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If you want people to recognise that a substance is dangerous - give it a complicated, hard-to-pronounce name. That's the implication of a new study that suggests we use a simple rule-of-thumb when judging risk. If something is easy to process and digest - for example, by virtue of being easy to pronounce - we tend to assume that it's familiar and safe.
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The results of a study into how kids react when put in refrigerators.
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Specialisterne was started by a Danish man whose own son has autism.
Thorkil Sonne now employs more than 40 people with autism.
He is finalising plans to set up a branch in Glasgow in the coming months.
He hopes to hire 50 workers in the first three years of operating in Scotland.
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Bets a million dollars that nobody can do what his client is alleged to have done. Someone proves him wrong - and he's refusing to pay up. To the courts!
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With thanks to my brother Mike.
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| Carlton is nice; rain is nice. | |
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| Part one: There are several interesting discussions currently going on on the Metacity blog, including the development of optional and experimental subsystems for CSS theming and window matching, and whether applications should be able to extend the window menu (so if you have Istanbul installed, you could add Screencast this window to all windows.) Hop over and add your two penn'orth. Part two: I don't know any good content management systems. "Good" here means: - easy for the end user to use (which is not usually me)
- without continual security holes
- not requiring MySQL
- if possible, not requiring PHP; Perl or Python would be lovely.
Moveable Type goes some way towards being "good", but my complete blog is so large that it takes three quarters of an hour to publish it in static mode, and the dynamic mode appears to require weird and clunky PHPisms. I have worked around this to some extent by using MT's rather nice dashboard, but turning off dynamic publishing, and writing a simple but fairly powerful mod_perl system called Plough which produces dynamic content by reading out of the database of a MT installation and running the results through Template Toolkit. Several of the sites I look after now use this system. I rather like it, but it's not really ideal: MT requires me to keep the static files around anyway, and they waste space. Maybe there are better answers out there. Part three: This blog's syndication is in a bit of a mess. It currently exists in four places: - LiveJournal, here, where it started. Archives are here going back to 2001.
- Dreamwidth, here-- but not everything has been imported from LJ.
- GNOME Blogs, here-- generally the same content as LJ, but not entirely. This is what is syndicated to Planet GNOME.
- marnanel.org, here-- again, not exactly the same content, but all public entries from LJ have been imported (although the comments haven't). This is what is syndicated to Planet Collabora. It's powered by Plough, of course.
I update the blog by writing it on Dreamwidth, letting Dreamwidth syndicate the content to LJ, and then copying it manually to GNOME Blogs and marnanel.org. I'm okay with this as syndication, but I think it would be good if I had fewer things to update. I'd quite like everything to end up on marnanel.org, for the increased control over styling and the googlejuice; I might perhaps write a script which updates marnanel.org and GNOME Blogs according to what's new in Dreamwidth's RSS. Part four: I am still planning to write up GCDS, but this is not that post. Part five: It has been mentioned that I don't blog about GNOME much any more, and that this is possibly not ideal for Planet GNOME. This happens because almost all my GNOME hacking involves Metacity, and of course that goes on the Metacity blog; I only mention here what I've already written there. If you have suggestions to fix this, please let me know! (Before you ask, the Metacity blog can't go on Planet GNOME; it's not allowed.) In news unrelated to blogging, my temperature has reached 99.6°F (38°C) and I feel rather awful. I hope I feel better tomorrow. | |
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| Just wanted to let everyone know, that a new version of MemcacheD has been released. We will be rolling this out to the memcache nodes during the week of July 20th to 24th. This should have very little impact on the stability of the website; however users may see a slight increase in load times as the cache is re-populated with entries.
The software has been tested and verified to be working just fine with the application; so we perceive this to be a very minimal risk in regards to updating, and the stability of the website.
Thanks...
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| In my post about the couple of days we recently spent in the San Francisco bay area, I enthused about the climbing gym our gracious hosts, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) parmonster and gentle_gamer took us to, Planet Granite, which was much larger than our "local" climbing gym at Harlow and which I really enoyed for its cleverly textured walls and fun, varied and inventive climbing routes. I went home lamenting not having a similar establishment nearby. Well, the_local_echo has been doing some googling, and it turns out that the city that has pretty much everything, London, does indeed have such an establishment. What's more, it looks like this:  It's a Victorian former pumping station, but was built to look like a castle, in that way the Victorians liked to do. Appropriately enough, it's therefore called The Castle Climbing Centre, and it is huge. The photograph doesn't really convey the impact this building has as you approach it on an otherwise nondescript London inner suburban street. That tower at the back is 150 feet high, to give you an idea. We really liked what we saw on their website, so Sylvia and I checked it out yesterday afternoon. We arrived there and expressed an interest in joining. The friendly reception staff asked if we had any experience, to which we replied that we were members at Harlow, and asked if we knew how to put a climbing harness on, tie-in, and correctly belay. We both replied that we did, were given consent/rules forms to read and sign, and on doing so were presented with our membership cards, or rather, we would have been presented with them were their printer working. Apparently we can pick them up next time. With no further ceremony, we headed off to the ladies' changing rooms, geared up, and hit the climbing routes. The first thing I noticed was that there was a lot of space dedicated to bouldering. There's no dedicated bouldering section at Harlow, and we could immediately see that The Castle had some on the round floor, and a mezzanine level entirely dedicated to bouldering (there's a floor plan here). It's not something I've got into at all yet, but perhaps this will encourage me to try. There were plenty of climbing routes dotted around, however, all on lovely textured walls, with cracks and arêtes, similar to the inventively sculptured walls we'd encountered in California, which promised much more interesting climbing that merely clambering around on what always look to me like oversized bits of chewing gum stuck to walls. We climbed on the walls downstairs for a bit, and were pleased to note that the ratings seemed very consistent. I was able to consistently climb the 5 (Sports grade) (5.9 in YDS) routes with ease, and consistently got up the 5+ (5.10a) routes, but found them a little more "entertaining". Sylvia consistently found the same thing with the 4 (5.7) and 4+ (5.8) routes. The few 6a (5.10b) routes I tried were very tough and I tended to fall off them. This seemed to match my experience at Planet Granite, and has given me an appreciation for what people mean when they say the routes at Harlow are graded "on crack". After a bit we decided to head upstairs to the cafe, to quench our thirst, and climbed the iron stairs up past the mezzanine bouldering area. When we entered the cafe area on the top floor, we were amazed to see a whole other floor full of climbing routes, both or lead climbing and top roping, which were even higher than the ones downstairs. Better still, we could sit on the sofas in the cafe area and watch people being impressive on the lead climbing wall, going up seemingly impossible routes and deploying their rope as they go (one day, one day)! I think we spent about 3 hours doing climbing routes (they have 450 of them apparently, from 90 rope stations), before declaring ourselves exhausted, and trying a couple of simple bouldering routes to wind down. I'd not tried proper bouldering before, and I quickly got the impression that it requires some very different techniques from the climbing I've been accustomed to so far. I didn't get very far, not having started to develop any of the specific skills I needed, and after watching me repeatedly attempt, and fall off one relatively simple route, a muscular young man who'd been watching leapt up and decided to show Sylvia and me how it was done (how rugged!) He fell off, adopted a bit of an "oh crap, there goes my chance of a shag" look, muttered something about being tired and wandered off, with apparently injured pride. I felt a bit sorry for him, but he did demonstrate some interesting bouldering moves which I'm keen to look at trying next time, so his efforts were not unappreciated. Anyway, we've determined that the place is utterly awesome, and is very much like the gym in California that we so enjoyed. We'll definitely be back, especially since they have their "women with altitude" night on our regular climbing night, Monday, where they have female instructors around to help provide a female-friendly environment for sharing experience and advice. They even have a little climbing wall for kids, which is handy because unlike Harlow, they have separate classrooms for teaching beginners and so don't have any routes on their main wall rated below a 4/5.7 (although there is one 4 rated route we found which was clearly intended to be a "starter" route, and was the only real example we found of a route which we both agreed was probably misrated. The only question is, given it doesn't take much longer to get to by train, and is apparently considerably more awesome, will we be going to Harlow any more? Originally posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/204419.html - you can comment here or there. | |
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| If you have domain forwarding enabled, a user can take control of www.sitename.com. (note the trailing dot) and possibly get ahold of the users master cookie, as well as some other pretty vile things.
Adding $host =~ s/\.$//; on line 256 of cgi-bin/Apache/LiveJournal.pm should correct this issue. | |
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| If you're anywhere near London, you might be interested in this: Hide & Seek Festival Weekend 2009Here's the official blurb on the subject: Hide & Seek Weekender 31st July - 2nd August 2009
Southbank Centre
Head down to the Southbank Centre for the Hide&Seek Weekender, two and a half days of free social and pervasive games. Betray, argue and deduce with an evening of social games on Friday night. Film, follow, decipher, hide and hunt all day Saturday. And turn up on Sunday for a day of family-friendly games. We'll be filling the South Bank with argumentative bank robbers, Twittering spies, teleporting enemies, adventurous soft toys, player-generated music, and much more, so do come and play! Visit http://www.hideandseekfest.co.uk/2009programme to read about all the different games.
"...combines all my favourite things about games - play, interactivity, performance, cleverness, technology, participation" – The Guardian Also, I'm going to be running Grand Emperor on the Friday evening. (See Ludocity for the rules.) Should be an exciting session since it's effectively a playtest as well as a public event. I'll be interested to see what strategies the players go for! And there's an impressive line-up of other games too. As well as several_bees and kevandotorg doing their thing, I also spotted James Wallis amongst the designers. And lasers! And monsters! And great big multiplayer pootergames on a projector! | |
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| And on the subject of my sporty clothes, when I stopped to pick up my sunglasses (which are ready three weeks later than my normal glasses and almost two weeks later than I was originally told they would be) the guy who helped me out said, “That’s the first Portsmouth top I’ve ever seen!” * I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that, but luckily he quickly moved on to something even more nonplussing: “Is it a good top to have, Portsmouth?” I was only glad it was me he was asking rather than, oh, say, wildheartofire. I laughed and said, “Well, I think it is!” * All shinydan‘s fault, it goes without saying.- Tags:football
- Music:Test Match Special of course
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| I actually lingered outside a shop I was going into so I could hear my beloved Duckworth-Lewis Method sing “Test Match Special” (probably my favorite on the album anyway) live on Test Match Special, before I had to go inside and take the headphones out of my ears.
I just sat in the sunshine grinning (in my football top, baseball cap, and basketball shoes... I’m very sports-ecumenical today). | |
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Overall crime is down by 5% and violent crime has fallen by 6%, and gun crime has seen a 17% fall. Rape is up, as is burglary and mugging/picking pockets.
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Gah!
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From the people that brought you Pride And Prejudice and Zombies...
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Get them to read this...
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Dashed line indicates one of the parties is from an Alternate Universe
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Which tells me the figures on my poll are for people who are paid normal salaries - and doesn't include self-employed people (i.e. contractors and the like).
Read the comments - and feel your brain melt!
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A team of Yale University researchers has discovered a repulsive light force that can be used to control components on silicon microchips, meaning future nanodevices could be controlled by light rather than electricity.
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A mental health expert talks about psychiatric drugs and what they really do. Hint - they don't fix you, they put you in an altered state that you may prefer to your natural one.
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Advanced Photo System logo.
Advanced Photo System was a 24 mm film format introduced in 1996 by a consortium of film and camera manufacturers, including Kodak, Fuji, Canon, Minolta and Nikon. The Canon Elph (Ixus in Europe) was released the same year. It was a beautiful camera: according to Wikipedia “at the time, the world’s smallest autofocus camera”.
Elph 370Z, a compact autofocus APS camera released by Canon in 1998. Photo by pointnshoot. Licence: CC-BY.
My camera was an Ixus Z70, the European version of the Elph 370Z you can see at the right. The bulging lens housing marred the elegant lines of the original Elph/Ixus, but it did have the compensation of 3× zoom. I used it for about five years and shot 34 rolls: 1,080 photos (which may not seem like very many in this digital age, but the fact that each exposure cost about £0.40 was a bit of a restraint). The camera was stolen when my house was burgled in 2005.
1,080 photos.
APS was a very short-lived film format. It arrived at the wrong time, just as film was about to be replaced by digital in almost all niches of the photography business. By 2000, digital cameras were clearly a better choice in the ultra-compact autofocus niche where APS had been most successful, and in 2004, only eight years afer introducing the format, Kodak stopped manufacturing APS film altogether. Ever since I heard the news, it’s been bugging me that I ought to get round to digitizing my APS photos while it’s still possible to find someone to do it. Minority formats have a habit of becoming obsolete quickly, and if I wait too long I might find that it’s no longer possible to convert the format. So from time to time I’ve been looking around for someone who can offer me a good price for digitizing all my APS film.
The curious thing about this search is that several photography businesses have felt obliged to explain to me why I shouldn’t have been using the APS format in the first place. A salesman at Campkins Cameras on Rose Crescent spent a couple of minutes lecturing me on how the APS format had been forced on the photographic industry by the manufacturers and that they hadn’t wanted to adopt it at all (Campkins can’t digitize APS film, in case you were wondering). Another company responded to my query with the admonishment, “I'm sorry but we do not have any facilities to either print or scan APS film as it considered an amateur film and we mainly deal with professionals”. Yes, thank you, photography companies, I don’t need you to tell me that I’m a rubbish photographer, I only wanted to find out if I could, like, pay you to digitize my photos.
I guess this is a case of professionals not understanding that amateurs can have very different requirements. Here’s an article about APS by Philip Greenspun from 1997 showing the same slightly blinkered attitude: “An APS negative is 56% the area of a 35 mm negative. That's all that a serious photographer really needs to know about the format. Everything else is gadgetry.” However, Greenspun includes a very sensible counterpoint from Kleanthes Koniaris, and a lot of the comments are insightful too. Some of them are quite funny, like this one from 1999: “Like digital photography, I feel that APS will have little or no effect on professional photography.” How’s that prediction looking now?
The key advantage of APS for an amateur like me was that it enabled manufacturers to make cameras small enough to slip into a pocket and robust enough to carry around in that pocket all day, and that made it much more likely that the camera would actually be to hand when I wanted to take a photo. It’s no good owning some fancy-pants piece of kit if its size and delicacy means that you don’t carry it with you. There’s no way I would have wanted to carry a 35 mm camera up a cliff or down a couloir, but the Ixus went with me in my trouser pocket. A poor quality photo is a lot better than no photo at all, and anyway, how likely is it that I’d get a good quality photo even if I did have a fancy camera? I know from my attempts to take photos with my parents’ Leica M4 that I don’t have the patience for anything beyond point-and-shoot.
APS also made some user interface improvements over 35 mm: there was no difficulty in spooling the film (you just dropped the cartridge in via a hatch); no chance of double exposures or missed frames (all winding was automatic); no way to ruin exposures by accidentally opening the back (the hatch locked until the film was rewound into the cartridge); no confusion between shot and unshot rolls (the cartridges had an indicator, and anyway the camera refused to shoot film twice). This kind of thing doesn’t matter to the professional who has long since refined their working methods to the point where they forget how novice mistakes are even possible.
Anyway, there are plenty of companies out there who will digitize APS photos, but most are a bit expensive for someone with 1,080 exposures. Jessops on Green Street wanted to charge me £0.50 per exposure, about twice the cost of developing the film in the first place. I was about to write, “at that price it would have been cheaper to buy my own scanner,” but I’m not sure that’s true: no-one seems to make APS batch scanners (like the CanoScan FS2710 or the Minolta Scan Dual IV) any more, so buying one would involve a lot of hunting around on auction sites, with no guarantee of finding a working model at a reasonable price.
Eventually I found PictureLizard in Swindon, which has very generous volume discounts: I paid just £0.15 an exposure. The quality is, to be honest, not that great: the scans are about 1,600 dots per inch (about 1,500 pixels across a 24 mm exposure) and are rather grainy (on the other hand, the originals were not all that great either). One of the rolls was left-right reflected; it must have been fed into the scanner back to front. The photo metadata (dates and times) were not captured by the scanning process. The accidental reflections were easy to fix; restoring the dates (by reference to the printed copies) took some time. Still, at that price I can’t complain.
( Here are twelve of my favourites ... ) | |
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| This is such a good song:
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| "I knew my typing was bad, but ... I've got a new version of Word which autodetects the language you're writing in, and it thought my writing was welsh!" | |
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| Somebody stole the wind in my hair.
Somebody stole the way my legs burn when I’m going up a hill.
Somebody stole my independence, my freedom from sporadic buses that are never going quite where I am.
Somebody stole the best way to get to my boyfriend’s house.
Somebody stole a method of exercise so fun I don’t even think it counts as exercise.
Somebody stole my bike.
And it’s not the two wheels I’m crying for, the broken seat, the wonky brakes that are squeaking like a small animal being murdered these days. It’s the freedom and fun, taken from me by people whose apparent nastiness upsets me even though I know I shouldn’t take it personally.
Somebody stole my bike, and I didn’t know how much I’d come to love it until now. | |
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