According FACT and the BPI there is a counterfeiter of music and films working in almost every street of every town. Apparently this is big business and they are making a lot of money. My question to this is if there is someone making money out of copying films and music on every street, and a street has on average (as a wild guess) 50 houses how ( Read more... )

Today I was demonstrating for CGV and one person had a very strange problem; they couldn't get the colour of text drawn by glutBitmapCharacter to change. It turns out the colour is not set by glColor, it's instead set by the GL_CURRENT_RASTER_COLOR parameter. And how do you set this parameter? By calling glRasterPos which as a side effect takes the ( Read more... )

This morning before I went to lunch I went to a cash machine to get some money out. I pressed the £40 and it buzzed and whirried and flashed as usual, then my card popped out and then... nothing. The cash draw stayed resolutely closed with no sign of my hard earned cash.

Grrr I thought, fortunately nmitchell was kind enough to lend me some money to buy my ( Read more... )

On Monday my girlfriend brought some ceramic hair straighteners, fair enough I thought - although I was a little surprised by the £100 price tag. Being the kind of person I am I read the back of the box to see what I could find out about them...

The ghd ceramic hairstyling iron is the Holy Grail of hair styling tools.
Slightly over the top, but ( Read more... )

Taken from this BBC News Have Your Say page on the closure of Darley Oaks Farm, which bred Guinea Pigs for use in medical research, after years of intimidation...

In centuries to come we will look back on the activities of animal rights activists and recognise them as brave and principled people who did what most of us could not do - they stopped ( Read more... )

I've just discovered that PyVault, a provider of RPM packages for Python software, has an RPM for some software that I have written (PyLinda). This is great and I'm very happy to see my software spread around on the internet. What does bug me slightly is the fact that they have gone to the trouble of patching my install script to remove the ( Read more... )

As much as I dislike the idea of an ID card my very own CitizenCard arrived this morning, and it took only two days longer than they said it would (and it only cost me a first class stamp). I think it looks like I've faked it, but at least I'll be able to get into Glastonbury and won't have the worry of taking my driving license or passport with me ( Read more... )

The new Coldplay album, X&Y, arrived this morning - but none of the three cd-rom drives I've tried it in can play it! Damn copy protection! Looks like it's time for a bittorrent search...

*Andrew Smash!*

Update: With a bit of persuading one of the three cd-rom drives did read the cd, and although cdparanoia said there were errors it seems to have ( Read more... )

The BBC has a worrying report on the rise of creationism in the UK. While not as vocal they are in America the Creation Science Movement has been around since 1932 and they even have a Genesis Expo 'museum' (though I do feel that calling it a museum gives it too much credibility) in Plymouth.

One choice quote from the CSM's website is this "Today ( Read more... )

( A rant with spoilers )