Notes and Jottings

It’s been a long time for me since I’ve done much Latin too! Conall asks, quis is legit?. And I think, shouldn’t that be quis hoc legit?… Can we consider a blog to be neuter? I think so. Or should he ask quis hoc legerit? as he would have been able to check the logs to see (post-fact) who actually did go to see his site. And only people who read that particular entry, after he had written it, could answer the question Or since we can presume that googlebot and other automated agents have checked this page, it could again be altered to qui quaeque hoc legerunt?
Sigh… the joys of Latin The above could be very much incorrect by the way - it has been over six years since I’ve done anything meaningful with the language.

It looks very like Python at first glance. This is a GOOD THING. More thoughts soon…

What? I’m supposed to tell other people what to use, I’m supposed to be the first person in my social group to find out about cool things Anyway, Jamila has emphasised at great lengths that I should try out Ruby. He says I will find it really cool. Even after I’ve pointed out my current theoretical fondness for Python. Jamila is the first person outside TCD that I’ve ever found who’s looked at Erlang (which I did a 3rd Year networking project in, and found pretty darned cool). I have obviously heard of Ruby many times over the last 18 months, but it has never really impinged upon my consciousness until now that it was something to be SERIOUSLY looked at.
The other thing that he has insisted that I look at is FreeBSD. Yes I’ve used BSD extensively as a user. But he thinks that if I use it as an admin for a while, I will be converted from my current Debian GNU/Linux fetish. We shall see

Houses of Parliament

Wow, they look cool!

Buckingham Palace

Slightly yawn-worthy… we saw it twice, once at night and once during the day, it only looked slightly better in the daytime.

Science Museum

The best thing in the city! And the restaurant inside isn’t the MOST comfortable, but it’s very cool and the food is actually REALLY nice.

Museum of London

Worth looking at. London really does have a long and interesting history, I found the period up to the conquering of England by William the Conqueror to be the most interesting and informative of the whole place, as none of my history books back in Primary or Secondary School ever really went into that area of history…

Trafalgar Square

Fun in the day, bring some food for the pigeons. Nice lights at night, but you’ll be lucky to see any pigeons - and to be honest, that’s always why you’d go to visit this particular part of the city…

The Tube

Incredibly handy, they are soooo lucky! I never had to wait more than about five minutes for a tube.

Tiger Tiger

Very trendy bar/nightclub on Haymarket. Very good DJs, very pretty girls there Note that you usually have to book a week in advance if you actually want to get in. How lucky were we!! All thanks to Juan and Annette, thanks very much!

I was over in London for the weekend with an old friend from Palo Alto in California - and I was completely amazed at how amazed HE was by the weather. He said that he had never NOT been able to see any of the sky. There was just uniform cloud from horizon to horizon (to my mind, normal stratus cloud, he should count his blessings), but he was awestruck.

Thinking back to my time in Palo Alto, I do remember the remarkable lack of cloud. But it seems really amazing to me that people from over there can find such a normal piece of European weather to be so weird…

pthread_key_create

Doing it so that it’s compatible across all supported systems isn’t so easy. I was thinking of thread-local storage, as begun by gcc on the IA64 platform and ported to many others then. But it’s still not that compatible with many systems. It seems that this pthread_key_create function might be more compatible - it’s part of the POSIX threading standard. It’s just a bit more hassle to write.

wossrom

Or maybe not, somebody might actually find it of use It is supposed to describe levels of aggressiveness/friendliness towards various operating systems… Oi, your graphs don’t work at the moment, Mr. sharph It says The image “http://sharph.net/rules.png” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. - now that DOES suck

The Register

AOL Time Warner are due to report on how they are going to turn around the online division. There are currently no public reports on how this may affect the Mozilla project, but I can *rumour* that morale is low on the issue among those who wish the Mozilla project to continue unchanged. Will AOLTW kill much of their current monetary input into mozilla.org? We have to wait and see for the conference, I just hope open-source people can pick up the slack eventually if it all turns out to be pretty gloopy!

Gasaraki

A good review of Gasaraki here. Mixing the good aspects of Gundam, Eva and Escaflowne, sounds worth keeping an eye on.

Mozilla 1.2.1 Coming Soon
Take what Asa says here and remember it. No matter what happens to Netscape, there are large numbers of people from outside Netscape who do great work on the Mozilla project, and the project would not die with only a skeleton staff from Netscape. Let’s see what happens…