« November 2004 | Main | January 2005 »
December 24, 2004
More congratulations
Hurrah for Mark and Martha, now Mr & Mrs Cossey.
They looked, and were, wonderful.
Posted by Tom Dolan at 11:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Photogenic
Daisy and Naomi in direct competition at Mark and Martha's wedding.
Posted by Tom Dolan at 11:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
I've seen it all now...
DIGITAL hair straighteners??????
And I love that in the small print, it explains this by saying it's got a "On/Off digital display".
Work that marketing angle guys!
Posted by Tom Dolan at 10:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 23, 2004
Because not everything in the world is 'full of caaack"
Woo, and indeed a might Hoo.
Armando Ianucci is coming back to the BBC this Xmas.
Lovely interview, and some great clips to watch and/or download. 'Bin Laden' is a particular favourite.
Posted by Tom Dolan at 10:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 17, 2004
Another NooMeeja Baby
Huge congratulations to Surj and Tanya Patel on the birth of their baby daughter. (Like an arse I accidentally closed the IM window, but I think she was called Naiya).
Posted by Tom Dolan at 09:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Go Vicky and Tim
Hurrah for the BBCi Comedy team. They have just launched this rather silly game on the DeadRingers site.
Can YOU beat Blair in the Newsfight?
Posted by Tom Dolan at 08:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 16, 2004
Like Father Like Daughter
This was Daisy's first time in the studio - and she made a beeline for the rack of synths and samplers.
Must...press...buttons...
Posted by Tom Dolan at 01:17 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
December 14, 2004
You know you're read too much comedy pornography when...
You can spot a clip of Charlie Skelton and Vicky Coren's porn film "The Naughty Twins" (the making of which was the basis for the rather excellent book 'Once More With Feeling') being used in the Mark Steel Lecture on Albert Einstein...
Even when it's less than two seconds long.
Posted by Tom Dolan at 12:26 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 12, 2004
Blog Comment Spam Becomes an Epidemic
Like lots of people, I run Movable Type. Like lots of people who run Movable Type and at least one inbound link, I've also found it necessary to install mt-blacklist to keep the blogspam down to a sensible level.
OK, so it's a pain in the arse to have to do the clearout of a couple of hundred emails once a new one slips through the net, but at least I've got a tool to make the process relatively painless.
Until now.
Yesterday, I got an email from the monitoring system at the otherwise lovely pair.com saying that they'd turned off the mt-comments.cgi script on my server space because (and I paraphrase) it was hammering the servers into submission. I needed to check their AUP before I changed the privs back to 755.
However, the cumulative effect over the whole of pair has been huge. In order to check if there was anything I should do about it, over and above hoping another attack did the same, I searched on Google for "pair.com mt-comments.cgi". And back came page after page after page after page of blogs which are now indexed as having their comments not available. All pair.com Movable Type instances have been hit - cumulatively the blog spammers had added up to a massive Denial Of Service attack.
I guess this means it's time to upgrade to MT3 and get typekey. (And yes, I did pay money for this one). At least the exchange rate is in my favour at the moment...
Posted by Tom Dolan at 10:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 09, 2004
Sigh
This pic (among others) made me very sentimental for my old friends back at the beeb.
Nairn, Marv, Gabriel, Jamie, Sophie, Tony, Kim, James, Jon, Justin, Piers, Rob, Matt, Tim...and all the rest of you... Sorry I couldn't make it. One of us had to do the babysitting.
I hope to catch up with loads of you soon though!
Posted by Tom Dolan at 01:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
December 07, 2004
Definitely BPID
As I find myself off work ill again, for the nth time in the last few months, I can only look at the latest post on TrixieUpdate and agree.
Posted by Tom Dolan at 01:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 06, 2004
On Dactylonomy
Matt Webb's got an interesting post on methods of counting using your fingers.
Being of a frivolous bent, I got to this bit:
If I want a number to be totally represented by the position of my fingers, then I estimate the absolute top limit on this to be 10 billion, or around that order of magnitude. That's the maximum number of states that can be represented by my fingers, assuming 10 states per dimension, and 10 dimensions (10 fingers, 10 points per finger). That's assuming no physical limits on, say, the stretchiness of my fingers, or limits on the complexity of the algorithm, or robustness to mistakes.
and then started imagining it as the finger version of "you can't fold any piece of paper more than 8 times".
The 'totally represented' bit fascinated me too - I remembered Avogadro's Constant, the number of molecules in a mole of any compound, 6.023(?)x10^23. Given the immensity of the scale that contemporary finger counting would have to represent, compared to the Chinese system he considers, is Matt's next challenge to develop the Scientific Notation of Fingers?
Posted by Tom Dolan at 10:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 01, 2004
This World AIDS Day I shall be mostly...
Pumping loads of translations into the staying-alive.org website.
I do rather recommend the Save The Humans stuff. Groovy CGI animals arguing.
Posted by Tom Dolan at 10:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
