Posts by breakfast

If only...

I guess they need the income- if only there was some other way for HMRC to make money.

Like, I don't know, making people who aren't paying their taxes pay some taxes.

But it's alright for Google to have and crossreference this data...

Where they didn't typo, they were linking to Google APIs, which is probably going to be for traffic and link monitoring.

So that's another thing that Google will be able to cross reference when they are building up our profiles.

Which was nice.

Just in time

I look forward to seeing this implemented for the landing system in LOHAN. It would make quite a change from the "identify tree, crash into tree" approach that SPB have favoured so far.

The other arts subjects are soft, but not my one...

I studied Philosophy as a first degree and I can't imagine a better foundation for working as a programmer- a solid training in analytical thinking and a good understanding of logic and problem analysis is more useful in my day to day work than the operating system design and formal system algebra courses my computer science peers were studying.

Of course, I only know that because I went on to study computer science afterwards ( turns out there's not much money in Philosophy ) so I guess I'm not pure fuzzy anyways.

Also a subject with a long reading list and not too many lectures a week is way more conducive to an enjoyable university life. Back when one didn't incur a lifetime of debt by going to university, that was actually a real thing. I still feel that it is important for people to enjoy youth for the brief flash it is afforded to them, not just having to work three jobs to finance a degree course they don't even really want to be on except that everyone else in the job market will have one.

That said, if I was in charge soft degrees would subsidise hard ones, both for national economic purposes and for the betterment of humanity.

Playing into their hands

Those creationist birds are going to be all over this, leaving volichnia everywhere.

Bracketing out

Lets not forget lisp comments:

()((()()))()))())))()()()))))()))))((()()))()))) ; (()()))()))()()))

Useful to know about, detail less important

I can think of a few times in the last 15 years of software development that I have been asked to do something that, when thought through in detail, could be regarded as one of the classic NP-Complete problems like the Knapsack or Travelling Salesman. In most case there was value in recognising them because we could go back to the customer and say "this is tricky, and therefore likely to cost more, are you sure it is what you want?" and suggest some alternative approaches to the problem that would get reasonable results without nearly so much work and they were happy to go for that.

Freedom through ignorance

I came up with almost exactly this theory in a Philosophy essay twenty years ago. I seem to recall my tutor at the time was unimpressed by what he termed "freedom through ignorance" but it's nice to see the idea popping up again, albeit far better expressed than my undergraduate ramblings could achieve. I still think it's as close as we're going to get to any kind of useful free will.

The flipside is that given an omniscient observer, our actions would be entirely predictable ( indeed all one needs to have absolute determinism is to consider time as a direction ) but if they don't feel that way from the inside, then we're still acting and feeling as though we have free will, which I think is probably what free will actually is.

On the upside, I hated those tabs. For glancing over emails ( most of what you want to do on Spamhoo messages ) it was a total pain in the ass because it wasn't obvious that you were in tabs, closing them was counter-intuitive and there was no way to use the back button, which is pretty much #1 on the list of classic web usability gotchas.

Sharing in menstruation?

I am not sure what exactly co-menses are, or how it/they would interact with a Snowden cash-in.

No matter how much Wikileaks hates journalists, at least the journos are usually literate.

I don't know how the UK stands in this regard but as far as I can tell the Chinese own the dollar, so if America want to kick up a big fuss or start getting lairy, China could just render their currency worthless overnight. In the light of that, seems a bit trifling to worry about a bit of network infrastructure really. They already own the US, might as well let them have a play with it if they want to.

Just going to buy some apples

Most of my shopping has gone through now, but I have these apples. No bar code.

Luckily we can add things from the nice list of pictures, but these aren't on the "popular items" page so you get to play the "guess which letter the creator of this list thinks this item begins with" game...

"A" for Apples? What is this? Playgroup? Far too easy.

"B" for Bramley Apples? Of course not.

"C" for Cooking Apples maybe? No.

After a long slog through the alphabet I find them under "Loose Apples ( Bramley)" because "L" is the OBVIOUS LETTER for this product. Fortunately this ridiculously poor usability will be fixed by my next visit. Unfortunately it will be with a swap to another totally incomprehensible letter.

Thanks "Fast" checkout. Really living up to your name there.

And another thing

A lot of albums ( which were a thing back in the day ) consist of songs in a particular order that the artists who created them felt fitted together in some way to form a whole that exceeds the components from which it is constructed.

It saddens me a little to think how infrequently the care and thought that goes into putting together an album as a whole is noticeable once we get to mp3 players on constant shuffle. I don't know if it will result in fewer great albums being made, but I hope not. ( As an aside there seems now to be such a glut of music that even when great music is made, it is very hard to find )

In spite of this my MP3 player is almost always on shuffle. But I do listen to CDs often too.

Free energy

The ideal time for this tool would presumably be while grabbing an after-work pint in a local Wetherspoons - if they're preparing food, the microwaves will be going crazy.

What is a stock market for?

The question that is interesting to me is what stock markets are for?

If they are about providing capital to companies then there really is no place for high frequency trading in them and maybe something like a Tobin Tax or a turn-based market of some kind would help to limit their antics. If they are about creating an interesting and entertaining computer game where different algorithms play against each other then wicked, sounds like this is just the thing!

Side question

Can anybody recommend a bank that actually has a modern site and that allows you to do anything interesting/useful with your money that is facilitated by the web instead of just offering some very basic account management functionality.

My bank hasn't changed any aspect of their website in the 8 years I have been with them and I can't help but feel they could have introduced at least *one* new feature in that time...

Good so far

I got one a couple of weeks ago because I needed something that could survive life around horses and Samsung seem to be doing better than Sony in reviews even where their devices have a lower on-paper spec.

So far it seems pretty good- my last phone is a fairly old Xperia, so I don't really have a modern benchmark, but it does far more than I need a phone to do and the battery life seems quite reasonable- certainly if I forget to leave it on charge overnight my alarm still goes off in the morning, which is a marked improvement over what I had...