It must be Monday…
Code Monkey sing.
Archive for April, 2006
A tribute to all you hard working Code Monkeys out there
Monday, April 24th, 2006Thursday jolities…
Thursday, April 20th, 2006The Tipping Point
Saturday, April 15th, 2006That’s a phrase you may have heard used more and more of late, so it came as a surprise to me to learn that it is derived from the title of the book by Malcom Gladwell. It’s a book destined to be on every marketing guru’s shelf alongside Sun Tsu’s The Art of War. In short, it’s about how, beyond some critical mass, people flock to some action, be it buying some trendy item, or crime waves, or voting. He examines the common factors in all these cases, and seeks out some of the types of people who seem capable of generating a ‘Tip’.
It may not be easy, but it certainly looks fun!
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006It’s such a good television programme, I wanted to mention it on both my blogs.
Double whammy!
Friday, April 7th, 2006Wow! Two of my favourite topics come together in one news article! It seems that the eminent noshmeister Heston Blumenthal (of Fat Duck fame) is making sure his experiments are preserved for future generations. A terribly good thing IMHO having tried some of them. The added extra here is that he’s using the Open Source collaborative encylclopaedia Wiki. This gives him and his staff access to the research onver any web-browser, and ensures that the information is in a format that can be extracted by future gastronauts.
Still not sure . . .
Thursday, April 6th, 2006I’v been dubious about mobile ‘phones for some time now (ever since they first came out, in fact). I’ve been pleased to read that almost all of the surveys done show that there is little to worry about from ‘phone radiation; what has not been shown (to my satifaction) is that the long-term effects are negligible. I wold suspect that as mobiles have been around for longer and longer times, the data on this gets better. ZDNet has an article about a Swedish study of over 900 people, and it indicates that if you’ve used a mobile for more than 2000 hours in total, your chances of many sorts of malignant cancer rises dramatically. Using a hands-free ‘phone is much better.
The point to notice about this is that it’s a lifetime exposure limit, not an hours per day limit, and the study’s been done over a long time period relative to previous investigations.
A Star comes to Bristol
Sunday, April 2nd, 2006Gosh! Here’s a great story! Bristol City Council have decided to ditch Microsoft Office, despite talks with them, and move 5500 users over to Sun’s Star Office, the sold-with-support version of the Open Office suite. This has been on the books for some time, but the savings of over a cool million UKP in 5 years were more than enough to assuage any concerns that there might have been about moving to new software. (Not that there’s much in the way of retraining needed, IMHO.) Apparently, each MS Office licence was 12 (!) times more expensive than the equivalent StarOffice one. Wow. No wonder they changed!