A Day in Birmingham

On Friday I spent several hours wandering around Birmingham city centre.  I have been through Birmingham on trains many times before but this was the first time that I had ventured out from New Street Station and I was pleasantly surprised.  Imposing Victorian buildings, large paved open spaces with fountains and statues (scientists and engineers such as Joseph Priestley and James Watt amongst them!).  I got a distinct feeling of being at a centre of immense power and wealth, as if Birmingham was to the Industrial Revolution what Rome was to the Roman Empire.

Waiting outside the Museum and Art Gallery for it to open, I tried to ignore the large flat screen on the Town Hall that was showing the BBC TV news (Had it been dark I would have been tempted to silence it with a brick).  Even the less imposing buildings such as the Library were not too bad.  Of the modern buildings, the most eye-catching is the Hyatt Hotel, a glass tower block with another glass tower block reflected in its windows (I would have taken a photo if I'd taken my camera with me).  In the afternoon I had a look around the two Waterstones bookshops.   

On the train journey home I saw two red kites several miles apart near Didcot.  Red kites are now common in the country between Oxford and Reading.  A little further on there were 4 small deer in the middle of a field.

Windows Vista is Broken

From computer security expert Bruce Schneier:

Windows Vista includes an array of "features" that you don't want. These features will make your computer less reliable and less secure. They'll make your computer less stable and run slower. They will cause technical support problems. They may even require you to upgrade some of your peripheral hardware and existing software. And these features won't do anything useful. In fact, they're working against you. They're digital rights management (DRM) features built into Vista at the behest of the entertainment industry.

 I have always suspected that the main function of Microsoft Windows was to prevent the user from doing things.

Learning by Scent Coding

Matthew Stibbe describes an interesting way of coping with exams:

Taking a hint from Proust and his madeleine, when I was at university, I used to smell code my different card decks with aromatherapy oils. Lavender for medieval history, lemon for 19^th century culture and intellect and so on. When I went into each of the seven exams I took in my third year, I’d dab the appropriate smell on my sleeve and the contents of the cards came flooding back. I came across the cards in December when I was unpacking after moving house. The little oil stains were still there but the smell had gone but to this day the scent of lemons gets me thinking about Ruskin, Darwin and William Morris.

Surely this is fairly close to cheating: couldn't the scents be regarded as performance-enhancing drugs? Still, it would be rather hard for the examination boards to ban all perfumes and scents from examination rooms.

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."