So… I’m not really go into the what’s going on in my life at the moment part of my blog. I’ll give give you some links…

For a start an interesting article about memory, cool hippy links and a free physics textbook.

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Finally I have returned to St Andrews! After a week of fun in Cambridge and then two days of meetings at Old/New. I am now the secretary and communications representative for DFs. This does, however, mean that I have 12 pages of minutes to type. Urghhh…. Anyway, I really must start catching up on real work.

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> Dear David
>
> Further to your request for accommodation, we can now offer you a single
> self-catering room  in New Hall. Could you please confirm that you still
> wish to move to the accommodation and let me know when you would like to
> move.

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Well, I found out today that I have a place in New Hall after Christmas, subject to some bureaucratic processes in the university. Which is nice.

Also, some fun web linkery. A good write-up about I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue on h2g2. Also, stolen from Ben, the counties of England.

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I was reading an article on perlmonks about traits, which seems like an interesting development in OO. Ovid has a journal entry and there is this article which is quite confusing. I will have to take some time to read this.

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I woke up today to the sound of my phone. It was Lucy telling me that her party last night wasn’t so goood. Hmmm, I think that seems to be a a feature of Raisin Weekend if you don’t have a really, really good academic family. You can’t only rely on lots of booze to make people think that they had a good time. Anyway, I woke up and decided to watch a little Futurama to wake myself up a little more (and to kill time while waiting for the bathroom to be free, something I am still doing…) when I got a call from a very odd number that wasn’t in my phone book. It turned out to be Adam wondering when I would get to Cambridge on Tuesday.

So, now I’m fully awake (and still waiting for the bathroom) I present to you some links…

Being a BBC addict and also a Co-Op addict I thought that this article about the Co-Op playing classical music to ward off gangs was quite fun. Also thre is this article about a good means of distribution for free software in South Africa was cool. I especially like the idea of distributing WikiPedia using this method. Finally, something a little more frivolous in the form of a warning label generator!

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Today has been very strange. My two third year modules were cancelled (leaving me with 2 hours not 4 which is good) but I don’t remember anyone saying that they would be. So I came in at 9am to find that Stochastic Modelling wasn’t on, then the same happened again just now when I tried to go to Linear Mathematics. Ack!

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It is half-past eleven.

I am in the astro lab.

I am highly sugared, caffeinated and staticized.

I’m now going home.

There was some hardcore orthogonalization going on earlier.

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Just some quick linkage… yesterday’s Worth1000 was very fun, ever wondered what would happen if Dr Seuss wrote Star Trek? Free DDR for Mac and PC and finally two articles about how to use the new SafeSleep feature on older Macs.Update: this is a much better article about SafeSleep.

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So it’s the end of the week, what have I actually done…

• Learnt LaTeX.
• Learnt AMS-LaTeX.
• Started using Emacs.
• Started using ESS.
• Learnt GAP.
• Did two microlabs instead of one by accident.
• Sorted out the AstroSoc gallery.
• Sorted out the AstroSoc weather page, again (after Ramin overwrote it).
• Watched too much Futurama.
• Started LaTeXing my Stochastic modelling notes.

So, yeah, I feel a little better now…

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From: David Miller
To: Adam Biltcliffe
Date: 11-Nov-2005 16:46
Subject: Re: Statslab open day

>
> ps. what do you get if you cross a ginger with a vegan?
>
gingervegan cos theta ? ;)

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Just some random linkage… Risk via Google Maps and supercharging your iBook to PowerBook standards.

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Someone on Radio 4 just called capitalism: “a giant Albanian pyramid scheme”. Oh, and I got a haircut…

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Well, yesterday I spent my day putting Bob Dylan programmes from BBC 4 onto my dad’s new hard drive/DVD recorder, which is a very cool piece of kit. I also updated the AstroSoc gallery with pics from the pub quiz and solar eclipse, with help from PIG which is a nifty Perl script that I really should hack into something more streamlined. I think I forgot to post this photo of the observatory by Tom from a while ago.

I’ve recently turned off Spotlight with help from this hint. Although a better proocedure would be to first edit /etc/hostconfig and change:

...
SNMPSERVER=-NO-
SPOTLIGHT=-YES-
CRASHREPORTER=-YES-
...

to

...
SNMPSERVER=-NO-
SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
CRASHREPORTER=-YES-
...

and then execute:

mdutil -i off /
mdutil -E /
mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle /System/Library/CoreServices/Search_SAFE.bundle

from a terminal. Then all you need to do is to quit SystemUIServer and any running md* processes and when it restarts there will be no more pesky Spotlight running. Since I got rid of Spotlight I’m using Locator as a replacement if I need to find anything.

Anyway… back to work…

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Yeah, it’s back…

random stripe generator, funnt flash: Schwarzenegger Street and Mac Mini on the side of a train. Oh, finally, a good Mac OS X for newbies guide with some very cool programs. I recommend Namely and MenuMeters. Also BackLight and SharePoints look cool but I’ve not had a chance to try them out yet.

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