Secondly, I haven’t blogged that much in those months, guess I’m too busy or something. Compare the number of posts in the archive from May 2006 to January 2005, and you realise how little I’ve done!

Finally, I’ve now done over 300 posts. I managed it the other day without even realising it. Fortunately, number 300 was a good one, Dancing Like a White Boy!

They have several TVs, and one big one. The big one was tuned to Sky Sports. It was showing wrestling…. and it was being translated into British Sign Language too.

Caused me great amusement. I wonder what the sign is for “Pile Driver”.

Where the hell did the Apple and Banana come from? If I had known I wouldn’t have bought it – I hate banana!

Hopefully, it’s not a case that a reporter has caught wind of the exercise and thought it was real!

I can imagine the first phone call: “Dave, we’ve got a case here in Fyfe.” “Bloody hell, this exercise is testing us to the limit, Tim.” “No, Dave. This one should be treated as real.” “Yeah, I know, we should do that with all exercises.” “No, Dave. This one is real….” “Yeah, very funny”….

Looks like that period of time where you don’t get to see you house in the daylight (except for weekends) is coming to an end for another year.

Plus, this morning, I can see blue skies! Makes a change for those horrible overcast grey skies we have had for the last 3 months.

I read it this morning, and I’m so impressed by it. It seems to have an amazing naivety to it, for example, the idea of space ships running on coal, humans using up all the uranium in the world for their power needs, and computers no longer needing transistor but instead reverting back to using “micro-valves”, but then you have to remember that the story was written in 1956. What struck me next about the story is it’s amazing insight – there is a casual reference to an “AC-Contact”, which sounds remarkably like a handheld computer, and computer systems that are natural language processors. These are all things that exist today (albeit in a limited capacity to those expressed in the story), that when written would have been considered pure fantasy. There is an amazing realisation brought through from the story that these things will happen, which is something that I had never really thought about before, and the question remains, what will human kind do when these things happen?

Finally, there is the ending. Which is just masterful. It actually reminds me a lot of the computer in “The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy”, but that is a different story.

The introduction contained on the linked page hints to a further underlying theme to the story, which I do have theories about, but I don’t want to spoil the ending….

N.B. This post has been back dated because I didn’t post it properly!

Sigh.

I’m kind of fed up of having to identify when a new version is available for some of the Open Source software that I use (e.g. SciTe, PuTTY, etc). I know that some tools have their own updating system (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, to name a few), but other’s don’t and it is often those pieces of software that get some of the more serious bugs.

What “the world” could do with, is a universal update awareness system.

Imagine this, I have SciTe and PuTTY installed. I download a small application, and subscribe to a “feed” for each piece of software. When the feed is updated, the software checks the installed version of the software (not sure how to fully accomplish this one), and does a simple version check (if installed_version_number < new_version_number then update_needed = true). The software can then alert the user (in anyway it sees fit) that an update is available. Furthermore, in the interests of paranoia (!), the application would be required to not download and install the application without user intervention.

My description of the word “feed” may be a little misleading: I’m not talking RSS/Atom here, as I think that although it’s got the right basics, it probably would not be best suited to this application. The feed would probably describe an “Application Name”, a “Version Number”, a “Download Location”, a “Description Of Changes”, and a “Update Importance Level”, and probably anything else that would suit the situation.

This would of course mean that software developers would need to provide support for this system (through a feed on a website, and a definition file deployed along with the application), but seeing the way that the open source community (and some closed source – see http://blogs.msdn.com as an example) have embraced things like RSS, I think that they will show some form of interest!

I stated that for years, I have wanted to come up with a totally made up conspiracy theory, and see how well it takes off. So today I came up with one.

Here’s the plot: Most of the clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere contain an alien space craft – the cloud acts a “smoke screen” to hide them. The reason that the Earth’s temperature is heating up is because there are more and more craft in our atmosphere, therefore the heat that these craft give off is increasing the temperature, plus it explains why it is no longer sunny when it is hot. Plus, it explains why pilots don’t often fly through clouds – they know about it and are sworn to secrecy, and they just don’t want to crash in the air. Oh yeah, and the aliens are watching us (for added drama), and there’s going to be an invasion.

Does that sound good?

If they hadn’t left, then they wouldn’t have had the inspiration to write a song about returning back there. Therefore, we wouldn’t be subjected to that god damn awful song that gets played far too much on the radio.

Anyone? No? Just me then.