Posts by Shaun Roe

W3C apologizes for HTML5 brand confusion

Suck it up

..just drop the 'X' from XHTML. There you go, all better.

Facebook facing fall-down issues

glitches in switzerland

its verrrry slow to upload messages here in sunny Geneva

Assange 'threatened to sue' Grauniad over leak of WikiLeak

It has to happen

please. If only for the pomposity of the organization.

http://xkcd.com/834/

Salvador Dalí style floppy iPad on the way, seemingly

Adult entertainment

The pr0n industry will no doubt find a use; high-end (fnarr fnarr) touch enabled sex toys?

Apple TV: Third time unlucky, Mr Jobs

Niche?

Does no other geek see a niche market in the making here? A rack TV system, like a VXI crate only prettier: room for hot pluggable hard disk, a controller (windows/mac/linux/OS 9?), a satellite receiver (or several), a digital receiver (or several), a multichannel dolby sound unit... all with the same data bus and power supply on the back plane...

Apple goes social with musical Ping

Apple TV still missing the point?

If you could connect something like the Elgato to it and actually receive free-to-air digital television, I'd buy it. But then I guess Apple wouldn't be making money, so *that's* not going to happen.

The Large Hadron Collider's mega-pic churn

Nude starlets recreate big bang

Pleease.

Naked German women evade Swedish chopper

The bottom line

'There's bares in them thar woods'

Apple spews Judas Phone signal bar 'fix' to world+dog

Nice brick, mate

I know apple is all about the flashy smooth design, but at this rate you have to wonder how soon it will be before they bring out a lovely chrome covered snug-in-your palm lump of metal which does absolutely nothing and which we will all be queuing to buy.

Fanboi's lament – falling out of love with the iPad

ex fanboi

Yes, nice piece. But lets face it, despite the brilliant hardware and the luscious interface, the Jobsian lock-down on developers and users is really starting to make him look like more the evil step-father than the hip uncle, and the products acquire that taint I now associate with chinese hairbands (http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/hairband.asp). When is apple going to realise it's reached the fork in the road, and for it's own good it is going to have to open up these devices?

HTML5 'unhinged from reality,' say Javascripters

HTML5? Why bother

Yet more ill-formed mixed content/meaning/presentation cruft ? It's difficult to get excited about the prospect. Proper adoption of XHTML, with semantic additions, possibly with good implementations of Xpointer etc would be a step forward. Time to grow up, web.

First among SQLs

shouty shouty

SQL IS NOT TOO_BAD.

{

for $realHeadache in doc("querying")

let $us_try :=XQuery

return

<ouch/>

}

French city in pedestrian-powered streetlight plan

cretinous moonshine

"The amount of power that people can produce using their bodies will never be significant compared to the demands of modern civilisation, and cannot possibly be worth the costs of collecting it."

reminded me of Ernest Rutherford's famous assessment:

“Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of the atom is talking moonshine”.

Perhaps France Telecom should install kinetic-energy recuperators around its taller offices to transform all their jumpers into electricity:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/15/ft_staff/

Viking frogmen chase Street View spymobile

Random art

I see a whole new genre of random performance art being born. Reg readers should rally to the cause...

Police arrest MD of dowsing-rod 'bomb detector' firm

Only fraud?

People have died as a result of this fakery; surely he will be charged with multiple accounts of manslaughter?

Quarter of France Telecom staff 'psychologically vulnerable'

Normalization

The suicide rate at France Telecom is not out of the ordinary for France as a whole; it employs roughly 100 000 people in France, and the suicide rate per 100 000 for people of working age is approx 21.5; much worse for men, at ~31.7 (year 2006 figures).

It's difficult to compare figures to the UK directly,but taking all age groups, France had 25.5 (men) and 9 (women) /100 000 in 2006 while the UK had 17 (men) and 5 (women)

So the question is not what is special about France Telecom, but what is particularly depressing about France?

LHC starts beaming Saturday: Collisions Dec 3

@Beer, and @SeanM

Buy him a beer? We should give him a job!

SeanM: I'd be interested to know what the requirements are for this...I feel a google coming on..

Apple denies censoring App Store swear words

@Apple

Double plus ungood, Apple

Apple takes Snow Leopard for walk

@Mac Phreak

Very specific, yep, hence the geek icon...but it stopped a project dead in its tracks at the time...and I'm surprised it was never finally addressed, given the fairly dramatic appearance of the fault.

@RichyS, @Anonymous Coward

Details and screen shots here:

http://shaunroe.blogspot.com/

ok, if it shouldn't resize, then it shouldn't...but neither should it corrupt the display like that

Safari: Still corrupt

well, it may pass acid3 but not all is well; try this:

http://sroe.web.cern.ch/sroe/test/test.xml

and resizing the page to get corrupt screen display. I've reported this for over a year...

More obscurely, integer arithmetic in Safari's XSLT engine still isn't up to firefox's; try this in safari and firefox:

http://sroe.web.cern.ch/sroe/test/hextest.xml

(geeks only)

Hacker unearths young Chinese gymnast scam

'Chinese bend over backwards to attract ageing British Rocker'

'nuff said.

Microsoft Mojave 'outs' secret Vista lovers

Good Story

'Never let the truth get in the way of a good story'. That's a sexy interface on the Mojave site, and the reactions are well presented (edited?), enough for M$ to produce its own reality distortion field, maybe there's even enough hype-r drive in there to produce a parallel universe in which Vista is truly a great product. Don't stand too close.

Why Microhoo! is like, so, totally dead

A bit weak

Yes I see its a parody. Its just not that good.

Brave try, though, and I hope you do better next time.

Isabella Rossellini romps with praying mantis

How low can you get?

Cockroaches?

Let's face it, we've all done it. Who can honestly say they've never slept with a mite?

The perils of pair programming

Books and sh**

"

(Referring to the argument that if you haven't done pair programming you're not qualified to comment on it) Matt said: "Luckily, we humans have pre-cognitive dissonance" (I said..."what???") and he continued "I've never dipped my head in a bucket of sh**, but I know, unequivocally and without question that I wouldn't like it if I did".

"

True. But if your going to write 390 pages about it rather than that one line, it might be a good idea if you did actually go and stick your head in a bucket of sh**.

I'm about to read this book, having ordered it from our library, but if you are really telling me that the principle author has no personal experience of the methodology he is criticising in detail, I'll take a generous pinch of salt with it