Daenmark

Posted by daen at 05:27 PM

September 26, 2005

Wikipedia bad jokes

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, editable by any passing webizen. This is both its strength and its weakness, attracting both proponents and detractors in large numbers.

One of the side effects of this "encyclocracy" is the Wikipedia Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense pages (hitherto known as WBJODN pages).

For instance, under "snake", some would-be contributor wrote:

"All snakes are devil creatures and should be killed by having their heads stomped in. No living creature should be cold and clammy and slither around without the use of apendages."

Under "keyboard layout", for countries that ban all written knowledge:

From "spoon":

A spoon is also commonly used as a tool to inflict pain; one might simply repeatedly strike another person with it for extended periods of time to cause great physical and mental damage.

There are many, many more. The WBJODN pages number 32 and are curiously titled: "The original Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense", "Yet more Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense", "More Bad Jokes than you can shake a stick at", "More Bad Jokes than you can shake two sticks at", "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense" and so on).

Posted by daen at 11:33 PM

Space elevator

I briefly blogged about space elevators back in March 2003. One of the companies I mentioned, HighLift Systems, a Seattle-based space elevator technology research company, is intimately linked with the commercial arm, LiftPort Group. Anyway, the LiftPort people successfully tested part of their technology on September 20 using a balloon to produce tension in part of the space elevator ribbon so that an early model of the lifting robot could climb to 1,000 ft. But what caught my eye from the staff blog was this:

I wasn’t involved in activities like making the ribbon. So it wasn’t until I was watching the video that I noticed the sentence written in block letters on the 2-inch wide ribbon (which alternates color in 50-foot strips of bright yellow and fluorescent orange) near the top:

ATTENTION PILOT: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE TOTALLY SCREWED.

Posted by daen at 01:02 AM

September 24, 2005

TI Calculators

www.ticalc.org

Posted by daen at 09:05 PM

September 23, 2005

Minicomputers

I heard a young guy call his WinMobile/Symbian/whatever-enabled mobile phone a "minicomputer" this morning. This is what I think of as a minicomputer (a DEC VAX 11/780 which went on sale in 1978) ...

... not this ...

But maybe he has a point. Perhaps minis are so obsolete that it makes sense to recycle the word for real mini-computers.

Posted by daen at 03:31 PM

September 21, 2005

A great and momentous anniversary ...

Today is the 50th anniversary of Great Britain's claim to the North Atlantic island of Rockall.

According to the BBC website,

The earliest recorded landing on Rockall was in 1810, by an officer called Basil Hall from the HMS Endymion. Its exact position was first chartered by Royal Navy surveyor Captain ATE Vidal in 1831.

In 1972 the Isle of Rockall Act was passed, which made the rock officially part of Inverness-shire, Scotland.

But the rights to any resources discovered on the ocean floor surrounding the island is disputed between Britain, Ireland, Denmark and Iceland.

Rockall is probably most famous for being an area in the BBC Radio 4's shipping forecast.

Of course, that last statement is completely wrong. Rockall is most famous for being the home of that mighty organ "The Rockall Times".

Posted by daen at 10:11 AM

September 20, 2005

Baker Tony's Pizza

Baker Tony baked a pizza
very round and thin
He said he added olives
but he never put them in

The stuff that he had grated
and sprinkled on to please
was only yellow sawdust
although he called it cheese
the rich tomato topping
was nothing more than dye
so Baker Tony’s pizza made all the children cry

Angela Martin, aged 57

Posted by daen at 05:05 PM

September 19, 2005

Geek dinner (Copenhagen) 28 October 2005

A geek dinner is in the offing for Copenhagen's fading autumn days. Sushi has been both proposed and questioned as geek fare. Personally, sushi would go down a storm, although if anyone knows of a good teppan-yaki restaurant in the greater Copenhagen area I would be tempted to table it as an alternative venue ...

Posted by daen at 07:08 PM

September 14, 2005

Dream of Tower is an exhibition celebrating the skyskraper at the Danish Architecture Center. It's on until October 23rd.

Posted by daen at 08:10 PM

September 13, 2005

Ted and Dizzy : the Wrong End of the 50s

If you're in Wivenhoe on Thursday night, you could do worse than spend £8 on a ticket to see "Ted and Dizzy : the Wrong End of the 50s" (includes refreshments and licensed bar), billed as an evening of entertainment, at the William Loveless Hall between 7pm and 11pm.

Ted Jarvis is an East Anglian son-of-the-soil, with opinions and language of an earthy bent. Dizzy is his on/off girlfriend. Together, they dissect modern events, sing, argue, and make you laugh.

Martin Newell knows Ted Jarvis rather well. Paul Ridley Thomas is rumoured to have rather more than a passing acquaintance with Dizzy, but then rumours abound in a small village.

Posted by daen at 12:52 PM

September 12, 2005

Final innings in the fifth day of the fifth test at the Oval

England have just been bowled out. The score is now England 373 and 335, Australia 367 chasing 342 in 18 overs. In other words, with Australia needing exactly 19 runs per over to win, England have won the Ashes!

Highlights : Pietersen 158 in the last day (including 7 sixes), Warne taking 37 wickets in this series ...

Happy 36th birthday tomorrow, Shane.

1900 CET (1800 BST): The umpires are now checking their light meters, the Aussies have been offered the light, they have taken it ... but the game isn't over! The bails are still on the stumps, so they'll continue the game if the light improves. The overs get reduced by one per 4 minutes. Obviously, this means that the game will be over very very soon. I have to go home now, so, in typical cricketing style, England will probably win the Ashes in a complete anti-climax ...

Update 2100 CET (2000 BST) Yup, four balls and four runs for Australia, then bad light stopped play and a draw was declared.

So:

England 373 & 335 drew with Australia 367 & 4-0 England win the Ashes 2-1

Posted by daen at 06:52 PM

September 09, 2005

Shiver me timbers, 'tis 'pon us again, me hearties!

Aaar! Ye have a woman's blog! I'll wager that there blog never had to ride the Spanish Main on a weevilly biscuit ... etc

Posted by daen at 12:28 PM

September 07, 2005

DAPUG workshop 6-7 September

I'm back from a two day workshop organised by DAPUG (the Danish Database Application Programmers Users Group). These workshops are held once or twice per year. The venue this time is Hotel Hessellet, which has been the location for many of these workshops over the last ten years. Hessellet is a four-star hotel situated by the beach at Nyborg, just over the Storebælt from Sjælland. The accomodation is sumptuous, the food is absolutely delicious and the location is wonderful. This workshop was titled "Using In-Memory Data Stores: Featuring ClientDataSets and .NET DataSets" and was expertly presented by Cary Jensen, long-time Delphi and database guru. I have quite a few ideas now as to how to use TClientDataSet in new ways, thanks to Cary. The next workshops are provisionally booked for May 2-3 and August 29-30 2006.

Here are some photos of the workshop and Hotel Hessellet.

Hotel Hessellet

Storebælt

Cary Jensen

DAPUGgers at dinner

Posted by daen at 11:26 PM

September 05, 2005

Lassen Volcanic National Park

Taken August 25.

Posted by daen at 01:25 PM

Late summer in Denmark

Early evening sun on buildings near Nørreport Station.

Posted by daen at 01:21 PM

September 02, 2005

Picayune, MS

Jon at Barlow Farms found a link to KY3 news' report on Picayune after Katrina on August 31. It's pretty bad. (You need Windows Media to play the embedded clip, but the transcript is just as transfixing).

Posted by daen at 10:31 AM

September 01, 2005

Sir Joseph Rotblat is dead

Sir Joseph Rotblat, who has died at the age of 96, was one of the scientists recruited to build the atomic bombs which ended World War II.

He then spent the rest of his life campaigning against nuclear weapons [see the Pugwash Conferences website] - work which brought him the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 86.

Posted by daen at 06:45 PM

Bush and New Orleans

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did appreciate a serious storm but these levees got breached and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we're having to deal with it and will," said [Bush].

Well, Joseph Suhayda, director of the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, said in 2000 that

the 15-foot levee [that holds back Lake Pontchartrain] will protect the city from a minimum hurricane of Category 1 or 2 intensity and at best a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane intensity scale. "A slow-moving Category 3 or any Category 4 or 5 hurricane passing within 20 or 30 miles of New Orleans would be devastating".

From the BBC:

A former official in the Clinton administration, Sydney Blumenthal, has written in Der Spiegel: "In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the US, including a terrorist attack on New York City.

"But by 2003, the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war."

More recently, Congress cut the 2006 budget of the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers by $71.2 million. The South Eastern Louisiana Flood Control Project, which had been in financial trouble for several of the years of its existence from 1995, and which in 2004 left several contractor bills unpaid, got an extra $20 million this year, bringing it to a total of $36.5 million in 2005. But for 2006, the House of Representatives and Bush have suggested reducing it to $10.4 million. This still leaves bills unpaid, and so no new contracts can be awarded - in other words, it won't even clear the debts.

To say that no-one anticipated this is to fly in the face of all the known information about these levees and the work required to mitigate the damage which could be caused by severe flooding in New Orleans.

Sorry Mr President, what you say just doesn't hold water.

Posted by daen at 03:51 PM