life on the edge of the digital extreme
Just a quick update before I head off for a long sleep after all the activity I’ve had over the last couple of days. Sufficed to say we didn’t win the competition unfortunately but we had a lot of fun taking part and it was very interesting to see what goes on at IBM. I’ll do a proper write up probably tomorrow. In the mean time take a look at some of the pictures I took here.
Enjoyed this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date.
After our software engineering team won the overall team prize back in April we’re off to to IBM Hursley (Winchester) tomorrow to compete against other universities in the ‘UK Labs ThinkPad Challenge’! Although I’m looking forward to it there’s a bit of a mystery surrounding what exactly we’ve got to do competition wise when we get there. From what I can gather from other people it’s a bit like ‘The Crystal Maze‘ (”but obviously without Richard O’Brien, the lock-ins, or elaborate sets”!). Hopefully we can have a good crack at whatever they throw at us!
Check back Friday evening (GMT) for an update on how things went and hopefully some pictures to accompany 
Enjoyed this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date.
Only one man could return from the dead to play a character in a book he wrote himself - Douglas Adams, the literary genius behind the ‘Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘. The BBC have posthumously adapted the final three books in the Hitch Hiker ‘trilogy’ which have been recorded using most of the original cast and are being aired by Radio 4, beginning today. Thanks to the wonders of digital technology, Douglas Adams himself can be heard playing the part of Agrajag which he recorded shortly before his death. For those who haven’t encountered the HHGTTG yet the BBC have an excellent site dedicated to it but in a nutshell this is another great example of slightly weird British humor at its best (the main characters are named Ford Prefect, Author Dent & Zaphod Beeblebrox after all)!
If you missed the first episode DON’T PANIC! - you can sit back and enjoy a Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster whist listening to it online via the sub-ether waveband!
Enjoyed this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date.
Stumbled across a cool little (or not so little as it turns out) Simpson’s fan project the other day which I thought deserved a mention - It’s a complete map of the fictitious town of Springfield derived from meticulous scrutiny of over 15 seasons worth of episodes!
For obsessed fans (like my brother) it contains a wealth of information on the local geography and events which occurred in each location. It’s obvious that perhaps the producers didn’t always have this map in mind when making the show as there are a few discrepancies and no doubt there have been disputes as to its accuracy. All-in-all this is another fitting testimony for people with too much time and too little to do, but nether-the-less I think it’s pretty cool!
Enjoyed this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date.
Spam (unsolicited/junk email) is an ever growing problem. Of the 30 billion+ emails sent every day around 40% of it is rubbish (around 12 billion messages!!) and this number keeps growing*. Most people delete spam as they receive it but cumulatively this costs individuals and businesses precious time and money. A common solution is to install a spam filter on either the client or server side. If properly configured these can be very effective although no solution is ever 100% effective as you are always balancing the chance of deleting genuine emails with blocking the maximum amount of spam. In the past I’ve have to ditch mail accounts which have become overrun with spam but have been lucky so far with my current addresses. I recently discovered that the mailbox of the root account on my mail server was getting bombarded with spam so took the step to install ‘SpamAssassin‘ which filters all incoming mail. It uses a wide range of advanced heuristic and statistical analysis tests on mail headers and body text to identify spam. It’s a bit difficult to setup as it requires you to fiddle about with Sendmail and Procmail but so far I’ve found it to be quite effective.
An engineer at Microsoft recently posted an interesting visual history of spam which highlights the growing problem well. Bill Gates has claimed that he’s working on a solution to the issue but I can’t see anything radical happening for quite a long time!
*Statistics taken from ‘Spam Filter Review‘ 2004.
Enjoyed this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date.
Recent Comments