Computers

Have A Break

It is fiddly. It is perverse. Most of all it is sublimely pointless. He doesn’t even like KitKats. Chris Applegate of qwghlm brings us one of the greatest expressions of the geek aesthetic since those guys put a Webserver in a fly. While I’m on the subject of geek culture and food, this from geek […]

Read More

The Rightful Winner Of The Turner Prize

As if to prove that not everything about post-modernism is bad, I have stumbled upon something that all but defines the term as applied to the arts. I sincerely hope that you have Java on your computer so that you too can experience Pac Mondrian. [For those of you who haven’t got Java installed you […]

Read More

Punching Through The Glass Ceiling

One of the co-workers of tech company cubicle drone Dilbert in Scott Adams’s inspired eponymous cartoon series is a fierce and talented engineer called Alice. She responds to the sexism and stupidity of her co-workers with extreme violence. She has triangular hair. Apropos of nothing, yesterday’s Economist magazine profiles Padmasree Warrior, chief technology officer with […]

Read More

Just Tell Me “No”

I used to have a Sega Game Gear.I bought it from an affluent, young family who begged me to take it away from them before it destroyed their lives. They’d got it for their son, who turned out to be more interested in catching toads and sitting in cardboard boxes. Mummy and daddy then became […]

Read More

Google Bible

I’ve reviewed this book about Google for the UK UNIX Users’ Group. I can’t link to the review because they don’t release the stuff from their magazine until months after it appears in print. In summary, it’s good enough that I would have paid for it if they hadn’t given me a free copy.

Read More

Hopelessly Behind

People—especially Adam, Claire and Jon—have been sending me lots of fascinating material and I haven’t had the time to read, comment on, or link to it. I slipped behind on PooterGeek during my ‘Net-less weekend just gone and I haven’t caught up since. Here‘s one from Adam on possibly the nerdiest gathering since the Albert […]

Read More

Trouble With My ‘R’s

My computer keyboard is driving me insane. The ‘R’ key is alternately firing twice or not producing a character at all. In the past couple of days PooterrGeek has had “resevoir” for “reservoir” and “amed” for “armed”. My apologies. Some time this weekend I hope I’ll get a chance to fix it.

Read More

Just Like Us

Ultimately, the goal of the work I contributed to in my Master’s thesis (1996) was to find a new computational technique for examining 3-D images. With it, psychiatrists would be able to detect variations in in the structure of human brains (in something called their “torsion”) and identify schizophrenics without having to dissect their heads […]

Read More

Whodunnit?

Microsoft will offer a bounty of $250 000 to anyone giving information leading to the conviction of virus writers*. Someone on Slashdot pointed out that this was reminiscent of O. J. Simpson swearing not to rest until Nicole Simpson’s real killer is found. *Yes, I know I should use the phrase “worm writers”.

Read More

Terminology, Psychology, Who-ology, Stringology

It’s a busy ‘Blogging morning. First: here’s a scholarly (or at least reasonably well-informed) argument for me to remove my usual distancing quotation marks from “Islamofascist”, “balanced” by more criticism for the U.S. administration over Iraq and terrorism (specifically Al-Qaeda and friends) in a ‘Blog interview with Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside […]

Read More

Flypaper / Quagmire / Tarpit

Amber* sent a link to a New York Times article [free registration required yakety yakety] about how the United States’ postwar slackness has fostered terrorism in Iraq. She also writes to tell me that, like everyone else (but me), she has received 400 email messages from various worms. Ah, Microsoft. (According to Geoff, our head […]

Read More

Phew

I’ve been too tied up with computer problems this past couple of nights to post anything to the ‘Blog. How did I fix them? Well, non-geeks might as well stop reading this entry now. I fried the Windows partition table on my Win98 drive. Running PartitionMagic 4.0 under DOS I was told to follow the […]

Read More
Newer Posts