As part of the Great Library Rebuilding on campus, level 5 is now "computing, business and fiction". Are they trying to tell us something?

Also, the "international" 2nd edition of the Dragon Book has some dreadful corporate clipart on the front cover instead of a dragon. Appalling!

The members of our team with a laptop needed mains power at the top of the tower and so they started poking about in a filthy and rather haphazardly installed equipment cabinet looking for something to plug into while I watched from the other side of the chamber (with my battery powered equipment). It contained routers from the dawn of time that ( Read more... )

Queen's Tower sits at the centre of Imperial's campus where I work, a lovely bit of Victoriana left over from the beautiful buildings that used to sit here before they were demolished in the name of 1960s progress. Said progress producing some of the more hideous carbuncles of the age ( Read more... )

Went to the South East of England Agricultural Society Autumn Show and Game Fair today. Sadly, Foot and Mouth meant that there was precious little in the way of agriculture but we did pick up some spectacular duck sausages from these people which were extremely tasty this evening. One of the many side shows was a classic tractor display (this year ( Read more... )

Yay! The bastard-wallpaper-from-hell is finally off the bedroom wall. Back in the mists of time when psychadelics were readily and enthusiastically available someone stuck lining paper to the walls with ICI's latest and greatest uber paste and then proceeded to paint it bright yellow, with thick, waterproof, solvent-based paint (probably coloured ( Read more... )

1. Think of an idea.
   
2. Make the idea sound as complicated and ground breaking as possible, preferably using large equations, especially when these equations take up more page space than just using plain English.
   
3. Sprinkle liberally with citations and impressive looking graphs. Having the graphs be more than only slightly connected with your work is not ( Read more... )

How can (big!) companies still be making devices with faulty USB implementations? It's almost as if the design of USB is overcomplex so that as much patented IP from the various companies that created it could be shoehorned in...

Still, after a swift kernel hack and recompile, evil_c's new iPod nano now works and is very cute.

Back from the tent! Horse and foal seem to be doing well after some worrying milk supply hiccups (still got to sort that one out, probs hormone x which controls subsystem y having side effects on subsystem z (where x, y, and z are some combination of FSH, LH, oestrogen, prolactin, the mammory glands, and the uterus) - how can there possibly be an ( Read more... )

It's been a very long wait (I've been camped out in the field for the past two weeks since Piceur started showing signs that she was just about to foal) but at about 02:45 she finally had her foal! I ought to write some backstory here as to just who Piceur is (our horse) and perhaps ought to have mentioned her being in foal at some point in the ( Read more... )

Beloved of IBM managers, KLOCs (thousands of line of code) are possibly one of ( Read more... )