Steven Hawking Near-Death Experience!

Pluvialis tells this little story:

I nearly killed Stephen Hawking once. I turned the corner of Pembroke Street in my little red Renault and there he was, in the middle of the bloody road. I tell you, he's a terrible driver.

That might have ended my academic career, don't you think? Can you imagine the headlines?

The worst thing is, after I parked the car and stumbled into the department, rather shaken, I confessed my near-miss to a colleague.

"Oh" he said. "I wouldn't have worried. He did all his best work twenty years ago".

Microsoft Excel is Broken

And not only are they not going to fix the bug, they are also pushing for it to become a standard:

Just how thoroughly the EOOXML specification is dependent on a single vendor's applications 4 is well illustrated by the spreadsheet specification's "Date and Times" requirement (pages 3305-6). That section requires that spreadsheet dates treat the year 1900 as a leap year, which contradicts the Gregorian Calendar. This raises severe interoperability issues when interfacing with the many other developers' office suites, other office software, and development libraries that do properly implement the Gregorian Calendar. The specification straightforwardly acknowledges that this behavior is required for "legacy reasons." Indeed, it is a known bug work-around in the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program, which would be imposed on other developers and software users by the EOOXML specification's adoption as an ISO standard, a problem discussed in more depth by Rob Weir:

"By mandating the perpetuation of this bug, we're asking for trouble. Date libraries in modern programming languages like C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby will all calculate dates correctly according to the Gregorian Calendar. So any interpretation of dates in OOXML files in these languages will be off by one day unless the author of the software adds their own workaround to their code to account for Excel's bug. Certainly some will make the “correction” properly, at their own expense. But many will not, perhaps because they did not see it deep within the 6,000 page specification."

Dying Mouse

The Targus AMU01EU wired optical mouse that we use with the laptop has started behaving erratically: it frequently  ignores right-clicks.  At first I thought it might be a Ubuntu software problem but, after finding nothing similar mentioned on Ubuntu Forums, I tried the mouse on our Windows XP machine and it exhibited the same symptom there.  I can see another walk to our local branch of PC World coming up!

Signs of Spring

The snow drops have been out under the trees for at least two weeks now.  When I went out at lunch time I saw a magpie flying with a long twig in its beak: it must have been making a nest.  However, tonight the temperature tonight has fallen to -3C and looks as if will drop further before dawn if the sky doesn't cloud over.  Tomorrow we are having a new gas boiler fitted.

Update on Wed 2007-02-07 by Tristram Brelstaff

The temperature by 7:00am was below -6C according to the Reading University Atmospheric Observatory, which is just 10 minutes walk from here.

Bluefoot

On Sunday, at around midday, the low winter sun was shining right through the living room and into the hallway producing some nice light effects in what is normally the darkest part of our flat.  I took a lot of photos of Zoe brushing her hair and walking to and fro.  The above picture is one of my favorites.  A proper 'Flickr photo'.