Experiences with News Aggregators

In an attempt to reduce the amount of time I waste scanning my favourite blogs, I have been playing around with some news aggregators.  I am afraid my experiences are not good:

• Akregator running on Ubuntu 6.06  frequently crashes with a segmentation fault.
• Sage, a Firefox extension, does not remember which posts you have read.
•  Thunderbird seems to be more mature but I an unable find how to get it to use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer as its default browser.

Note added 2007-01-28:  I have just come across Google Reader which looks very promising.

Java as Damage Limitation

Some words of wisdom from Steve Yegge:

... But I'll still take Java over C++, even without MI, because I know that no matter how good my intentions are, I will at some point be surrounded by people who don't know how to code, and they will do far less damage with Java than with C++.

As I have probably said before, Steve's internal Amazon blog is well worth reading through in it's entirety. 

Sunday Times told: hands off Science

Article that claims "Experiments that claim to 'cure' homosexual rams spark anger" sparks anger.  The Sunday Times obviously can't afford to employ proper science journalists.

Epsilons as Vectors

The mathematician Paul Erdős famously used to refer to small children as "epsilons" (a mathematical term used to denote a small quantity).  I think a better term for them would be "vectors", but not as directed quantities, rather as carriers of disease.

Train Delayed by Deer

It has been a long time since I last saw any deer from the train near Ascot Station.  During the drought in the summer I saw them every week or two on the patch of scrubland between the current line and the embankment of the old track to Guildford.  However, when the rains came in September they disappeared and I haven't seen them since.  It might be that the deer were attracted to that patch of scrubland by the small stream that runs through it.  If they were going there to drink then they probably would no longer need to when the rains returned.  Anyhow, by the time I went back to work last week I had more or less given up even thinking about them.  I was therefore surprised and a little pleased to hear an announcement that my train was delayed a few minutes by "a deer on the track" somewhere between Ascot and Bagshot.  I do hope it got away safely.