Chris-Linfoot.net

Over at the Grauniad Politics Blog, Andrew Sparrow notes that critics fail to see funny side of No 10's Jeremy Clarkson video.



Category: Misc
Technorati: Gordon+Brown Jeremy+Clarkson viral video youtube
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Volker posted a fascinating video yesterday - Our inability to understand the exponential function.

If you didn't watch it yet, you should. It's long, but worth watching in full.



Category: IPv6
Technorati: IPv4 IPv6
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The brand spanking new Airbus A340-600 sat in its hangar in Toulouse, France without a single hour of airtime.

Enter the Arab flight crew of Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies (ADAT) to conduct pre-delivery tests on the ground, such as engine runups, prior to delivery to Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi. The ADAT crew taxied the A340-600 to the run-up area. Then they took all four engines to takeoff power with a virtually empty aircraft. Not having read the run-up manuals, they had no clue just how light an empty A340-600 really is.

The takeoff warning horn was blaring away in the cockpit because they had all 4 engines at full power. The aircraft computers thought they were trying to takeoff but it had not been configured properly (flaps/slats etc). Then one of the ADAT crew decided to pull the circuit breaker on the Ground Proximity Sensor to silence the alarm.

This fools the aircraft into thinking it is in the air....

More > (with pictures) ...

Category: Coffee and Cats
Technorati: A340 Airbus
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Over at CircleID, Patrick Vande Walle writes, with some surprise:

IPv6 Considered a Problem by Some Users.

I have a Google Blog Search Alert looking for posts over IPv6 in my RSS reader. What strikes me is the number of posts explaining how to disable IPv6 in Windows Vista, MacOSX, Ubuntu and other flavours of Linux.

It looks like disabling IPv6 makes web browsing faster for a lot of people, independently of which operating system is being used. One guy even wrote in one of his posts "In order to fix this problem". IPv6 was supposed to be a solution, not a problem.

Category: IPv6
Technorati: IPv4 IPv6
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First we hear tales of faux spectators being bussed in to make the Olympics look full. Then we hear the shocking revelation that the cute little Chinese girl who sang at the opening ceremony was miming, and that the recorded voice wasn't even hers.

But only now are the reports surfacing of the worst horror of the games so far...



Category: Coffee and Cats
Technorati: BSOD Olympics
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On BBC Radio 4's Today programme, the chef Rick Stein says that cookery should be classed as an art.

Challenged to justify this, he explains:

"It's the piece of cod which passeth all understanding."

Delicious.

Category: Coffee and Cats
Technorati: Art Cookery
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This is just plain infuriating.



Category: Domino 8
Technorati: IBM Lotus Domino Language+Pack Multilingual
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This is very odd. From The Philadelphia Enquirer...



Category: Coffee and Cats
Technorati: Libshitz Scunthorpe
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This just in, from a sender who identifies himself only as "Foreign Affairs Minister"



Category: Spam miscellany
Technorati: 419
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It is now not unusual to see spams with subject lines designed to fool the unwary into believing they are about to read some breaking news story or intimate details of some celeb's love life, or even to watch video of the same, but this?



Category: Spam miscellany
Technorati: Spam
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This just in.

Category: Phish
Technorati: Phish
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Oh my!

Isn't Volker looking youthful these days?

The hair! The absence of even a single pair of spectacles!

But those ears are, well, a little more sticky out than I remember...



Category: Google
Technorati: Cuil Google
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A while ago, I was being bothered by large numbers of malformed requests for pages on this site.

They all turned out to be from a startup company named Cuill, which was refining its super efficient indexing algorithm by generating and then following large numbers of non-existent URLs.

Today, the newly renamed Cuil (1) takes the wraps off its Google killer, the eponymous Cuil.



Category: Google
Technorati: Cuil Cuill Google
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This is rather sad.

A huge fire has destroyed the historic Grand Pier at Weston-super-Mare.

Dozens of firefighters fought to tackle the blaze which took hold of the partly wooden pier in the Somerset seaside resort at about 0700 BST.

No-one was injured in the fire, though black smoke and flames were said to be visible from as far away as Cardiff.

BBC Radio Bristol reporter Nigel Dando, who is at the scene, said: "It looks as if the pier has collapsed on itself. Nothing is going to be saved."


They've only just completed a major refurbishment too.

Weston-super-Mud (as it is affectionately known chez moi) was the location of Milo's first trip to the seaside.

Category: Misc
Technorati: Weston-super-Mare
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