hintofsarcasm
am i still ill? Archive for May, 2005
May 31, 2005 at 16:21 · Filed under News
In Pakistan it will.
Four employees burned to death in the KFC restaurant. Two others died in a cold storage room they had hidden in after riots broke out at a Shia mosque next door. The restaurant was attacked because of its proximity to the mosque. KFC outlets, closely identified with the US, are frequently targeted during anti-American riots in Pakistan.
As if it’s not bad enough to be doing slave labour anyway, it must be more than a kick in the nuts to be killed doing your crappy job.
I’m doing some investigative journalism right now, I’m about to call KFC’s corporate headquarters in Louisville to see what that have to say about this..more on that later..
Update: KFC corporate headquarters advised me that they had no comment at this time. Typical.
May 25, 2005 at 11:57 · Filed under Uncategorised
I have to get hold of this videotape for the my own version of “You’ve been framed” entitled “You’ve been horribly disfigured”
Two hurt in mock lightsabre duel
May 21, 2005 at 10:39 · Filed under Uncategorised
Another hard weekend at the office…just starting my “Die Hard” marathon, in between I’ve got the Monaco F1 Qualifying to watch, yeesh. I hate my job. 
May 19, 2005 at 08:12 · Filed under Uncategorised
Ken Young writes a good article in todays Online section of The Guardian in which he makes many valid points. The main one being “Why are mobile users being kept waiting so long for push technology?”
Push technology is what a Blackberry prides itself on. You are alerted to a new email just like a text message, it brings itself in, you don’t have to send/receive or “check for new emails” every 5 minutes, it pushes itself to your device which means there is significantly less data transfer and in this world of £4/mb gprs this can make a sizeable difference in your bills and is a hell of a lot more convenient too.
As Ken rightly states in his article, it is more than likely the changes to the MS exchange server that is taking the time rather than updates to the OS, this seems like a logical explaination as the exchange server is a pretty serious piece of kit and changes to it cannot just be chucked out into the wild relatively untested as it will be exploited.
May 18, 2005 at 09:07 · Filed under Uncategorised
I’ve been an admirer of Barrie J Davis’ work for a while now, and when I saw this article on the BBC News website I thought it was a work of art in itself.
Barrie is organising a mass pub crawl in Cardiff on Friday 27th May, starting off at City Road (doesn’t stipulate which pub, watch this space) in the name of gaining fresh ideas for his conceptual art.
Barries’ art is way out there, I do accept it requires an acquired taste, but you really can get a feel of where he is coming from with some pieces and this whole pub crawl idea sounds great fun too 
May 17, 2005 at 10:47 · Filed under Uncategorised
Now I don’t play much Playstation.
I own a PS2 and only actually play one game on it, or at least, one series of game on it, and thats Grand Theft Auto, a game which I simply cannot be parted from, I can sit there for hours.
I much prefer the PC for gaming, Medal of Honour, Halflife, Doom3 etc.
But, Sony today unveiled their PS3, set to debut in Spring 2006 and man, is that looking sexy.
PS3 combines state-of-the-art technologies featuring Cell, a processor jointly developed by IBM, Sony Group and Toshiba Corporation, graphics processor (RSX) co-developed by NVIDIA Corporation and SCEI, and XDR memory developed by Rambus Inc. It also adopts BD-ROM (Blu-ray Disc ROM) with maximum storage capacity of 54 GB (dual layer) , enabling delivery of entertainment content in full high-definition (HD) quality.
To match the accelerating convergence of digital consumer electronics and computer technology, PS3 supports high quality display in resolution of 1080p(*) as standard, which is far superior to 720p/1080i.
With an overwhelming computing power of 2 teraflops, entirely new graphical expressions that have never been seen before will become possible. In games, not only will movement of characters and objects be far more refined and realistic, but landscapes and virtual worlds can also be rendered in real-time, thereby elevating the freedom of graphics expression to levels not experienced in the past.
Via E3Insider
So in other words, games will come on media that can contain up to 15x more information, which will be output in better than HDTV quality (for screens that support it) and computing at 2 teraflops (2 trillion floating point operations per second) whereas the PS2 was just out of reach of 1 teraflop. This thing really does sound like a beast of computing power that could and will bring us some amazing virtual reality over the next few years.
As long as it’s backwards compatible, and Rockstar North bring out a GTA series game on it, I’m definitely in.
May 16, 2005 at 15:38 · Filed under Uncategorised
I’ve been enjoying the content that developers have been submitting to the BBC Backstage project.
The project is based on the decision that the beeb has made to open up their news website with an API and the relaxing of their licensing and terms & conditions to go with it. These now allow us normal people to use our initiative and varying types of expertise to develop scripts that use content from the BBC News website to do things that hadn’t previously been thought of.
Simons Cozens had the great idea of using the API to extract names from the BBC News website, tally up how many mentions each gets and then display them in order of popularity along with the links to the stories and pictures of the person.
But, sadly computers don’t have the ability, not really anyway, to filter for pictures which could be termed as pornographic, as we see in the picture that is displayed for Saddam Hussein, a modification dubbed ‘Saddam Insane’.
Other than that, the idea is pretty neat and something that I may perhaps try to emulate and build on (I have visions of a “top ten chart” displaying on my right hand navbar).
BBC Backstage is a great idea and something that the internet community should be really grateful for and will help the internet to grow and develop at a rapid rate, I would imagine.
May 12, 2005 at 10:59 · Filed under Uncategorised
Had this forwarded to me this morning, I don’t usually take much notice of the standard “forwarded to everybody in the company” emails, but I found this one quite intriguing and quirky.
From: Ryall, Adam
Sent: 12 May 2005 10:21
To:
Subject:
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!
May 9, 2005 at 13:17 · Filed under Uncategorised
God I hate Internet Explorer so much.
I added some new code to the site this morning, as usual everything worked fine in Firefox, but because IE is so primative and does not interpret all CSS correctly, it was constantly making the site look like a load of balls.
Word from Micro$oft is that IE7 will address a load of issues with the incompatiblities it has with CSS, but beta tests are not even due to start until the late summer, so we have a long wait until their program is even close to being up to date.
CSS2 has been compatible with other browsers for years now, since about the turn of the century. So why is it that Microsoft are so far behind with the standards? It really boggles the mind.
It keeps the web a step behind as you cannot start adding complex CSS scripting which works fine in more competent browsers because there is always going to be the problem that the masses (90% or so) that still use MSIE are going to complain it doesn’t work. So you have to go back to using basic CSS thus depriving everybody, including those who use competent browsers, of viewing webpages the way that the designer intended it them be seen.
It really does hack me off.
May 8, 2005 at 13:44 · Filed under Uncategorised
One event over, another one starts..
No, not another election, but the F1 Spanish Grand Prix.
I’ve finally decided to subscribe to the F1-Live.com premium service, it actually offers quite a lot for the ardent race fan.
During a grand prix weekend there is a screen which is constantly updated with sector and laptimes and during the Grand Prix it is also updated with current track positions.
I’ve set the laptop up on the sofa next to me to display all this information whilst I watch the race on the television, should be great to have all the information at my fingertips and not just what they decide to show on the television, they do tend to miss out quite a lot as they have very limited time.
Time to go, race is starting in a second
My setup pre-race.
Update:
Looking pretty good during the race.
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