daily tweets

• 09:16 Addicted to Mock the Week. #

daily tweets

• 10:36 Very good source for Windows time service, clocks, synchronisation, accuracies and the like: tinyurl.com/5teujt. #

daily tweets

• 10:11 Picasa Web Albums added face recognition/tagging capabilities! Neat. Read more in tinyurl.com/58nrgf. #

TinyUrl Creator

How I've always hated all those people using TinyURL versions of otherwise perfectly legible urls in the vast white expanses of their normal 1280x1024 web pages. This moronic habit made you think that these links were most likely cover ups for god-knows-what phishing, porn, cracks, illegal pills sites they led to. Until Twitter came about and TinyURLs made sense all of a sudden. There's a great Firefox add-on for that, TinyUrl Creator by Jeremy Gillick. Can't tweet without it I tell you that.

the Albanian Generals Problem?

Funny how the name of the Byzantine Generals Problem came about. This is an account by Leslie Lamport:

There is a problem in distributed computing that is sometimes called the Chinese Generals Problem, in which two generals have to come to a common agreement on whether to attack or retreat, but can communicate only by sending messengers who might never arrive. I stole the idea of the generals and posed the problem in terms of a group of generals, some of whom may be traitors, who have to reach a common decision. I wanted to assign the generals a nationality that would not offend any readers. At the time, Albania was a completely closed society, and I felt it unlikely that there would be any Albanians around to object, so the original title of this paper was The Albanian Generals Problem. Jack Goldberg was smart enough to realize that there were Albanians in the world outside Albania, and Albania might not always be a black hole, so he suggested that I find another name. The obviously more appropriate Byzantine generals then occurred to me.

downgrade from Outlook 2007 to Outlook 2002

I recently had to move all of my Outlook 2007 stuff to 2002. First issue: Outlook 2007 does not give you any option to export to an older data file format. The one used by 2002 has smaller capacity (read: different format) and no Unicode support. There is a way around this: create a data file in the older Outlook 97-2002 Personal Folders file (.pst) format and import items from the newer data file format to the older .pst file format. Then import that .pst into Outlook 2002. You can read more about .pst data files in different versions of Outlook here.

Second issue: Once you have imported all of your items into Outlook 2002, you may need to copy your calendar items to a different target calendar. You cannot just right click on the source calendar and copy all the items; if you paste onto the destination calendar, a subfolder will be created containing the source calendar. I know it's stupid, but here's an article to the rescue.

archimedes

This is a diagram from Reviel Netz and William Noel's book [The Archimedes Codex] How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist . It's part of Archimedes' proof that a parabolic segment is four-thirds the triangle it encloses and it's particularly astonishing. Most of us I'm sure have the silly figure of a naked man jumping out of a bath shouting "eureka" in our minds when we hear the word Archimedes. This extraordinary little book does a great job revealing the magnitude of this genius. I was shocked at how much I didn't know about who Archimedes was and what he had accomplished...

Google calendar nuisances

I am very happy with Google Calendar's syncing with my Outlook. I don't have Microsoft Exchange at work so I can only share my calendar through Google. That is all right, after all that's the whole point of having your calendar online. Or, is it? Not quite! Whenever you go to Google Calendar's first page, and you're not logged in, you have two options: log in or sign up. Yes, no search for somebody else's public calendar. You have to go through the usual Google search route for that. You can send your friends an html link (mine is here) or an ical entry of your calendar, but that's certainly not practical. What's more, each calendar has its own unique link (fine) but what happens if someone wants to see your merged public agenda? To top it all, a private event with "Show me as busy" in a public calendar still shows up when shared, complete with the event's time info and a telling, for-those-in-the-know (or for-those-in-the-law at other times, depending on the event), "busy" title. That's not very private to me.

darjeeling tippy golden flowery orange pekoe tea

For all tea aficionados, this Darjeeling Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe is the "champagne" of teas, as Fortnum & Mason calls it. It is Darjeeling 1st & 2nd flush only, grown on the Himalayan foothills, one of the highest-grown and a rather lighter black, almost greyish tea, that, simply put, has no rival. Even at double the cost of other good quality teas this variety is in a league of its own, and one will have to search high and low to find a better one.

sennheiser hd650

After 9 years of what I, back then, thought of as an absolutely superb pair of headphones, both in looks and in sound quality, I went ahead and replaced them with the ones in the picture above. Friends usually accuse me of overreaching myself. This purchase was definitely a case in point. I started out considering a good pair of audiophile headphones, then I found out that I could afford a much better set if ordered on the web, for the same price, like the Sennheiser HD595. Next thing I know, I was already ordering the top of the range Sennheiser HD650 from eBay... Going from a 40 euro to a $600 piece is like going from a Citroen 2CV to a Bugatti Veyron so my blog entry may not attest to their astonishing sound. Here's some hard facts:

• Systems with narrow tolerances (± 1dB), hand-picked in pairs.
• High quality, titanium finish.
• Specially modulated connecting cable (detachable) made from highly conductive OFC copper, Kevlar-reinforced, with very low handling noise.
• Extremely lightweight aluminium voice coils for excellent transient response.