixing a computer. Sorry everyone. I did take a brief break on Friday evening. During that interval I watched two young women hit each other very hard in front of a baying mob—not on screen; in the flesh. Naturally I’ll ‘Blog that. In the meantime, please feel free […]
Read MoreWoke up this morning. Had no emails. I’m not that unpopular. My server just failed. If you tried to email me between midnight GMT and now then your message has disappeared into the ether. Sorry! Please resend it.
Read MoreA couple of weeks ago The Today Programme broadcast an item about how a group of psychologists had discovered that people who prepared job applications by hand were more likely to lie in them than people who made applications through online forms. Today invited an “expert” onto the air to discuss this finding: a graphologist. […]
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