Wed 2007-10-31 
A week ago, I was travelling on the Stansted Airport Express when it stopped for a minute just outside Bishop's Stortford station. Beside this shed. Fortunately I had my camera with me.
Mon 2007-10-29 
Earlier this evening I went outside with Zoe to look for Comet Holmes which has recently undergone something of an outburst. Immediately on stepping out of the front door it was obvious as a 2nd-magnitude star-like object a few degrees from Alpha Persei in the direction of Capella. Through binoculars it was a circular ball of fuzz, contrasting nicely with the sharp pin-points stars in Alpha Persei Cluster. No sign of a tail. The integrated brightness was just a little below that of Algol at maximum, say magnitude 2.3 or 2.5.
But for me Comet Holmes means the above photo taken by Edward Emerson Barnard back in 1892. This photo appears as Plate 18 in Ball's Popular Guide to the Heavens, one of the books that sparked my interest in Astronomy when I was about the same age that Zoe is now. This is what Ball had to say on this photo:
HOLMES' COMET AND THE ANDROMEDA NEBULA
On Nov. 6, 1892, Mr. Edwin Homes discovered in London a comet which was in many ways remarkable. When found it was close to the great nebula in Andromeda, and its motion was so slow that, throughout the month of November, it could be photographed on the same plate with the nebula. Plate 18 is a reproduction of a photograph taken at the Lick Observatory, on November 10th, by Professor Barnard, who describes the comet as "round and sharply defined like a planetary nebula, with a symmetrical, nebulous atmosphere surrounding it for some distance."
The after-history of this comet is very curious. By the middle of December, it had grown so exceedingly faint and ill-defined that scarcely any telescope could show it. But, in the middle of January, it suddenly brightened up, and condensed into a small, hazy, star-like object, after which it again became diffuse, and finally vanished.
The comet's orbit was equally remarkable. It lay entirely between Mars and Jupiter, in the zone of minor planets; and it has even been suggested that the comet was not a comet at all, but the result of some celestial accident --such as a collision-- which had befallen an asteroid.
Sun 2007-10-28 
Volker Blanz of the University of Siegen and co-workers have developed software which can produce fairly convincing animations of a person's face based on a single image of that person. They map the image onto a computer model of an average human face and then use that to produce the animation. As an exercise they have animated a few old paintings: the results can be a bit Pythonesque. Speech animation of old paintings is more interesting, but his technology begins to becomes a little bit scarey when they start adding speech to video images of people. You can no longer believe anything you see on video. More details can be found here.
Sat 2007-10-27 A few weeks ago I let my daughter stay up to watch House of Flying Daggers. Now, whenever I throw a cushion at her, she leaps up, kicking her feet in the air, and falls onto the sofa as if dead.
Fri 2007-10-26 From a blog post by Eugueny Kontsevoy:
Most of curious souls who try to compare Linux to Windows usually start by picking Windows features one by one and comparing them to how Linux does that. That's just wrong. Because there are things (at least in Ubuntu/Debian) that Windows simply doesn't do. Take their package management system for instance. Finding free software and installing/removing it from a central repository is awesome. Windows, with its always broken registry and freakish MSI, makes it scary and generally "not safe" to install new software. In fact, Windows gradually gets more and more broken as you install something. Hey, computer geeks, how often do you get a call from a friend, complaining that "My Windows computer got a lot slower"? And what can be said about an OS that discourages you from installing software on it?
Exactly! I can remember just the other day thinking to myself how superior the Debian package management system was (as exemplified by Synaptic on Ubuntu) when compared to the program installation and remove system on Windows. The dependencies seemed to be tracked precisely and you are given the option of doing a complete removal which also deletes any associated configuration files that have been created.
