UK beats the US at: Bread. In England, you can get a lovely, inexpensive, fresh-baked, unsliced granary loaf from just about any corner supermarket (the sort that is a 5 minute walk from your house). In America, any bread other than sliced prepackaged is some kind of speciality item, available…
Impulse buy!
Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel. I’ve studied a bit of Lisp; enough to get interested. Of course I studied functional programming in college so the concepts are not so mind bending as they would be at first. Hopefully this book will take my Lisp into the realm of the…
"You probably know a million songs…"
“…wouldn't it be nice to hear more than 20 of them?” So goes one of JACK FM's tags. I take issue: let's look at the facts. Assume a song is 3 minutes long on average. Assume that I listen to songs for 3 hours a day every day, never repeating…
The Da Vinci Code
(Warning: spoilers ahead) I read it. The plot was excellently contrived. The way it mixes fact and fiction is great. But as a whodunit, it's a bit rubbish. Dan Brown is continually treating both his characters and readers as simpletons. Now I realise it's not an easy thing to invent…
SOE announce "Exchange Servers"
Sony are launching an escrow/auction service for Everquest 2, whereby players can sell in-game items, coinage and characters for real-life currency. They are applying it only to certain servers (to be decided via an in-game poll, and with the option for players to move servers). It’s a $200m-a-year industry, apparently,…
"London, England"
Bill Bryson was right. The “London, England” effect is everywhere in the US; the media dumbs down everything to an absurd degree, hence “London, England” – as opposed to London, where exactly? To be fair there are plenty of other Londons, but I think it's pretty unambiguous in a story…
MySQL 5!
MySQL 5.0 almost ready, reports ZDNet. Stored procedures. Triggers. Views. Welcome to the world of real databases, MySQL!
TRN Magazine reports that researchers from MIT have developed a tool (“Metafor”) for turning English into code. I am immediately reminded of the aphorism, “Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find the programmers cannot write in English.”
Jury duty
I got a jury summons. I'm not eligible. Whee!
Movies I have seen recently
Wimbledon. Not bad. An enjoyable 90 minutes. But a) I don't think that's the way to Brighton from London, and b) nobody runs 10 miles during a tournament, even less so while wearing Converse All Stars! Clueless. I'm a sucker for teen movies. Plus, it's got Alicia Silverstone in it;…