This story was all over the front page of the Metro recently: 'Wicked' mother gets life for smothering newborn in clingfilm. I think the Metro story focused even more on the "witchcraft" element, which seems both irrelevant and speculative, but I'm not going to talk about that. In fact, I don't really want to talk about this specific case, since ( Read more... )

I have now officially been served notice of redundancy and I'm on gardening leave. I've got a new job lined up in Glasgow, so it's all for the best. Thank you for your attention.

I've read more than one piece of sci-fi where some sort of wormhole transport technology can only function far away from the gravitational fields of planets, but is revealed also to function anywhere the gravitational potential field has a zero gradient: at Lagrange points or even at the centres of planetary bodies. I wonder, though, is this ( Read more... )

I spent a while playing Scribblenauts recently. For those not familiar with it, it's a game for the Nintendo DS where you solve puzzles by writing out the names of objects you'd like and then using them to achieve some goal, such as guiding home a lost cow, jump-starting a car or saving a princess from a witch. I'm still not sure what I think of it ( Read more... )

Font rendering is mostly pretty good for me on Ubuntu. But I do have a problem with some fonts on some web-pages:


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I have difficulty with popular culture
...particularly when it comes to music.


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Next we have the "Museum" question.
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Okay, first up, the "hill" question.
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This year's informatics olympiad is this week. There are (I think) four questions each day on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. While the contestants take part in Bulgaria, you can follow along at home and submit your answers on the web. Generally you have a problem to solve and must write a program (in C, C++ or Pascal) to solve it within certain ( Read more... )

It looks like my laptop is in bad shape again. Last time it was upgrading to Ubuntu Jaunty - some video driver or something disagreed with it, resulting in random hanging, and it seems the hanging resulted in file-system corruption, which could be repaired by fsck, but still left me with critical parts of the system not working and no clue how to ( Read more... )