This BBC news page is about how many more people use the BBCs web search engine.
There’s a brilliant section on what people have searched for using natural language questions (which I don’t think the search engine supports).
Anyway, some of the more bizarre queries are listed on the page. The best one beingWhat is so special about the Swiss?
I would have loved to have seen the answer to that one….
I’ve just come back from a quick trip around my local B&Q (a hardware/DIY shop if you are unaware).
Worryingly, I managed to find a set of mini-paint rollers that had a leopard-skin pattern to the roller head – which of course is going to get covered up the first time you use it, but we won’t go into that.
Next to them though, I managed to find a paintbrush and roller set that were a very designer purple.
It appears that even DIY and paintbrushes are now a victim of fashion. Lets just hope that the next colour I choose to paint doesn’t clash with my paint brushes otherwise I could never live the embarassment down.
I was perusing some of the MSDN blogs today whilst I was at work (had a spare half hour whilst a very long report was finishing).
There are some very good blog entries on there about testing and best practices. There is also a good description of how to file a very good bug report.
There is also a very controversial blog post about why Windows may not necessarily have more or less bug reports than Linux. Cue spontaneous anti-MS comments aimed at MS poster/employee. I can’t decide whether his arguments are valid, or not, or whether he has kind of been forced into that position. He does however make some perfectly valid remarks about the validity of some of the reports.
In my opinion Linux and Windows are truly comparable in their quantity of bugs. Linux is too diverse, and is not one product, and as such cannot be evaluated as one. Windows is, and can be compared this way. Whilst may people claim that the Linux Kernel has far fewer bug reports than the Windows Kernel, how often is it that these (Windows) bug reports are related to the Kernel, and not the periphery user-space applications (e.g. the Explorer Shell, or the excessive quantities of TCP/UDP services running on external network interfaces)?
I’m not trying to argue one case over another, I am merely stating that it is difficult to provide an accurate or even reasonable comparison between the two.
Now, stop your bickering, or I’ll bang yer ‘eads together.
My friend, Richard, put me on to this page. It’s very funny.
I’ve just noticed over the last couple of days that the latest round of Nicorette adverts, here in the UK at least, seemed to be aimed at women. I can’t remember seeing a man in any of their adverts for over a year now. Interesting….
On a completely different note…
My iPod has arrived. Unfortunately, I’m at work, and I don’t have time to sit around and play with it.
Still, I can jump on the desk and starting singing “I got my iiiiiiii-Pod, I got my iiiiiiii-Pod”, whilst gyrating my hips in a hypnotic manner.
I watch this programme on Channel 4 last night. Again, it was brilliant.
What was nice, was they had focussed on British participants of Parkour, and not just gone back to the French founders.
I was so amazed that Sebastien, the main French founder, was still so down to earth, even though he has created a world wide movement, and was still willing to help even beginners and offer them advice. Good for him.
I was a little disappointed this time though, as compared to Jump London (the first programme), the final jump montage sequence didn’t really seem to pay attention to the movements, just the fact that they were happening on top of “big buildings”. But hey, it was still a good programme.
Now, off to find some bollards to leap on…..
This guy sounds like a bit of a nutter really.
If it were possible to adopt his system within a year, bearing in mind that all computer software would have to be replaced along with the year, month and date of the current day, the calendar is completely unworkable.
There is a line in the report:it does have one major problem: there is no way of working out from the year you are in if it will contain a leap week. which kind of reduces the plan to a pile of rubbish.
If you can’t work out something like that, how do you write software for it? Or how to do you work out that you need a leap week in the first place. It just don’t make any kind of sense
Their solution is somewhat farcicle:Henry’s system would need us all to keep a leap week calendar alongside our normal calendar.
The report also states that he would like GMT to be the standard time throughout the world. Egit. Has he not considered that at all times, one part of the world is in day light and the other in night time? As the editorial comment points outYes, but then when I am in California, how do I know when lunchtime is? – Ed
On the way to work this morning, I killed a bird with my car. That’s the first animal I managed to kill, and I’ve been driving over 5 years now. Guess it had to happen at some point.
The worse thing is, when I got out the car in the car park at work, the front and side of my car are covered in feathers.Eww, gonna have to clean that off.
A problem has been plaguing me for months, and it’s has stretched my Mum’s PC too
Yahoo! Mail. I couldn’t access it, not from 3 computers and 3 different browsers
Except, I could access from outside my house.
This lead me to believe that it could be a problem with NTL, my broadband provider.
Bingo!. Here, Here, and also Here confirmed this, and also put up a cure.
Having managed to successfully burn a CD in Linux last night, I’m spreading my wings and will soon hopefully be burning a DVD.
I had to find a load of pages about the topic though, and exactly how I need to do it. It’s a bit of a departure for me as I haven’t even done it under Windows yet. In at the deep end….
Here’s a list of the sites I found:
This site tells you pretty much how to do everything. Kind of a good site
Again, this site tells you everything
This is probably the best site out of the lot, seems to list pretty much anything you need to do
‘Q’ DVDAuthor is a piece of software for making DVD menus graphically and not having to learn the command line interfaces.
For more information about me, please view my LinkedIn profile.
An Applications Developer by day, by evening he's usually on an Ergo or watching TV, and at the weekends, he's a sculler.
