Dr Laura James's writings

died this week. She was a computing pioneer during WWII, and described herself as one of the computers which ENIAC made redundant. There only seems to be one, rather sparse, obituary online sadly. I met Kay at GHC in 2004, and she was a witty and insightful woman, with many tales of the early days of computer development which still reflect today's computing realities.

Rendezvous - up to 140mph through Paris in 1978 (on google video) . It's as old as me, but still looks like a lot of fun. Makes a change from WEEE which I've been looking into today for work, and which promises to provide me with my very own personal skip of electronics waste some time in the future. What more could I want?

Today we went to Sutton Hoo and Aldeburgh. Mahon got his photos up already, quicker than us, which is probably for the best as they are likely to be better than mine anyway!

Beer-based cocktails in the NYT - not my thing, I suspect, but knowing people who like both beer and cocktails, perhaps there is a market for them.

List of online note-taking apps. There are so many nifty sites online now that it is lucky there's a large number of people with nothing better to do than try them all out. Those of us with other work are still left trying to work out which are actually useful without an inordinate effort to configure them in the first place, which are still going to be operational in a few months, and which are secure enough to be useable for work...

CITB-Construction Skills (a strange organisational name, but a good bunch of people) have a great new TV ad to entice people to consider careers in their industry. You can view it by clicking "How will you make your mark?" at BConstructive (also works with the e, for spelling geeks). One day, all engineering fields will have professional skills bodies like this...

Multiprotocol IM via Meebo for those away from their machines with IM clients or behind firewalls. Still, no Skype, so it's not the all in one solution I'm ultimately looking for. 

Just as I was about to seriously start using iCal (which conveniently integrates with my new project management tool, Merlin , which is super btw), Google finally launches their calendar offering. Very nice too, although the SMS alerts seem to be US only at the moment.

The first ducklings I've seen this year, at Sheene Mill . They made it up the stairs, amazingly.

Paul and Ivor next door have been building Ivor's new garage the last 2 weekends. Today they put the roof on.

Not that I am planning on driving over my MacBook Pro, but this is reassuring...

Laptop count: most people weren't using them. Of those with them, I'd say at least 50% powerbooks (some could be macbook pros, it's hard to tell at a distance, but the ones I got a closer look at are all powerbooks so far), 40% wintel, and 10% weird tablets and other similar oddities. Gender count: 20% women, give or take. That's not a formal count ;-) Unformatted writeup of some of the sessions (straight from my outliner): here

Compared to the evil Linksys , I spent a little more for an Axis 207W, which is both dinky and works - really works. Plug into Ethernet, my Mac finds it on Bonjour, set the wifi key, unplug the cable, and it's there, serving up some nice html with actual MPEG/JPEGs too. And it has lovely concentric LEDs around the lens. The web interface is easy to use, and lets me do complex things or simple things. I like this one. Shows what you get when you spend an extra £100, though. Ouch.

I'm at the International Symposium on Intelligent Environments this week. Like Less Is More last year, this is organised by MSR in Cambridge , and has an unusual (to me!) mix of compscis (mainly on the HCI and AI sides), designers, artists, and sociologists (I think). So far, Don Norman has given an interesting keynote - as usual for such things, nothing especially new, but lightly amusing coverage of fairly obvious high level material. No call to arms in this one. I'll write up my notes at some point; I could of course be blogging in realtime, in a terribly cliched way, but I think I'd rather digest the material before writing it properly. For once I've been happy to take notes electronically - the lighting in the auditorium is rather random and so in general the audience is in pitch darkness, meaning only those of us with glowing screens or amazing writing ability can take notes at all. I've been very glad of my glowing keyboard!

I'm playing with webcam systems at the moment. My first purchase was a Linksys WVC54G, a wireless camera, and compared to most of the other wireless cams around quite reasonably priced. It comes with a bunch of nifty services on free trials (such as MMSs when the motion detector is triggered). Setup was fairly simple (although it is notable that running WPA on our wifi net seems to defeat the small brain of this type of attached device). However, I can't say I'd buy another - because it only feeds IE or Linksys's custom software viewer. What kind of webcam is that? I've had a trivial prod at trying to access the MPEG4 stream otherwise, but the internal webserver seems determined to thwart me. Time to go buy one of the nice expensive AXIS ones, I think, to see if they do any better...

Finally, Oblivion is out. As expected from the screenshots and trailer, it is astonishingly pretty. Really shows off the capability of the XBox 360 (not that we're playing it on ours - that's still off at Microsoft having unexpectedly turned into a brick after a software update - we have a borrowed box for now). Very much a next generation game - Morrowind was beautiful and insanely complex, but Oblivion takes this to a new level. Sadly with Paul having got a head start, and since I've got work and other things to keep me busy at the moment, my battlemage is still struggling at level 1 without a single axe to wield yet.  

One possible rebirth for Smart roadsters: as MG Midgets :-) This is encouraging because it turns out that my Smart has more passenger legroom than an Aston...

Paul bought a blood pressure meter a while ago, because he was worried his BP was high. Invariably, it's turned out to be quite normal, whereas mine is pretty low - Paul seems surprised I can function at all. Today we finally got around to checking out what is a low BP online, and luckily mine is just high enough to keep me safe from fainting. We also checked our BMIs (I'm very annoyed to find that I've moved from underweight to healthy since I last checked mine). A cholesterol test is next on my list, as that's more concerning given my cheese consumption, but there's no rush on that. The one Paul used, bought in Boots, was expensive, astonishingly complex to operate, and required a non-colourblind person with quick reflexes to determine the result. Also, embarrassingly, I'm not sure that I'm up for lancing my finger to access some blood - it's hard to imagine that I'm capable of pumping out a "falling drop" quantity anyway, with such low...

Which desperate housewife are you? Answering the questions I felt I'd come out very evenly distributed between all 5 (which is usually how I feel watching the show, too, although generally I don't relate much to Gabrielle, and even less to Edie). But I'm a Lynette. Hmm. Should I buy the T shirt ? I was unaware that so much DH merch existed - although I should have guessed that one could buy Bree's pink dish gloves somewhere...

And, judging by things yesterday on the New Museums Site, one of the busiest Science on Saturdays ever too. We worked out that I've been involved in Science Week since practically the dawn of time; it's not always been jitterbugs, but I was around the first time ExSciTe ever did them, which was Science Week, ooh, many years ago. We must be doing something right though. One family who visited yesterday said it was the fourth year in a row that they had built jitterbugs with us, and that their small son had been planning his for most of the previous year... My extremely unrepresentative sampling shows that Bottle Your Genes (which when spoken invariably makes one think first of blue denim) was one of the most popular activities, or one of the least well sign-posted; but I think the former, as the queue once you got there was not just out of the door but down the stairs, round the corridor, etc. People were so desperate to find activities which didn't have huge queues that the...